Know Your Role: Why Performance Depends on Clarity, Not Control

What’s Your Role?

The Missing Piece in High-Performance Preparation and Performance

One of the most common questions I hear from athletes, coaches, and parents is deceptively simple:

“What’s my role right now?”

It usually comes up in high-pressure periods: major competitions, selection phases, finals, or moments that really matter. And it’s a great question, because high performance doesn’t break down due to a lack of effort. It breaks down when people step outside their role, often with the best of intentions.

High performance works best when everyone understands:

• What phase we’re in (preparation vs performance), and

• What role we’re responsible for executing well

Let’s break this down.

Two Phases That Matter: Preparation and Performance

Before we talk about roles, we need to separate two phases that often get blurred:

• Preparation – where learning, refining, problem-solving, and development happen

• Performance – where execution, trust, and simplicity matter most

Most mistakes happen when we treat performance like preparation… or try to keep preparing when it’s time to perform.

Now let’s look at the three key roles.

The Parent’s Role

On Performance Day: Be the Parent – Not the Coach

On competition or game day, an athlete is already carrying pressure, expectation, and emotional load. The last thing they need is more performance input.

The parent’s role is simple:

• Be support

• Be calm

• Be safe

• Be human

That might look like getting food, finding a quiet space, keeping things light, or just being there. It’s not about analysing, fixing, correcting, or coaching.

Love and support should not be conditional on performance.

When parents try to 'help' by talking tactics, technique, or outcomes on performance day, it often creates doubt – even when it comes from care.

During Preparation: Deliver the Environment, Not the Answers

Preparation is where parents play a critical role – just not in the way most think.

The role is to support the foundations, not solve the sport:

• Nutrition

• Hydration

• Sleep

• Recovery

• Logistics

• Balance

It’s also about emotional regulation – knowing when to listen, when to step back, and when to encourage the athlete to speak directly with their coach instead of fighting battles on their behalf.

One powerful rule many parents benefit from:

If you can’t talk about training by the time you get to the car, don’t talk about it at home.

Athletes need downtime to reset, not a post-session interrogation.

The Coach’s Role

On Performance Day: Don’t Pull the Athlete Back Into 'Student Mode'

One of the biggest performance killers is over-coaching at the wrong time.

When coaches correct, adjust, or overload athletes during performance, they often drag them out of performer mode and back into student mode – where doubt and overthinking live.

On performance day, the coach’s role is to:

• Answer specific questions if asked

• Support routines and structure

• Create calm and clarity

• Stay out of the athlete’s head

Correction teaches the athlete:

“You can’t trust yourself, you need me.”

Trust teaches:

“You’ve got this.”

During Preparation: Collaborate, Don’t Overwhelm

Preparation is where coaching matters most – but how information is delivered is everything.

Effective coaches:

• Share the right information at the right time

• Adjust their role as the athlete moves closer to performance

• Reduce volume and increase precision

• Ask questions instead of just giving answers

As competition approaches, coaching should shift from:

• Building → to polishing

• Teaching → to reinforcing

• Adding → to simplifying

If coaching doesn’t evolve with the athlete’s phase, it stops being fit for purpose.

The Athlete’s Role

On Performance Day: Execute What You Already Trust

The simplest, and hardest, truth for athletes:

Performance is not the time to learn something new.

If you need to 'figure it out' on the day, the issue isn’t the performance – it’s the preparation.

The athlete’s job on game day is execution:

• Follow the process

• Trust the system

• Stay in performer mode

The more complex the athlete makes performance, the further they drift from what they already know how to do.

During Preparation: Build Your Own System

Great preparation creates trust.

Athletes need a preparation system that works for them, not something borrowed from a coach, parent, or teammate. This includes:

• Identifying non-negotiables

• Knowing what they need (and what they don’t)

• Gradually shifting from student to performer mode

As performance approaches, the athlete should spend less time analysing and more time executing – until performance day becomes about doing, not thinking.

When Roles Are Clear, Performance Gets Simple

High performance environments don’t succeed because everyone does more.

They succeed because everyone does their job well.

• Parents support without controlling

• Coaches guide without smothering

• Athletes prepare thoroughly, then trust themselves

When roles are blurred, anxiety rises.
When roles are respected, confidence follows.

The Three Words That Matter Most

Before any major performance, I encourage everyone – athlete, coach, parent – to ask themselves:

Do I trust?
Do I believe?
Am I enjoying this?

If the answer is no, something in the role or the phase has been confused.

High performance isn’t about panic, control, or force.

It’s about clarity, trust, and execution.

Train smart.
Know your role.