Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is a dose of mental goodness. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle. In this episode 45, we're going to look at the role and the evolving role of the coach and when's the right time to upgrade. Now, when we look at the career of an athlete, it can span anything from 10 to 20, sometimes even more years, often starting when the athlete is really young. And when we start our careers, irrespective of the sport we're in, we've got to start at the beginning, the foundations. The coach that we employ to do that role needs to have a certain skill set. They need to be the right coach to bring out the right things in those athletes at a young age. They've to have that skill set of the foundations, building the very strong, very familiar, and very reliable foundations to build an athlete's career upon. However, when we move into the more elite and professional end of the sport, the skill set of the coach needs to change.
More often than not, the same coach that works with you as a child or works with you when you start building that foundation, isn't the same coach that takes you into your elite or professional career. Why is that? And why can that transitional period be such a critical and also very emotional time for all involved? Now, I want to tell you I'll tell a quick story. I was approached about 18 months ago by a very talented athlete and her parents about moving the athlete from elite into professional sport. Now, when they They came to me, they said the biggest issues they were having were consistency. And when they went to compete, the way that this athlete was training wasn't transcribing into the way that they competed. So they employed my services to come along and look at and watch and understand what we could do differently to get that athlete to perform more consistently. I watched the athlete train, I watched the athlete prepare, and I watched the athlete compete. And when I sat the parents and the athlete down, I said to them, In reality, the majority of what you are doing is already correct.
You're doing a great job. Your preparation is consistent. When you come to competition, you're in the right mindset. You're switching yourself on at the right times. And when you compete, you're going out there and you're competing in the right format. So the parents turned around and said to me, Okay, so why isn't she taking that final step and moving into professional sport? Why is she not being selected consistently? So we decided to dig a little bit deeper. And as I began to dig deeper, I started to speak to more people around the athlete. I spoke to the coach, I spoke to the support specialists, the chiropractors, the physiotherapists, everybody, the nutritionists, everybody that was involved in this young athlete's career. I spoke to her teachers, I spoke to her parents and her friends and her peers from training. And the one consistent feedback that I got was she doesn't have that professional mental approach. So I sat down with the athlete again and we decided to go through her structure, how she viewed her structure, not necessarily the practicalities or the physicality of her structure, but what she thought about when she was doing her structure.
And people were right. What was missing was that professional elite mindset. When we traced it back, it came all the way back to the mindset that the coach had, this same coach that had been coaching her since she was five years old. There was nothing wrong with that mindset as an amateur, but it wasn't the right mindset as an elite athlete. Don't get me wrong, this coach, this older lady, was the ideal coach If my child was going into that sport, she's the coach I take my child to because she's nurturing, she's motherly, she made it fun. She did everything that you'd want as a parent for your young child to be involved in a sport. She made it safe. She made it a great environment. These kids never wanted to leave. But what she was lacking was the professional end of that elite sport. So I sat down with the parents I said, Okay, this is what needs to happen. When your daughter was a young athlete, these are the things that she needed, and you gave her that right environment. You gave her that coach that nurtured her through that. You gave her an environment that made her feel supported and familiar and comfortable.
Now that she wants to go into the elite end, there's some new skill sets that need to be added to that. Unfortunately, this great foundation coach doesn't have that skillset, so you're going to have to move on. This wasn't greeted particularly well. The athlete didn't want to leave the coach. The parents didn't want to turn their back on this coach who'd been there since his child was five years old. And that was never the intention. That was never like, let's cut this coach out of your life. It was, we need to add to this skillset. Unfortunately, this coach doesn't have the skillset that you need to move into the elite world. Well, as I say, that was 18 months ago, and those parents and athletes thank me for my advice and walked away. Two months ago, they came back to me and they said, Okay, we realise what we need. We understand that what our child needs to move into the elite world isn't what this coach has. We are now prepared to make that change. How do we do it? So What this tells me, and should tell you too, that it's not always an easy transition.
