A 9-Step Guide to Achieving Work-Life Balance for You and Your Coaching Staff

A 9-Step Guide to Achieving Work-Life Balance for You and Your Coaching Staff

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Table of Contents 3

Introduction

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The Impact of Burnout

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Finding Balance

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Set Schedules and Routines Prioritize and Delegate Don’t Bring Work Home Stay Cool in Stressful Situations Take Advantage of Tech Set Your Own Goals Establish Boundaries Build a Network Stay Active

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Conclusion

You can’t do a good job if your job is all you do.

The good news is, regardless of your personal situation - whether you’re coaching full-time, part-time, one team or four - burnout is both preventable and easy to overcome.

The key is learning how to recognize when coaching is taking its toll and counterbalance with more rest, self-care and recreation. That may mean spending more time with your family or in isolation, changing up your processes, or simply finding room for an extra day off.

While “work hard, play hard” might be a cliche, the concept rings true. The harder you’re working, the harder you need to try to combat the exhaustion and stress it can cause.

In this eBook, we’ll cover a number of ways to do that. We’ll talk dealing with burnout when it hits, how to deal with stressful situations that might exacerbate it, and steps to prevent it from becoming a major problem in the future.

...let’s get started

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THEIMPACT OF

BURNOUT 4

Before we dive into how you can achieve work/life balance, let’s talk about the impact of coaching burnout.

Because burnout can feel like exhaustion, it’s easy to minimize its impact and how seriously it should be taken. If it feels like you’re tired, you treat it as if you’re tired, ultimately writing off burnout as something that will just slow you down and wear you out until you can manage a little more rest.

But burnout can spiral and have a lasting impact on various areas of your life—all in different ways.

You’re a less effective coach.

If you’re feeling unmotivated, discouraged and exhausted by your coaching, doing your job well will feel a lot harder. Creativity and problem solving might not come as easily, and energy to stay motivated until the end of the season can feel hard to come by.

Players aren’t as motivated.

Since so much of your job involves helping, motivating and inspiring your players, tapping into your own passion is key. The team feeds off of that excitement. But when you’re feeling burnt out and dejected, it can have a negative effect on your players.

Your personal and professional life suffers.

Regardless of where you feel the most burnout, those feelings can easily carry over into other areas. For example, if your coaching is making you moody and tired, you may not be up for a raucous night with the family afterward.

These symptoms can be alarming, but it really is normal for coaches to go through a rough patch every now and then. It just means your routines are a bit off-balance and in need of a tune-up.

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Set Schedules and Routines

Wherever maintaining a regular schedule is difficult, create small routines for consistency.

Finding consistency is essential to achieving balance. As you’ve probably told your team hundreds of times, becoming good at something takes practice. It’s just as true for managing your well-being as it is in athletics.

Sure, there will always be parts of your schedule you won’t have complete control over. Things like schedules, tournaments and emergencies can’t always be predicted. But that only makes it more important for you to protect your time whenever possible.

Try to build a consistent schedule for yourself around practice, games and “big picture” tasks. That may mean having dinner with your family every Sunday night, protecting early mornings for workouts, or reserving a weekend afternoon to do absolutely nothing.

Wherever maintaining a regular schedule is more difficult, you can still add small routines for an element of consistency.

For example, a lot of coaches have post-game rituals they like to do alone, away from the crowds—and maybe you already have a preferred activity you could turn into a regular thing.

You may not have control over when your games take place, or where, or what the outcome is, but being able to look forward to a ritual after each game could make all the difference.

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Prioritize and Delegate

Delegate smaller tasks to coordinators to focus on the most impactful work.

Working too hard for too long is one of the quickest ways to bring on burnout. As a head coach, it’s easy (even natural and understandable) to feel like the entire fate of the team rests solely on your shoulders.

And while you are the leader, you’re not the only one with a responsibility.

You’re part of a team that can and should share the work. There are assistants, coordinators, maybe even players with the same passion willing and able to chip in.

Your focus is best directed toward planning, training and looking at the big picture. By delegating smaller tasks to coordinators and letting go of things that won’t help your team reach its goals, you can prioritize the work that will have the biggest impact.

By giving that work more time and focus, and giving yourself less to worry about, you can become a more effective coach. Here’s what Newark Valley High School coach Brian Sherwood had to say about reshuffling his workload:

“It wouldn’t have been effective if I would’ve continued to be a coordinator because I couldn’t have sat on the bench, get out of the flow of the game and make all the decisions a head coach has to make during the game.”

Brian Sherwood / Coach at Neward Valley High School

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Don’t Bring Work Home

Mental baggage that follows you after practice can threaten work-life balance.

Our third recommendation for finding balance as a coach is to avoid bringing work and work-related issues home with you.

