Coaching Keeping the Unique Relationship:

Coaching

Keeping the Unique Relationship: Coaching

Like teachers, coaches are often some of the most influential people in the lives of students, athletes, and competitors. Taken outside of the home, authority manifests itself in a new way -- not on a soapbox preaching while simultaneously requiring a chore and punishing one for the last one left undone -- but with compassion, motivation, and the backdrop of an event that one enjoys. While this unique relationship is of extreme value in most everyone's lives, achieving the trust and motivation required in a coaching relationship is not easy. Furthermore, a successful coaching relationship focuses both on the subject as well as the sport or event, combining a self-motivation with a desire for glory in order to achieve maximum performance. By exploring how coaches establish and maintain relationships, set goals, and communicate with competitors, the reader will have a better understanding of this complex relationship and its implications for the world of sport and competition along with personal development.

Understanding how coaches build and maintain relationships is the first step to understanding why this particular relationship is so important. While Megginson and Clutterbuck define coaching and mentoring as two different practices, they suggest that "the skills of mentor and coach overlap to some extent" (4). Thus, while these authors describe mentoring as dealing with the "whole person," while coaching is goal oriented, seeking to better a performance on a specific point, it is not difficult to understand how coaches can quickly become mentors and goal-oriented instruction can quickly become holistic (4). In fact, this is how the best coaching relationships are established. The coach is expected to play the role of teacher, while the student plays the role of learner. But the teacher and the learner must usually get along well, as well as a mutual understanding of the reason for the relationship and relationship boundaries in order to establish a successful coaching relationship (Megginson and Clutterbuck 18). (Megginson and Clutterbuck use the terms "teacher" and "learner" for the coach and his or her student, and these are the terms that I will continue to use in this paper.) Furthermore, trust is essential in building and maintaining a successful coaching relationship, as teachers will be assessing learners' strengths and weaknesses almost immediately. In order to keep learners at a relatively high self-esteem, a requirement for those who want to continue to learn and grow, according to Maslow (Huitt).

Once a relationship has been established, it is important that the task of improvement (coaching) begin. Because coaching is rather performance specific (Megginson and Clutterbuck 4), it is important to set goals rather early in the relationship. This not only allows the teacher and learner to establish a professional and organized relationship, but it also serves a variety of other purposes. For example, goals allow students to feel as if they are accomplishing something at a rather accelerated pace. While much coaching takes place over a long length of time and it is difficult to see the results in a timely fashion, goals allow learners to avoid the discouragement involved without seeing immediate accomplishments. In fact, one of the barriers to the setting of coals is that learners feel as if they are not accomplishing them. Overcoming this barrier, however, is relatively simple. For instance, Taekwando is a sport that involves those from a variety of age groups and backgrounds. Attaining the skills to be proficient in the sport takes a great time commitment, but because the skills are broken down into belt levels, students see their accomplishments in a timely manner and are often motivated to continue. In addition to organization and motivation, goals can be used for measurement purposes, determining, amongst other progress, if the learner has achieved the goal or needs more work. For this reason, it is important not only for the coach to set goals, but for the learner to explore and discuss his or her own goals. As Meginson and Clutterbuck suggest that "the best learning often takes place on the edge of what is known and accepted," or near the "discomfort zone" it is important to have the learner discuss his or her goals to determine why he or she is being lead to an uncomfortable place (24).