Coaches Ask a Sport Psych, Episode 04, Putting Training Setbacks into Sustainable Context
I'm pleased to bring you the fourth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're tackling a question that many coaches face:
"How do we help clients see the forest from the trees?"
In this episode, I explore strategies for assisting clients who may become fixated on small setbacks—like a bad workout or a momentary challenge—that feel monumental to them. I'll discuss how to guide clients in focusing on the bigger picture, so their overall progress and long-term goals continue to influence their behavior positively.
Join me as I delve into methods for helping clients navigate these fleeting obstacles without derailing their motivation and engagement.
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Edited Video Transcript:
The question that was asked is: "How do we help clients see the forest from the trees?"
The context provided was about training clients so that a small setback—a bad workout or something else that is momentary or fleeting—doesn't feel so monumental; instead, the bigger-picture effects, status, or progress is what influences the client's behavior.
There are a couple of different ways that we can help clients move through experiences where there are small setbacks, whether that be dietary challenges, workout challenges, or whatever it may be. We've all seen it. We've all seen clients who have one bad workout, and it's a couple of days before they're coming back to workouts or returning to practice and engaging with it in a beneficial manner. I think that's where this is coming from. Or they have one competition where they were expecting top ten and ended up 15th, and it kind of undermines their training and their perception of progress for a while.
The way that we help those clients depends on how the "hook"—that thing that kind of derails them—is showing up. If the hook is around something particularly specific—some clients will have dogmatically strong rules that they're trying to adhere to, like "every lift has to be perfect" or "I have to run every single day"—we'll work on helping that client separate from that rule.
That work may entail exploring when that rule has been usable and workable for them and when that rule has really kind of worked against them. That's exploring workability criteria. Another related way that we do that is by helping clients explore past experiences where they have perceived progress while experiencing the disruptive thing. Ultimately, that's exactly what we want.
We want our clients to have disruptive experiences because those are always going to happen—we never have 100% perfect lifts; we never always attend training every single day. Being pragmatic about the fact that we're going to have upsetting experiences—or athletes are going to have them (well, coaches are too)—means that being able to navigate those upsetting experiences is much more practical than trying to eliminate them. Yes, it's totally beneficial to try and reduce those in frequency by systematic changes, but this question was about how we help clients navigate that.
Ultimately, it's through separating their sense of self from really, really dogmatic, impractical rules and helping them explore times where they have engaged in navigating those speed bumps in a productive manner. If they know—or if they can come to acknowledge—that they already have the skills to navigate those and identify the explicit responses that are more sustainable, it's a lot easier for them to engage in that kind of sustainable behavior than if we have to train it in from scratch.
And for the most part, we don't. For the most part, just helping them connect the dots between past experiences of sustainable behavior and where they are now tends to really unlock that ability to see the forest from the trees—to take the perspective that, "Yeah, today I had a bad workout, and tomorrow's another day, so I'm going to show up 100% and keep doing this thing because the big picture is important to me."