“I make an impact daily!”
“I have such a huge influence with my players.”
“I touch many lives, year after year.”
“This is what I am meant to be doing.”
These are all things that have gone through my head to explain the amount of work I put into my coaching and the neglect for living my life. Impacting my player’s lives is so much more important to me. They have such bright futures and so many just need the right person to help them along the way and be in their corner. This is my calling, my purpose. To serve and be there for them when they need me. Does that mean that I don’t live my life? Yes, that’s what coaching is… Isn’t it?!?!
When I first began coaching, it was immediately after I finished playing. I was completely new to the profession and didn’t really know what to expect. So, naturally I listened to those who told me what to expect and had already begun experiencing it. Because of this, there was a time I was a coach that agreed with many that it is impossible to live a life outside of coaching college basketball. Like many others, I was taught that if I wanted to be a great coach, I must put in the time, grind, and basically think about basketball 24/7. We believe that if we don’t put in the time, someone else will - in which case we are setting ourselves and our team up for failure.
Our season, our job, our livelihood depends on us putting in the time to be the best we can be, which results in us attempting to spend every waking hour (and often into sleep time) thinking about how we can be better coaches. We watch others and strive to be coaches who live and die on basketball - the next play, the previous game, and all the “could have”, “should have”, “would haves” are constantly running through our minds. We fall into this cycle of making our lives revolve endlessly around the game, our team, and back-to-back clinics (virtual these days).
At first this may work for you - mostly because you may not know any different, which isn’t anything to beat yourself up about. It seems that this is just the way of the profession, especially at the collegiate level. For me this worked… until it didn’t. I wanted to live life. I wanted to coach at the college level. I wasn’t willing to give up one for the other. I didn’t know how it would work and I didn’t know exactly how it looked at the time. What I did know is that working tirelessly without a personal life was not enjoyable. The reasons we as humans normally carry a job is to provide for our families and be able to live. Yet this gets pushed to the side as a coach. We are able to bring the paycheck home but we lose the life living aspect along the way, because we are so busy trying to be great coaches and impact those who have trusted us to do so.
One question I ask all the coaches I work with, and I want to ask you this too.
Are you LIVING or are you EXISTING?
We are blessed to be able to impact those that we do, but this doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our own living in order to do so. We can do both - AND I’ll let you in on a little secret. When you start living and not existing, you will have the ability to impact those around you in a way like never before. You will be an example of what is possible.
It took me nearly 10 years to believe that it is possible to truly live life and be a college basketball coach. If you want to start living life today, I would love to talk to you personally during a free mini session. Please click here to get started.
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