While coaching does have a fair amount of actual work that can follow you home, a bigger risk to your work-life balance is the mental and emotional baggage that follows you around after practice.

If there was a conflict between players, a problem you couldn’t figure out how to solve, or any number of other nuisances, it can be hard to turn off your thoughts as soon as you’re “done” working.

But by following other steps in this eBook and implementing healthy mental habits like meditation, you can reduce the number of issues following you around and get better at focusing on what’s in front of you.

You can also practice mindfulness to recognize when you’re distracted by coaching duties outside of coaching time. When it’s not possible to completely prevent issues from worrying you, work to find yourself reacting and push them out of your thoughts.

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Stay Cool in Stressful Situations

Setting a definitive time to resolve issues can mitigate stress.

In addition to practicing mindfulness and changing how you react to distracting thoughts, you can also work on your internal and external reactions in a moment of a stress.

In difficult conversations, such as dealing with an unhappy parent, try these tips to manage it well:

Ask the right questions.

How you phrase things can change your meaning, and in an already difficult conversation, communicating clearly is key to reaching an understanding. Try to listen just as much or more than you talk, and ask questions to understand the other side as much as possible before expressing your own views.

Know the details.

Make sure you’re fully informed on any situation before discussing it with someone else. This helps get everyone on the same page and ensures you’re dealing with the situation correctly, instead of running the risk of creating more conflict.

Postpone when necessary.

There will be some situations where you’ll want to put a hold on the conversation.

If the timing is inappropriate or emotions are running too high, it’s okay to ask that the conversation be continued at a different time. This makes it less stressful and emotional for all parties involved.

By dealing with things better then and there, or setting a definitive time to resolve things later, you won’t find yourself as burdened by stress outside of coaching.

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Take Advantage of Tech

Technology can make your job easier and enhance the entire team’s experience.

For example, tools like Google Drive or Trello make it easier to share information with your coaches, players, parents, etc. And as that information accumulates, the apps also help you stay organized.

Handy email and messaging apps also make it easier to get in touch with everyone at once. Group chat apps are more organized than text messages if you need to contact the team right away, while newsletter tools, email templates and social media simplify sending things like schedules, announcements and team pictures.

There are even platforms designed specifically for the jobs you’re doing—like our performance analysis tools (shameless plug!). Hudl handles the “down in the dirt” work so you and your staff can focus on bigger tasks and strategic thinking.

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For example, when you use Hudl Assist to produce reports and detailed analysis of your game video, you free up time after games to rest or work on other things. In the case of Park Hill South head coach Mike Sharp, that meant his staff earned an extra day off each week.

“It gives time back to our coaches and families,” Sharp said. “A lot of that information is mindless— down and distance, ODK. It doesn’t take somebody with a specialized talent to figure that out. By the time we get in the playoffs and you’re maybe breaking down six or seven games, it takes a lot of time.

It gives those guys more time with their families.”

And by using playlists to organize moments and pull together clips for review, you’re saving the whole team tons of time otherwise spent fast-forwarding.

Whether you’re looking to improve productivity, communication or your actual coaching and analysis, technology can be used to streamline those processes and manage information better.

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Whether you’re looking to improve productivity, communication or your actual coaching and analysis, technology can be used to streamline those processes and manage information better.

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Set Your Own Goals

You run a team, but you’re also your own person. And just as you set goals and make plans for your staff and athletes, you need to do the same for yourself.

When you’re in a leadership position like head coach, it’s easy to focus too much on helping everyone else improve and forget your own development.

But remember that by dedicating time to improving your own skills, you’re becoming a better resource and leader for the rest of your team.

There are quite a few ways to spend time on professional development, just pick the one that works best for you. It could be by reading books.

Our personal recommendations include: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

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You can also develop by upping your fitness game, either by trying a new sport or training for an event. Sometimes it might be learning more about the habits and practices discussed in the rest of this eBook.

Become a better resource for your team by dedicating time to improve your skills.

Anything you do to better yourself betters your skills as a coach.

When you’ve decided on a new focus area, be sure to set S.M.A.R.T. goals for yourself, just as you would with your team or staff:

Specific

Instead of a vague goal like “work on communication skills with my staff,” think more about exactly how you’ll do it.

Measurable

Set an end goal for yourself, so you know whether or not you’ve succeeded at the end of your timeline.

Attainable

In the name of balance, choose a goal that won’t add more stress and aggravation to your life. It should be something you enjoy doing.

Realistic

Be realistic in what you can handle on top of your everyday coaching duties.

Time-bound

Set a deadline for yourself to go back and reflect on whether or not you’ve achieved your goals.

It sounds cheesy, but coaching yourself as well as you coach your team and the improvements will impact everyone you work with. You can also use the project to work on a part of your job that stresses you out to avoid that struggle in the future.

