The Inner Coach
What is an inner coach? It’s that ever present voice in our head letting us know what they think of what we’re doing. It shows up when it’s time to perform, it’s with us through every practice, it awaits us in every one of our training sessions. We all have an inner coach. Whether we’re high level athletes, weekend warriors, or an amateur showing up to the yoga mat. Our awareness and relationship with this voice determines how we experience our endeavors of exercise, development, play, and performance.
That voice develops over time and is informed by our past experiences. It’s heavily influenced by all the coaches, teachers, bosses, even teammates and colleagues we’ve had. When gone unchecked, we are open to adopting the dialog of these external inputs as more of an internal presence. We rarely control the superiors we get in life but we can control our relationship with ourselves, the voice within our head, and how we show up to be our own coach.
An important question to ask: is the coach I have the coach I need?
This type of inquiry requires a certain amount of self-awareness and mindfulness. I didn’t become aware of my inner coach till the very end of my hockey playing career. I was reading Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and oddly enough, it became the best sports psychology book I’d ever read. My early practice of mindfulness allowed me to start observing the entire stadium of shit talkers living rent free in my head with no one in my defense.
Awareness was the first valuable step. I remember lining up for face-offs beginning to hear voices criticize me and my play. I developed a simple practice in response to these negative voices. I would simply say to myself, “those thoughts aren’t mine.” It was enough to quiet the shitty inner coach or teammates in my head and create space to be in flow with a presence of mind. Less thinking, more playing.
This one simple mental hack helped me as much as anything in my playing career. I became aware of how much I stressed over the opinions of scouts, teammates, and coaches. Dropping that worry, quieting those voices, and trusting my abilities was a massive game changer. Not only did the experience of playing become more enjoyable but my performance improved with tangible stats to show for it.
Like many important lessons in life, I forgot about this one down the road. After retiring from hockey I was unmotivated about working out. I was no longer forced to train so I exercised every right not to. I watched slowly as I allowed my body to soften and eventually ache.
I eventually made my way back to training. I began working in fitness, studying it, and working as a trainer. I was fascinated by learning more about the body and mostly how to make it feel better. As much as I was learning and improving other people’s relationships with their bodies I was so inconsistent with my own training.
It took years to identify one of the root causes negatively affecting my consistency. Again a practice of mindfulness helped me recognize what was going on in my mind while I was training. It was not an inviting environment. Every rep was proof of how much my fitness level had declined. My inner coach was quick to point this out and my inner athlete felt defeated by the evidence. No wonder I avoided training, it wasn’t a safe place for my self-esteem. I realized how deep of a deterrent this was for me to get myself to train.
I was hard on myself as a player. If I had a bad game I trained harder and prepared more for the next one. If a coach was hard on me I responded with more intensity to prove him wrong. After hockey though, this approach was no longer cutting it. My inner coach barked the same way it always had, but at this stage my body began saying “no”.
My body had been through a lot. Years after retiring a functional MRI revealed the effects of everything my body had experienced. Countless sub-concussive events from decades of a contact sport, the trauma of a car accident many years ago, and no doubt some sub-optimal coping mechanisms on top of it all. It all made sense that my body and my brain were not responding well to the old ways of pushing it. At this next stage of my life, my system was asking for safety and care to heal.
I realized there was a clear difference between exercising to nourish the body and pushing to it’s limit like high level performance demands. I had to change my mindset towards exercise if I wanted my body to get on board with it.
The coach I had from the past was no longer the coach I needed moving forward. Once I was able to make this shift I began gaining some consistency. I started to feel better from exercise instead of beat down, it began feeling more like progress and less like punishment. Training looked quite different but it became something to look forward to and less something to dread. Some days a walk in the woods was the best thing for me. I began to accept the value of this type of activity rather than judge it as a waste of time. It allowed momentum to really shift in the right direction.
The inner coach of old would have told me this wasn’t intense enough for any results. What that coach didn’t consider was that I had a new opponent that required a different game plan. If I was going to respect what my body needed then this next chapter required progress that looked a little different. In many ways it didn’t “look” like anything at all. It was progress that was felt more than it was seen. So any coach who didn’t respect this new approach was no longer welcome on the bench in my head.
Like the small internal shift made years ago on the ice, this new mindset made the world of a difference. It helped me feel better. It repaired my relationship with exercise. It allowed me to benefit from a more caring approach to training my body. This all led to a significant improvement of my health and how I felt over a long period of time. I was able to return to levels of intensity that I used to think were necessary, without feeling trashed by them this time around.
Different times in my life called for different styles of self talk and inner dialogue. Necessary mindsets change all the time for everyone. Sometimes we need a drill sergeant in our ear, other times it’s important to be gentle with ourselves. The biggest mistake we can make is to unconsciously allow our inner coach to speak to us in ways that don’t serve us.
Rarely do we have control over who our coaches are in life. All the more critical that we do have awareness and choice of the coach that lives in our heads. The most important thing is to ask ourselves: is the coach I have the coach I need?
