Love Tough

Recently I read Dear Coach by Sara Erdner and How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Even though these two books had different messages, they shared the same theme, improving and understanding your relationships with others. One big takeaway that I took was often when coaches preach “tough love,” they often forget the “love” part and only use the “tough” part. This absence can be detrimental to the environment it may create within your team and how your team perceives you.

Dear Coach is a compilation of letters from athletes to coaches that allows insight into successful and failed relationships. A common theme amongst the letters written to negative coaches was that they did not care and only viewed athletes as a means to keep their job. The coach never considered that these athletes are people outside of sport, with feelings and coming to age problems. However, all the letters to positive coaches were that they did more than coach sport, but they also coached life. These coaches became supports for their athletes, which allowed buy-in and for the coach to push them harder than before. These coaches loved tough.

Dale Carnegie describes in How to Win Friends & Influence People two crucial principles: “praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement” and “Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct”. As a strength coach, we constantly challenge our athletes in the weight room to get lower on a squat, be powerful through a movement, or go up in weight. But this all happens in a one-hour time block, three times a week. That means there are 165 hours in the week that we cannot witness and do not know what happens. Getting lower on that squat may be the hardest thing that an athlete must do that day for many reasons. However, that athlete is still there; doing the work and getting lower is easy to fix. Then, when they do it, there should be an equal level of praise as there is effort.

Loving tough is about showing athletes that you care, that you want to see them succeed, which creates buy-in. Once the buy-in is there, you can push their limits and be tough because they know it is rooted in love and support. Through the new perspective from Dear Coach and principles from How to Win Friends & Influence People, I try to create that kind of support every day with my athletes. Whether it be applauding a technique change or as simple as ending all my sessions or communications with “I am here for you if you need me.”