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Establish Boundaries

Maintain work-life balance by holding yourself accountable.

If you follow the other recommendations in this guide, like delegating tasks and using tech to save time, you should have more personal time to unwind and enhance the quality of your relationships outside of your immediate coaching circle. You won’t have to spend as much time on work, but dedicated coaches can still develop the “always on” mindset.

Be honest: Have you ever tried to solve a problem over your lunch break?

The mindset that you have to be 100 percent dedicated 100 percent of the time can be a hard one to break, so establishing rules and boundaries for yourself can hold you accountable to keep that newfound work-life balance.

For example, say you use Hudl Assist and no longer have to spend the day after a game analyzing the video, but you still find yourself doing so out of habit, “just in case” or because you don’t have other plans.

Setting rules for yourself, to spend Saturdays connecting with friends or taking in a good book, helps turn your actions into routines to make balanced coaching feel automatic after a while.

Some boundaries you might want to address for yourself include when you’re allowed to “brainstorm” or “get ahead of work” related to the team, and how often you vent to your significant other. But to help enforce these boundaries, you might also need to set boundaries for your staff, like when to contact you outside of work with any non-emergency.

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Build a Network

Let others help you work out challenges and new ideas.

Managing a better work-life balance doesn’t mean you’ll never get stressed out or have problems in your job. But part of the process, as we talked about earlier, is knowing how to deal when it does happen.

Having a group of other coaches that you can talk to about work gives you a relevant sounding board. You’ll have others to help you work out challenges and new ideas by combining their own experience with yours. You’ll likely be able to work things out more effectively than if you were doing so alone or enlisting the help of a friend or family member.

Plus, having a dedicated space to talk about your coaching problems will make it easier to“unplug” from coaching outside of work-related activities and establish those boundaries.

But how do you go about meeting other coaches when they might see you and your team as the competition?

You’d be surprised what simply reaching out or attending local networking events can do. There are also tons of opportunities online and on social media to meet and connect with other coaches. There’s even a new Hudl Forum to learn how other coaches in your sport are using technology in their day-to-day.

You could follow websites and blogs about coaching and connect with the owner or other readers, find a forum focused on your sport, or look at public conversations on social media and reach out from there.

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Stay Active

The benefits of being active go beyond staying fit.

You may not need to be as in shape as your best player, but you don’t want to focus so much on your players’ health and fitness that you neglect your own. As someone in athletics, you know the benefits of physical activity. You can (and do) give the healthy living lecture yourself.

But you also know how hard it can be to practice what you preach.

You’re so focused on your assistants and players and helping them improve that you don’t notice how long it’s been since your last workout.

Through steps like setting routines and goals for yourself, you can establish regular exercise habits like a morning run or friendly sports games every weekend.

Ever been on a run and had a big “a-ha moment?” Look at this as a chance to have them more often.

The sweat sessions will keep you fit as a coach, help relieve stress, and bring moments of clarity to problems and challenges you may be facing.

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Conclusion A lot of people, not just coaches, get nervous about the idea of working less and spending more time on themselves. It’s hard to have the realization that working less can actually help you work better.

Luckily, if you’ve downloaded this eBook, you’ve already figured that out and decided to take action to be a more effective coach living a more balanced life.

You’ll be healthier and less stressed, which can lead to better thinking, strategizing and coaching.

And you won’t be the only one to benefit. You’re setting an example for your assistants and players to care for yourself as much as you care for the sport.

So start getting into the work-life balance mindset. Establish routines for yourself.

Prioritize what’s most important for you to do and delegate the other stuff. Take steps to reduce stress and distractions so that you can do your best work.

If you pay close attention to yourself and are self-aware of how you spend your time, it’ll be clear where you need to change your habits and reactions.

And if it feels a little bit daunting or impossible to step back from some of your normal activities, if you’re unsure it will really pay off beyond feeling more wellrested, we know a lot of coaches who have already overcome this work-life balance challenge and lived to tell the tale. To see what they did to save time and work smarter, read their stories on our blog.

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Here’s what a few of the coaches have to say about prioritizing work, using technology and finding that balance:

“ I have a wife and four kids, so I want to spend some time with them too. I’ve found that the easiest thing that I’ve been able to do is to use video.”

Michael Adams / Head coach at West Windsor-Plainsboro South High School & founder of Princeton Volleyball Club

“Sometimes during the weekend I spend the whole weekend with the computer on my lap working on stats or getting ready for the next week. Anyone that coaches football knows you don’t have a lot of time for yourself. It is an absolute timesaver and it’s well worth what you spend for it.”

David Cook / Head Coach at Herculaneum High School

“It’s just the little things that save us four hours every weekend, and that’s a ton of time to coaches,” Randy Barnes / Head Coach at Rains High School

These examples should inspire you to find your own balance and improve for the sake of your team.

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