Building Self-Awareness

Coach, have you ever let your emotions get the best of you? Have they ever impacted your decision making?  

I'm going to assume the answer is yes - to both of these questions - because we have all been there especially in a career as challenging as coaching.

Your emotions influence your mood. A mood is a temporary emotional state that stays with you for a period of time. It may be a temporary state, but your mood can set the general atmosphere and affect not only you, but your team, your coaching staff, and everyone you come in contact with. Your mood sets a powerful tone for all interactions.

Have you ever heard an athlete say: what kind of mood is the coach in today?  

Would you like to change that? The place to start is with self-awareness.

When you are self-aware you are able to understand what you are feeling moment by moment. Self-Awareness is the ability to recognize your emotions and how they impact both your performance and others.  

Self-awareness makes it possible for you to understand how your emotions are affecting you before you take action. Then you have the choice to respond instead of reacting to situations. This will be especially crucial as emotions arise in tense competition. It will also help you understand the emotions you and your athletes experience in those crucial competitive situations. 

Emotions are important data. It’s important to identify and label them. For instance when you are frustrated identify what you are feeling so you can put space in between the emotion and your response. What you don’t want to do is react to the emotion of frustration and regret it later.

There is a linkage between thoughts and emotions. Thoughts precede emotions and emotions precede actions. For example, when you think about a recent success you have had, it may make you happy. When you are happy, you smile - not the other way around. The more attuned you are to your thoughts and emotions, the more proficient you will be at responding rather than reacting.  

With a deep self-awareness and understanding of our thoughts and emotions we learn how to manage the way we respond and behave in various situations. We are emotional beings. Every action, behavior and decision we make is based on an emotion! Take that in for a moment and you can see how important it is to deepen your self-awareness. 

Learning and understanding your emotions will have a positive impact on your coaching. 

Coaches that have high self-awareness are clear. They know why they do what they do, what motivates them, and what provokes a reaction in them. That awareness allows them to choose to respond versus react.

Self-awareness is the cornerstone of being socially and emotionally aware. 

Developing self-awareness is not easy; it takes commitment. It’s a process. It is achievable with practice. Along the self-awareness journey, you will begin to notice roadblocks called self-limiting beliefs. As you further develop and deepen your self-awareness, these self-limiting beliefs will be more readily identifiable to you.

So what are self-limiting beliefs? They are unconsciously-held beliefs that hold us back, stop us from taking chances and risks, or that simply prevent us from being all that we can be. We all have them. Too often our self-limiting beliefs get in our way. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of peoples opinions. Your athletes experience these and many more!

The more we become self-aware, the more we are able to identify those nagging self-limiting beliefs and how they are effecting us. Don’t get discouraged if you can’t easily identify them on your own. Often times they lie deep within and we don’t see things that are closest to us. As H.M. Tomlinson famously said, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” 

If you are naturally self-reflective you can do the work of becoming more self-aware independently if you ask yourself the right questions. On the other hand, some coaches find it beneficial to hire a performance coach to help bring these self-limiting beliefs to the surface.  

The purpose of all of this is to head off our emotional chain reactions that lead to the behaviors that we want to modify. When awareness precedes behavior we have choice. Choice and belief in ourselves gives us a competitive edge!

No matter what you are doing - coaching, recruiting or just living your life - every day is comprised of dozens of battles in your mind. You have to be emotionally invested and aware to win those battles. As you become more self-aware you create clarity of thought and you begin to eliminate the noise in your mind. You are able to stay in the moment and put yourself in the best position to be successful. You become aware of how your emotions and feelings impact your performance, attitudes, judgements and decision making. 

Keep in mind, we are energy and vibrational beings. As coaches, when we are self-aware we become cognizant of how our emotions, energy and vibration affect our teams. Part of this is our social awareness as a coach which we will address in an upcoming post. But the other part is simply managing our emotions. Remember when you were an athlete and your coach came into practice looking upset? Yikes! It was going to be a long one. It’s the same with you, Coach.  If you want your players to respond to you in practice, be mindful of the tone you set from the onset. When you walk onto that field, court or practice venue - you are in control; you set the tone. 

Let me leave you with these questions for you to use to check-in on your self-awareness:

• What emotion am I experiencing right now?

• Why am I experiencing this emotion?

• How is it impacting me and my coaching?

• What pushes my emotional buttons?

Are you ready to get started on developing better self-awareness? I am here to support you on your journey!