One of my new year’s resolutions for 2017 was to improve my work\/life balance.\u00a0 To my surprise, it has been going pretty well — in the past, work\u00a0has had\u00a0a nasty habit of creeping into the rest of my life (I have regularly had emails and reports\u00a0plaguing my evenings and weekends!), but 2017 has been good so far.<\/p>\n
Yet\u00a0over the past week, I’ve had the odd experience of the work\/life balance going in the opposite direction:\u00a0 the rest of my life creeping into my work!\u00a0 I don’t mean the\u00a0usual\u00a0story of developmental psychologists sometimes learning more about child development from their everyday experience of family life than from their academic research.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s a familiar experience and fairly standard stuff (though probably worth another blog post at some point)!<\/p>\n
No, actually, this was quite different. It started last weekend, when I attended the Baseball Softball UK Coach Summit 2017<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 I grew up playing baseball in Japan and over the last five years have been coaching youth baseball in Sussex<\/a><\/span>\u00a0as part of the growing community of baseball clubs in the UK.\u00a0 Last weekend brought\u00a0an opportunity to learn from some of the most experienced baseball and softball coaches in the world, and to watch them running a session with the youth players in the High Performance Academy<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n I went in expecting a weekend of top-notch baseball, and I certainly got that. But what surprised me, as I took notes throughout the weekend, was the gradual recognition that what I spend most of my time researching in my work is linked — not just in general terms, but specifically<\/em> and directly <\/em>— to the dynamics of sports teams.\u00a0 And I mean sports at every\u00a0level, from fun team sports activities with the youngest children right through to professional sports where teams draw enormous crowds and TV audiences.<\/p>\n Of course, I shouldn’t really be surprised.\u00a0 After all, sport and exercise psychology<\/a><\/span> is a well-established field with prominent researchers and applied practitioners who have worked for decades at the interface of\u00a0motivation and athletic performance.\u00a0 But during the Coach Summit, I just kept finding close connections between the specific things I work on and what these visiting coaches operating at the top level of their sports were saying.<\/p>\n Some of the links were very explicit.\u00a0 “Psychology” must have been one of the most frequently heard words that weekend, as coaches talked about how the mental game was as important, if not more important, than the physical or technical game.\u00a0 There was also a strong emphasis (as in so many other domains, like schools) on grit<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and growth mindsets<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n But that was the first point where I began to realise I was getting more from talking about this in sports than I have done from the innumerable meetings I’ve been to on these topics in schools. And that’s because it was just so obvious that the coaches were talking about changing the environment<\/em>, rather than the players<\/em> themselves.<\/p>\n I’ve been frustrated by the way that so\u00a0much\u00a0I hear about ‘character’ these days treats it as an attribute of the person\u00a0in a vacuum, like it’s just a property of the individual.\u00a0 And of course it’s not –\u00a0it’s actually something that develops in a particular set of social contexts, or more specifically\u00a0in a particular network of relationships.<\/p>\n So, ironically, we often adopt a ‘fixed’ view of things like character, resilience, and even\u00a0the\u00a0growth mindset itself.\u00a0 But what the coaches were talking about last weekend was how all of these come out of the environments that are created for and with\u00a0players:\u00a0 the way\u00a0coaches behave, the way they give feedback, and the way they respond to\u00a0mistakes and poor performances as well as the big wins.<\/p>\n I love the fact that it was so obvious to everyone that we can’t just tell<\/em> kids to develop a growth mindset, have more grit,\u00a0or be resilient.\u00a0 We need to create the conditions to support those things, even when\u00a0— or maybe especially when — there is unbelievable\u00a0pressure on performance outcomes.<\/p>\n When it comes to professional athletes looking to advance to or stay in the big leagues, the personal\u00a0stakes are so high — more even than, dare I say it,\u00a0school league tables.\u00a0Yet what I heard time\u00a0and time again was\u00a0an emphasis on the process, not on the outcome. The mantra was\u00a0effort, learning, and progress —\u00a0not showing that you are better than others:\u00a0 “stop trying to prove<\/em> yourself, start trying to im<\/em>prove yourself”.\u00a0 That should sound strikingly familiar to those of us working in educational psychology – anyone for a bit of achievement goal theory<\/a><\/span>?<\/p>\n And there were so many other connections that weren’t highlighted explicitly, but came through implicitly in everything the coaches were saying.\u00a0 The emphasis on how players can be supported to take ‘ownership’, on strategies to build team cohesion, and on ‘hunting the good’…?\u00a0 It could almost be a step-by-step guide to supporting the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence in self-determination theory<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n I was also surprised to find many references to the challenges of coaching children, teens, and young adults in a rapidly changing world.\u00a0 My notes include lots of scribbled arrows linking what the coaches were saying to our work on\u00a0consumer culture<\/a><\/span>, mental health and well-being in youths<\/a><\/span>, and even mindfulness<\/a>\u00a0(there was a\u00a0deceptively simple emphasis on mindful breathing\u00a0at the highest level of sports).<\/p>\n I was really struck by the key messages with which the coaches ended the event.\u00a0 The recap drew my attention to the importance of effort, respecting individuals’ autonomy, and self-improvement (including the Pirates’ translation of the Japanese concept of ‘kaizen’ into a continuous cycle of improvement, even if it’s\u00a0one-tenth of one percent every day).\u00a0 But one of the final interactions\u00a0at the Coach Summit triggered another connection with our ongoing work with young people:\u00a0 when asked what really makes the difference in coaching athletes,\u00a0one of the coaches responded, simply, be kind<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With thanks for a great weekend to all at BaseballSoftballUK, and the fantastic coaches who shared their experience and wisdom:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my new year’s resolutions for 2017 was to improve my work\/life balance.\u00a0 To my surprise, it has been going pretty well — in the past, work\u00a0has had\u00a0a nasty habit of creeping into the rest of my life (I…<\/span><\/p>\n\n