Don't get me wrong, some athletes change their coaches more frequently than they change their undies. But some athletes just hold on to that past, hold on to that relationship that they have with that coach and won't let go. This is not a personal thing. This is a practicality. This is a skill set that needs to be added. You wouldn't go to your nutritionist and say, You know what? I know I need to be eating more of my greens, but I want to stick with my chocolate because it makes me feel good. You would know that doing that isn't going to give you your outcome that you're after. And reality is this is no different. So we sat down with the athlete and we sat down with the parents and we said, how do we transition from the nurture coach, foundation coach, into the elite coach world? And we decided to have an integration, to employ both coaches for short period of time and then have them transition and almost like a job share for a period of time. I sat down with the old foundation coach and explained what they had done for the athlete, how they'd built foundations that would have been ideal for them to launch their career off of, and what was needed for them to go to the next step.
And the coach recognised that they didn't have that skillset. They weren't that precise. They weren't that consistent. They were their more emotional support and emotional foundations. In actual fact, the coach was quite okay about it. It was just the athlete and the parents that used it as an emotional anchor to stay to the past. Once that coach had recognised it and almost given their blessing for this athlete to move forward, the transition was very effective and very efficient. That athlete moved on to the next coaching phase in their career and were instantly more professional when they went out and competed. They've since been selected, and the reality was the only thing that was holding them back wasn't skill set. It wasn't their ability to do the sport. It wasn't whether they were or were not elite material. It was them not willing to put the right team around them at the right time. I've talked before about building your team around you and how that's an evolving process, consistently changing. As you grow as an athlete, the people that you need around you need to change. When you're a beginner or when you're in the early foundation years of your sport, you probably don't need an elite coach telling you specifics.
What you need is somebody to make you feel good about what you're doing, to make you feel supported in that familiar area. When you walk in there, you're willing to learn, you're open to learn. Those coaches are critical for the early years. And they have a very specific and very key role to play in getting Bums on mats, making sure that there's that large number of athletes coming through the system that feel as they're learning, feel that they're enjoying what they're doing so that the few real elite athletes can pop out the top and move through the process to the next coaching phase and then onto the elite professional, those kinds of spheres. So if you're coaching, you're listening to this, it's critical for you to understand what is your skill set? Are you the foundation coach? Are you the elite coach? Or are you those very, very few coaches that can do all of them? And if you can, where do you prefer to work? If When you're an athlete, it's time for you to recognise who do you need in your entourage team. Who are the people specifically working for you to get your best out of your career?
Are they the right people at the right time? Are you holding on to the past, wanting them to take them along with you, but they're not giving you what you need at the right time? Or are you striving too far forward, too early, and looking for that elite coach when your foundations are not yet solid enough? As a parent, when you're there to support your child and that athlete, emotionally, part of your role is to keep that ability to look at it in perspective and context and look at who do we need to put around them at the right time. Because ultimately, you're the one paying the bills. You're the one paying for the right coaching staff at the right time. So when's the right time to upgrade your coaching? When it's the right time for the athlete, so just before they need it. So the integration process should be happening. So when you need that specific coach, they're already integrated into your environment. You know them, you have a relationship with system. They're working towards you. They have a commonality and a common goal. They need to work hand in hand with the foundation coach, the coach that's been there since the athlete was very young, and have that handover process.
And it needs to work amicably. It's not about leaving someone behind. It's about moving through the system that best works for that athlete, keeping the relationship. If you have to move the foundation coaching to a different role, be it a mentor, be it a friend, just be it a supporter, then that needs to happen so that everybody works together. The athlete feels as though they're ethical and in the way they're doing what they're doing. Nobody wants to work with a coach that they have a great relationship with, and then in the back of their mind, think, at some time, I've got to drop you. We just need to put them in the right role at the right time. Time, and sometimes that role changes. So as a team, sit back and look at your career. What do you need right now? What will you need in 3, 6, and 12 months time? How do you begin to select the right people for you? How do you begin to integrate those people? How do you work through that handover process? All of these questions are structured approaches to your career. All of these questions enable you to select the right people and put the right people around you at the right times.
All of these questions are questions that should be in the back of your mind every single time that you interact with people, be it that your coach, your future coaches, your support specialists, even your parents. If we think about your career as a business, it's important to put the right people in your business. I hope you find this information not only informative, but it's critical to you and your career. Hope you've enjoyed listening to this and get some great perspective on how you integrate coaching. I look forward to working with you on the next episode of Brain in the Game. And until then, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
