The modern day high performance coach is charged with a great many responsibilities on and off the field – from marketing the club, to leading and managing a diverse range of staff, to being part scientist / psychologist / master tactician and motivator of a large group of individuals that need to all sing from the same hymn sheet in order for any chance of success to happen. Leadership and vision is created and sustained in the top roles such as that of coach. It’s a pivotal role in the high pressure cooker of sport.

Within the sporting environment however, coaches are given very little time to get it all right. The truth of the matter is this – the skills that got you the job in the first place (those being passion, dedication and knowledge of the game), are probably not the ones that are going to keep you there.

Coaches need a specific sort of fitness that is going to complement all the other skills many have spent years refining.

The one thing that makes all the difference – emotional intelligence (otherwise called emotional fitness) – is often overlooked as a ‘soft’ skill. Recent history though will tell us it is the coaches with high levels of EI that have a chance of conquering the challenges the role presents.

All we have in sport is people – the rest is just smoke & mirrors. People create the culture, make up the team and support the conditions that will either see a group be successful or not. Sport is played, coached and managed by people. The ability to not only relate to people but to engage and inspire them in a vision is paramount to success.

However, across many sporting environments, I have met very few people that believe their EI, or lack thereof, may be hindering their success. The blame game usually includes other people, processes or players that don’t perform.

Without a doubt – a lack of emotional fitness is the top reason senior coaches in AFL get sacked. Boards and CEO’s attempt to package this up in a myriad of ways but it almost always comes down to the coach not having enough EI to get them through.

When you get to the top of your game, you can assume your technical capacity will be about the same to others. What separates you is something else – and that is your skill base around emotional intelligence. Your ability to leverage EI, both on and off the field, is critical to your success as a coach.

In an era where we are all looking desperately for a competitive advantage, the secret sauce is staring at us right in the face.

You could dismiss the potency of emotional fitness if you were in a role where there wasn’t a great demand for emotion – such as a scientist or mechanic – but you dismiss the benefits of EI to your coaching at your own peril. Let’s face it – the responsibility of coaching demands the use of emotions skilfully, engaging the hearts and minds of others to hopefully do extraordinary things.

Research indicates that using emotional fitness more purposefully gives competitive advantage in 4 areas:

Greater mental healthThe ability to be able to sustain superior job performanceMore effective leadership skills

And most importantly (and directly related to coaching), those with higher EI are more likely to cope with high pressure situations / environments.

Emotional intelligence focuses on identifying, understanding and using emotions resourcefully. In teams environments, strong emotional intelligence in groups starts with emotionally intelligent coaches.

When you are a player, you train the muscles in your body to be able to do specific tasks, whether it is speed, strength or endurance. When you are a coach, the muscle you need to train is your EI muscle – to get in the game and to stay in the game. It is the thing that will set you apart from your colleagues and make people want to be led by you.

The great news is this: that EI can be taught & developed, unlike IQ which remains fairly stable over time. And it is important to discern between EI & IQ, as they are not the same thing. You can have a high IQ but be emotionally unfit. In fact, a lack of EI can make really smart people sometimes do really dumb things, which we can observe from time to time in the theatre of the match day coaches box.

Emotional fitness separates outstanding performers from adequate ones. And in the sporting system, as we know, adequate is nowhere near good enough.

There are 4 key areas of emotional intelligence which are important for coaches to consider:

Self awareness

Self-awareness is arguably the most critical aspect of emotional intelligence. It is the ability to know yourself – to really know yourself - warts and all. We are creatures of comfort, so this is a challenging proposition for most of us.

Recognising your own emotions and behaviours for what they are and ‘dealing with this as they are, not as you wish them to be’ is about the best professional development a coach can undertake.

Knowing what you do well, what drives you, and what brings you satisfaction is all important to know. But shining a light on what you don’t do well, what pushes your buttons, or simply being unable to deal with your emotions is unhelpful to you, but most importantly, to those around you (particularly players and fellow coaches).

Knowing all parts of self and the impact you have is often place of discomfort for most people so we try to avoid at all costs. But if you are a coach, you can guarantee that people are talking about how aware, or not, you really are.

