Helping Players Sit With Discomfort
“This is uncomfortable, not dangerous.”
I LOVE THIS from an IG post by @health_anxiety that came across my feed last week.
Not just because I’m someone who has long dealt with a raging, unending health anxiety (show me a tv show with a character suffering an ailment, and I’ll be convinced I have it in under 3 minutes), but also because I think it captures something much bigger about the way we experience everyday life.
Whether it be in sports, our professional lives, or our roles at home, we're going to be bombarded with uncomfortable moments. Hopefully, true danger is something we experience only rarely. But discomfort? That's simply part of being alive.
As coaches, we're already comfortable teaching this in athletics. We ask our players to embrace discomfort in conditioning, the weight room, skill development, and close games because we know that's where growth happens. Where I think we often fall short is helping them recognize that the same principle applies away from competition. Discomfort during a hard conversation, while receiving accountability, or while challenging a belief we've always held can be just as necessary for growth as another sprint or another set in the weight room.
Too often we let our players—and ourselves—escape those moments. We walk away from the sexist joke because confronting it feels awkward. We ignore the racist framing because we don't want to make the room uncomfortable. We let a disrespectful comment slide because speaking up feels harder than staying quiet.
But that's exactly the point. If we want young men to grow, we have to help them understand that feeling uncomfortable isn't automatically a sign something is wrong. Sometimes it's a sign that an old belief, habit, or assumption is being challenged. They'll willingly change how they run a route, shoot a basketball, or attack a full-count fastball because they believe improvement is worth the temporary discomfort. Our job is to help them develop that same mindset when it comes to becoming better teammates, partners, fathers, and men.
One more reason I wanted to share this full carousel of images: It is built around sentences your guys can use to calm themselves in moments of anxiety. FANTASTIC resource to allow us to have more tools to offer than just “Hey, calm down.” Most athletes already know they should calm down. Very few have ever been taught how.
Coach Prompts
Where do you intentionally teach your players to embrace discomfort outside of practices and games?
What conversations does your team tend to avoid because they feel awkward rather than unsafe?
How do you help athletes distinguish between situations that are genuinely dangerous and those that are simply uncomfortable?
Player Prompts
When was the last time you avoided doing the right thing because it felt uncomfortable?
What's one conversation you've been putting off that probably isn't dangerous—just difficult?
Why do you think growth so often begins with feeling uncomfortable before it feels rewarding?
Run Your Program's System Audit: You wouldn't let your team play a game without a scouting report, yet most athletic programs leave their decision systems entirely to chance.
If today's post made you wonder what invisible scripts are running through your own locker room or athletic department, don't guess.
Click here to run a quick Decision Confidence Analysis (DeCA) and see where your program is reinforcing health decision-making…and where hidden gaps may exist.
