CoachBri’s Blog

Well, you’ve been training with me now for about two weeks. I can see you’re struggling.

No! I’m fine! Thanks for asking.

You’re so quick to answer. Are you sure you’re okay?

Well, I don’t admit or show weakness, right coach?

Is that so? So why then do I see you struggle? I don’t care if you’re weak.

Yeah right! If I admit to this weakness it will come back on me.

How is that?

Well, no matter what, if I admit weakness, every coach in the world would punish me for it!

That’s fine, but do I punish you?

No, but you don’t see my weakness.

So why am I having this conservation with you then?

Because you think I’m doggin’ it! So you have come to give me shit. Right? That’s the coaching thing!!

No, I just want to find out how it’s going.

How come you’re starting with me?

Who says I am?

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It is funny how some talented athletes are moody to cover up having to perform.

Their moods are a way of being pissed off because their lives are not going the way they want them to because of the pressure to perform. So to get off the pressure they are moody and blame other people for not doing things that they think they should. So if they are angry and pissed they have an excuse for not calling up their talent to win.

Moodiness is one of the emotional states that create an off-ramp for success. It is a way of being so self-focused and disconnected from others and punish oneself for mistakes or perceived failures. The moody athlete is always at the hands of others and uses ones energy to get others to do what they think is best for others.

The choice to be moody disconnects people and causes confusion. People don’t know what the moodiness is about and thus take it on themselves and wonder what they have done. This is a clever way to avoid self- evaluation for both people (the moody and the one who blames themselves for the emotional state of the other.)

To deal with this, athletes must understand that all behaviour, no matter what it is, is an attempt to feel good. The moody athlete tries to feel good by choosing moodiness and this satisfies one or more of their basic needs, usually power. Moody athletes feel powerless and ineffective in some area of their life and therefore seek to get power by trying to control others with their mood.

Make the choice not to be affected by someone else’s mood. Tell them how their mood is affecting you. Love them and tell them they are ok and you understand. Call them up to perform, lead them to succeed. Be positive, clear and never buy into their mood – and you will never let yourself off the hook and use the moody athlete as an off-ramp.

Love
Coach Bri

I wonder if you and I could just for a few short moments in our lives to share something together that is most profound. That thing is freedom! Most of us are not free and the way we train is never focused in the love of what we are doing but mainly in tying ourselves to an outcome or goal. This is our conditioning which we come to practice and neglect due to the duty of producing quality in a practice. We are conditioned to a negative doing cycle that looks at failure as the enemy.

What does it look like to use your sport as a vehicle for transformation? First of all, it is all about how you walk in the gym, your presence of mind or your state of mind. Do you ever, for a few moments, just look and see what you actually are before you train, during your training and after your training? Do you ever tell yourself the truth of what you are all about – your doubts, insecurities, egocentric demands, pleasure, pain, fear, hopes longings, desires and all that is you?

To use your sport as a vehicle for transformation you must set aside all of these things and do your skills as if you were doing them for the first time. You must have your brain, mind and heart in a state of learning. When we are happy it is not when we are learning. But most of us don’t want to learn about our disorder, which stems from a brain that is full of its own knowledge. Therefore we can’t train out of our comfort zone. To have a beginner’s mind, brain and heart is to welcome resistance of whatever the situation is and go through it without judgment. This state of freedom is one in which failure is looked at and explored. It reveals to the athlete, coach and even the CEO the learning piece that one must get to produce quality. However, this must be an exercise of discovery and you can’t discover if you are holding on to previous knowledge you have of anything. The word discover means not to cover up. Therefore one must be free to explore.

Whatever the problem in the sport, the same manifestation is in one’s life. Under pressure we will build ourselves an “off ramp” and that same situation applies directly to one’s life. Know your “off ramps” in sport and see the parallel in one’s life. Then training and your sport take on a whole different meaning.

Coach Bri

So often when working with athletes we are not integrated in body and mind. The body will go through the motions and mind is often off doing its own thing. The competitive situation is then lost, as well as the opportunity to develop some mental toughness.
When we go through the motions of training and are not attentive to what is going on, we often get frustrated especially when coaches start to yell at us and we have to force ourselves to perform. I believe that this is an approach that only works for a short period of time and doesn’t develop the independence the athlete needs in order to perform. The act of performance in most sports is the act that is independent of the coach. The coach may be able to influence aspects of the performance but most athletes have to go it alone relying on their own skills in order to get the job done.
We do not know when we are aware or attentive. Each one of us, at any given moment, can be completely aware of our inattentive state which breaks the cycle of inattention. When the body is doing one thing and the mind another that is not attentiveness. Attentiveness is the body and mind fully awake, which means all senses are peaked to attention. This is easy to do if you are driving your car and all of a sudden the car in front of you begins to spin out. All of your senses are fully awake, time slows down and what happens in the next few minutes could determine your life or death. This is the same in your sport. It can be changed and worked on but it must be generated from the inside of you. That is high performance coaching. The next level is to see the fact that how you perform on the court is the same as to how you deal with your life. Your life and my life are a series of relationships and the health of those relationships is dependent on one’s ability to be attentive to what is really going on in them. When we are faced with the true of this it is rather disturbing.

lov bri