I haven’t witnessed a club environment yet where people don’t make it a sport to talk about how the head coach is faring – and this is the thing – those conversations are most often not towards the coach, but out of their earshot.

People will go to great lengths to avoid giving others the feedback they desperately need to succeed. We live with a warped view that it is not the right or kind thing to do, but in reality, it is the greatest injustice you can do to a colleague. As a coach, you need the moral mandate to lead, alongside having the title. The only way to get that is through being aware of your strengths and opportunities to develop.

Self-management

Self-management builds on the basis of self-awareness and is simply the ability to control your emotions, so they don’t end up controlling you.

Consider the worst boss you ever had. Think about the impact they had on you. Almost always, these are the people who were poor at self-management, which had major repercussions on how people behaved around them.

Self-management in the sporting environment is really the ability to control emotional impulses which lead to poor performance, and the capacity to create specific emotions which lead to high performance – and of course, to know when to switch on to do either option.

People who have poor impulse control are hard to be around, and change the dynamic of the environment. People stop acting comfortably around them, they hold information back for fear of upsetting them, and don’t speak up when they should. The mood of the leader, determines the mood of the team.

This is particularly problematic in a high performance environment where any ‘elephant in the corner’ has the ability to derail success. I have been in far too many football meetings where people do not say what they want to, for fear of upsetting either the senior coach or someone up the hierarchy. This compromises high performance and contributes to a negative culture.

It is important to remember, people don’t leave clubs or organisations or companies – they leave people.

They leave their leaders. They leave YOU!

Of course, while a certain amount of emotion is required in coaching, it is a physiological impossibility to make good, effective decisions when under large amounts of stress, such as when you have allowed yourself to become angry or anxious. The ability to manage your emotions, and therefore your behaviours is critical for the coach leader who is also trying to manage the emotions of others.

Social awareness

Social awareness is the skill-set used to pick up on, and understand the emotions and feelings of other people both individually and in group situations. With well-developed social awareness you can accurately read situations and people because you are able to understand & empathise with their emotions. This gives the coach a strategic advantage, as you will be see the power dynamics within your environment with clarity and be able to navigate a way through the politics.

This means using all the tools of communication at your disposal, including elevating the need to listen effectively to not only the verbal, but the non-verbal messages – body movements, gestures and other physical signs of emotion.

Using empathy effectively is an underrated leadership tool – but being able to ask better questions, using feedback to clarify what is understood and acknowledging feelings of others even if you disagree all enhance leadership. Likewise, so is holding back from making comments or statements that are judgemental, rejecting, belittling or undermining.

Coaches who do not have good social awareness set unreasonable demands on their players & and coaching team, and miss the signs people give when they are disengaging. When coaches are sacked and it comes as a surprise to them, that always surprises me, but gives great insight into where they might sit in relation to their own social awareness.

Relationship management

Relationship Management is about your capacity to connect and build trust. How you get the best out of others - your ability to inspire and influence, to communicate and build bonds, and your ability to help them change, grow, develop is crucial in the high performance environment. Think about the number of different stakeholders a coach needs to engage with. If the ability to connect isn’t well developed, this can present significant challenge to coach success. Relationship management isn’t luck however – it is a deliberate success strategy.

Great relationship management allows you to connect with others in ways that help them feel understood and supported. Managing relationships is an essential emotional intelligence skill that enables you to effectively become a coach leader.

Effective management of relationships relies on your self-awareness, self-management and the level of social awareness you might have. Once a coach is using all four areas to their advantage, they are operating with sound emotional fitness.

Developing your emotional fitness

Some tips to developing your emotional fitness -

1. The cornerstone of emotional fitness is self-awareness. Any tool that helps to build this for you and your team is valuable in enabling your high performers. There are many – formal tools (such as DISC or MBTI, 360 feedback) or informal tools such as mentoring & coaching (don’t underestimate the power of conversation with the right questioning). Also, give someone in your environment ‘permission’ to be a barometer for you around your behaviours and impact you are having – positive, neutral and negative.

