Where Coaches Export Their Stress

Today’s blog is a reaction to this post, which I find ideal for the work we do with TeamsOfMen.

Why? Because of how often we as coaches tell our players to “leave your shit at the door” before practice. “Focus. Lock in. Don’t bring the day’s distractions into the gym.”

And yet, if we’re honest, we as coaches are often just as ill-equipped — and sometimes completely unable — to unload the stress we carry from the rest of our lives.

When that happens, it shows up.

It leaks out. It bleeds all over our players and our staff during practice. They witness it. They absorb it.

And they are expected to simply deal with it.

Meanwhile, the modeling they’re receiving is emotional dysregulation: pressure builds, emotions get stuffed down, and eventually they explode onto whoever happens to be closest.

Then those same players go out into their own lives and repeat the pattern.

And very often, as the post suggests, the people who receive that overflow are the women closest to them — the partners, sisters, friends, and family members they claim to love.

There is only so much “grit your teeth” and “stuff it down” a person can do before it bursts out of their soul in words or actions that harm others.

The answer isn’t pretending we don’t feel stress.

The answer is learning how to process it.

As coaches, that means seeking out pathways and tools that allow us to regulate our emotions instead of exporting them onto the people around us.

And when we do that work ourselves, we leave breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs our players can follow. Because they’re already watching how we handle our lives. The question is whether we’re showing them suppression…or growth.

Coach Prompts

• What stress are you carrying into your practices without realizing it?

• Do your players see you regulate emotions — or explode them?

• What tools do you personally use to process stress before it spills into your team environment?

Player Prompts

• What does it look like when someone brings their stress into the room?

• How do you usually deal with anger or frustration?

• Have you ever taken your bad day out on someone else?