Formulating coaching philosophy: self-awareness, esteem, and disclosure

Coaching Philosophy

Every coach would like to be a successful coach and that is the main target of each coach as they go about their coaching business each day. They all want to be a coach who wins, one who relates well with the athletes, one who motivates the players, one who knows how to recruit successfully, one with good financial support, with a strong work ethics, one who has the right equipment and most of all good knowledge of the sport.

Aspects of formulating coaching philosophy

The coach will have to take into account three main aspects or guiding principles when formulating the coaching philosophy that will enable him to operate successfully over a long period of time.

Self-awareness; this simply implies knowing self and can be achieved through getting the feedback from peers, sufficiently understanding the real self, the ideal self and the public self and how these three are the commonly tested hence used means of knowing self or self-awareness. This self-awareness will allow the coach to evaluate own beliefs and assumptions hence while constructing the coaching philosophy or drafting any schedules, the coach will be critical enough to come up with relevant material that will significantly contribute to the practice of the coach in the given sports.

Self-esteem; this is referred to as the way one look at his inner being as and individual and the value that they attach to it. It is how an individual feel competent and worth a position. This is indeed important for the coach since communicating messages full of positivity to the players will certainly boost their confidence. This can only be achieved if the coach is of high self-esteem and if he focuses his worth on winning a game, then the players will adapt the same attitude hence the coach will use inner confidence to inspire confidence in this surrounding him. It also shows that how the coach relates to himself is the very same way he will relate to others, hence having a high self-esteem is very significant for his career as a coach and even when coming up with coaching philosophies.

Self-disclosure; this is the outward expression of feelings and thoughts hence vey central in coming up with coaching philosophies and working with the team. The self-disclosure of the coach is manifest in the way he interacts with the team and the way he creates bonds that are based on trust and honesty. There is need to know what to share with the team and those should be the issues that will increase team spirit and positive thinking in the team. The self-disclosure is mostly expressed through what he does rather than says hence it is a very significant concept that is capable of building the coaching career of an individual or break it if not well handled.

External influences on the coach's philosophy

Every coach has a scripted out training philosophy and schedule that they use in the management of their teams. The philosophies are often written down and followed almost to the letter in order to provide consistency within the team. However, there are external factors that intervene in the philosophy drafted our by coaches and most of the time these external factors are inevitable and cannot be changed. One such common external factor is the aspect of time, in relation to the changes or differences in time zone especially when the team travels far off from their home training ground for a match. When the team travels westerly or easterly and crosses various time zones, they either gain or lose hours. The consequence of this change in time is a significant upset to the body system and functions especially those that are time linked for instance eating time, sleeping time, waking up and the bladder and bowel functions. This often challenges the coaches since they may not be able to have the practices as scheduled bearing the fact that individual players will react differently to the time differences hence it can be hard to have an accurate and comprehensive training philosophy for outside events.