“Coach always knows best!”
Really? I’d say it depends.
What happens when we employ our mind-reading strategies and substitute them to be facts of life? Misunderstandings crop up and emotional mayhem ensues as a result. You’d be surprised at how many sports coaches and trainers jump to conclusions. Misattribute what’s happening in their interactions with athletes, thereby creating conflict and strife between them.
Often, part of the problem rests with the fact that a coach is “set” in his or her thinking. In other words, they are predisposed to think in certain ways. To misinterpret or perhaps exaggerate what an athlete is really thinking, or to underplay it or give due benefits of doubt where none are warranted. And so they form negative opinions if they are used to doing so, as a “normal" way of thinking. They misinterpret and over generalize, tar and feather with negative images that they project.
Whenever we disappoint each other some of the extreme images take over which fuel the anger and the frustration. Such biased observations and their ensuing conclusions create a form of prejudice in us, Psychologists call this "negative cognitive set." So, a coach might frame a particular athlete with this set and if so virtually everything that he or she does, is viewed skeptically, even destructively.
Thinking style therefore, has a knock-on effect. Being “prejudiced” for example, can warp the way you interpret not only others in your world, but yourself as well. Such individuals are usually keenly concerned with the way they interrelate and in particular, with what others might think of them. If they have a low self-esteem, then this is likely to exaggerate their perceptions. Indeed they might even come to situations with a preconceived and usually negative interpretation as to how others regard them.
The poorer the self-esteem, the bigger the problem.
Let me illustrate an example.
Melanie, a high-level basketball coach saw me on a number of occasions. Her career seemed to be going nowhere and despite wanting to improve things, try as she might, nothing seemed to help. She became extremely depressed and dare I say, suicidal at one point.
In the course of her conversations with me, it emerged that despite public accolades and player praise, she had a very poor self-esteem. I asked her to think about the way she thought about things. Her "cognitive style". We went through various thought strategies and it soon became apparent that she employed the same negative set of assumptions to almost everything she related to. Not just on the court or in the gym.
What follows, is a set of her assumptions, which in reality had very little foundation to them at all. But not so for her. This was her real (if misconstrued) world.
Melanie: "My best player Jenny is usually quite talkative. This past week however, she seems to have gone awfully quiet. I don't know why, but I feel sure that she’s punishing me for something I said at practice in front of the team and I’m scared to ask her about it."
L.K: Aren't you making a major assumption here? Why do you think she is punishing you?
Melanie: "Because when I grew up, my dad used to go quiet in the same way when he was upset with me. It was his way of demonstrating that I had done something wrong and that he didn't approve."
L.K.: And are you comparing what your father did and the way you interpreted that as a growing child, to what Jenny is now apparently doing?
Melanie; "No not really although I have this sense of foreboding that maybe she's negative abut me or does not appreciate me anymore. I guess that I’m played out and I've got nothing more to offer her from a coaching standpoint. I guess she’ll never really respect me again.
L.K.: Aren't you perhaps over-generalizing the magnitude of what happens to be a few days of Jenny’s relative silence? What do you think is going on in her world at the moment?
Melanie: “I don't really know. But if she doesn't regard me, then clearly I must be totally unrespected. I know I'm unlikable at times and that's why I'm so miserable. Although everyone says “rah rah rah” and “way to go coach” I feel lonely, isolated and unhappy and I can't face my team when I'm quite useless and unloved by everyone. Frankly I'd rather die. Everyone would be much better off."
Melanie's tacit denial when asked whether she had attributed meaning to her father's actions and whether Jenny was now doing the same thing to her- (“no not really“), and her response to what might be happening inher world (“I don't really know”), was perfunctory. She was really not interested in anything other than her own depressing and devaluing thoughts and feelings.
Look how on a step-by-step basis she applied her own pessimistic preconceptions to build up a completely negative evaluation of herself in the light of how her players and others supposedly viewed her. She saw each of her " unshakable " beliefs were in fact a presumption, and by working through other examples in her life, how they were quite groundless. I pointed out however that when taken together, the whole bag of them created a potent negative force in the way she thought about things.
Melanie examined her entire system for coding interpretations and was astonished to see just how negatively prejudiced she had become. For example, she had interpreted various innocuous actions on the part of her staff and team, as being “rejecting” of her. She transformed one or two boisterous activities as her being directed at her personally and thus proving to herself how bad, even worthless as a coach she was. And this thinking permeated outwards, into her being a no-good wife, friend, and general citizen.
What does this tell us? It tells us that thinking style is something to think about. It reflects the way you consider a variety of issues both on and off the field - whether you tend to be more or less, analytical or intuitive. Your amenability to newness, that is, whether you are open or closed to new ideas, plays, tactics and experiences, can help you learn whether you have built a prison for your personality or not.
Dr. Lenny Kristal