2. Emotions are a filter that shape what we see and how we evaluate information. Emotional intelligence allows coaches to perceive and manage these filters so they get a more accurate and useful understanding of players and staff, leading to high performance. By putting placing emotional fitness as a priority, or seeing it as just as important as the other aspects of a coaching role, you will have a greater chance of utilising effectively the one resource that is unique to you and your club: the people within it.

3. Emotions are contagious – choose them mindfully. When coaches develop emotional intelligence they are more skilled at accessing and generating the emotions that let them connect with, and influence the people around them to deeper reflection and more powerful motivation.

4. Leadership is set from the top – but conversely, the ‘fish rots from the head first’. As a coach, you set the tone of the environment.

Consistent reflective practice habits are under rated for coaches. We ask players to be reflective on their performance as part of the routine, but don’t often integrate this practice at the coaching level.

The culture of busy-ness is killing our capacity to lead with high emotional intelligence. Actively managing this part of the high performance environment is pivotal for success.

If I could have one superpower, it would be the ability to turn fear down in people, so they could more easily lead authentic & meaningful lives. What is your poison of choice when it comes to internal fear – fear of failure? Fear of being wrong? Fear of what people will think? Fear of leaving a job you hate because the alternative is unknown?

Imagine what kind of place our world would be and what would be achieved, if we were all able to be free of the inner critics that reside in our head.

Without doubt, the number one thing I work with people about is fear, and I get to see first-hand the impact that these doubts & anxieties can have on your life – holding back from saying what you need to (or know is right to say), doing what you are passionate about, making a real impact.

Of course, I have also been witness to how fear has played a role in my own life (just because you work with these challenges doesn’t mean you always have it nailed yourself!). I think back and can clearly pin point decisions, big and small, that were made from the starting point of fear.

Our community places great emphasis on heroes, and celebrating acts that are about being strong & brave. This can make the rest of us that are not out saving the world and thumping our chests about it feel small in comparison, particularly when we are alone with our fears. But I have never met someone without fears – have you? We all deal at some stage with the enemy within.

A useful starting point in understanding fear is to get informed about what happens to our brains around fear.

One of the first things our brains do when presented with new information is to put the shutters up, retreat, and get anxious about what the fresh news might mean – a response that works like an alarm clock, gaining your attention. Evolutionary speaking, this reflex was once very useful, as chances were if you were feeling fear, you were probably about to be eaten by a bear. However, most of us living in the modern world now don’t need this reflex to be so present, but it is still there. If we can use logic to see that fear is controlled in our brains (and is a neurological response), we also have the power to shift the thought process from fear to something else more productive.

It also helps to identify what your fears really are. Name them. There is no point denying that they exist – even the most courageous people feel fear – they just learn to turn the volume down and manage their emotions in a way that it doesn’t stop them doing what they want to do. It’s easy to deny fears exist, it’s harder to be honest with yourself, reach inwards and work out what you really are dealing with.

Then, ask yourself five questions to really understand your fear (and then be able to do something about it) much more productively:

How does this fear affect you?What is the history of your fear? Where did it begin?What triggers your fear?

Once you have a better idea of what you are dealing with, add the fourth, big kahunaquestion in –

Where is the evidence base for this thought process?

This is incredibly important, because it starts to put logical thought processes alongside the emotional ones. Most of the time you will find that there is no evidence base for your thinking, rather it has been built up over time without a strong reason.

Take for example the popular fear of public speaking. You have a big presentation coming up. You are fearful you will stuff it up, and making an idiot of yourself. What is the evidence that this will happen? How many presentations have you stuffed up before? Chances are, you have illuminated this fear without any credible basis.

Finally, add my favourite coaching question of all time:

What is the worst thing that can happen?

This helps us to think about our fear in a very conscious way, rather than allowing ourselves to get away with paying it lip service. And by paying conscious attention, we can work with the emotion and alter the impact it has on us. Really, what is the worst thing that can happen? Can you live with that? What are the chances the worst will happen? Flip it around – what is the best thing that can happen as a result of you overcoming this fear?

Vision the best things that can happen, and work with your fears. I promise, it is one of the most worthwhile exercises you will ever do on the path to nailing your ambitions.