How Can You Turn Coaching Stress into Your Competitive Edge?

Coaches juggle stress on two levels: managing athletes’ stress so they don’t burn out or underperform and managing their own stress so they can lead well and avoid burnout themselves.

To do both, coaches need to understand how stress works, as well as how to make it work for them and their teams.

Here, board-certified family physician and TrueSport Expert Deborah Gilboa, MD, shares how coaches can turn stress—for themselves and their athletes—into a competitive edge.

Reframe stress as a tool

Stress isn’t necessarily negative or positive, but it is powerful. Gilboa suggests seeing stress as a physiologic tool. “We don’t want to pretend that stress feels good,” says Gilboa. “But we are saying that you can use stress to get better and get more of the life you want. Your athletes being stressed is not evidence that you're a bad coach. You being stressed does not mean that you’re failing at something.”

“Stress is real. Stress is often hard,” says Gilboa. “But stress is not a toxin. It's a tool that's incredibly valuable. Without stress, we would have no motivation or drive.” Moving through stress grows resilience—the ability to navigate through setbacks—and resilience is key to performance and overall health and well-being.​

Know your optimal stress range

People need some stress to grow and thrive, but only within an optimal range. Too little and you stagnate; too much and stress becomes paralyzing or harmful. Gilboa likens stress to water: Having too little or too much can be deadly, but there’s a wide range that keeps us alive and a smaller range that keeps us healthy.​

“The same is true of stress: You can survive a truly ridiculous amount of stress, and that's your physiologic range,” she says. “But you have an optimal range in the middle, where your stresses are keeping you focused on the things that matter most to you, and helping you move towards the life you want. When you’re in your optimal range, you’re able to pay attention to what matters most to you, knock stuff off your to-do list, perform at practice, and have important conversations. That’s enough stress that you’re motivated and driven, but not so much that it hurts your efforts. That is the range that we want to stay in for ourselves and our athletes.”

Use stress as a signal

Stress should cause you to pause and assess, not panic. “When you're stressed, that should simply remind you to pause and evaluate your current situation,” says Gilboa. “I recommend asking two questions about things that are causing stress. Ask yourself: Is the thing avoidable or unavoidable? Is the thing useful or useless?”​

If it’s unavoidable or useful, you know you need to deal with it. If it’s avoidable, then you have more choice than you may realize. And if it’s useless, you can work on letting it go. This same simple framework can be powerful for athletes, helping them reclaim ownership of stressful school, sport, or relationship situations. And if your athlete thinks that they’re stressed, believe them, even if you don’t understand the reason.

Watch for yellow flags

Coaches are quick to spot “red flags” that signal an athlete is stressed, such as an athlete storming out of practice. But there are also yellow flags, including irritability, snapping at teammates, showing up late or unprepared, or shifts in social behavior. It’s important to recognize those yellow flags and know that every athlete’s signs will look a bit different. Be sure to notice your own yellow flags, too, so you can recognize when you’re edging toward the top of your optimal range for stress.​

And remember, paying attention doesn’t mean quickly removing every stressor. “It is not your job to keep your athletes within their optimal range of stress,” Gilboa says. “But it is your job to help them recognize when things are pushing them out of that range and start to develop strategies to handle that themselves.” For example, you can’t prevent bad referee calls, but you can coach athletes to handle them better, so they don’t lose control or get ejected. “One of the reasons that it's not a coach's job or a parent's job to keep kids in their optimal range of stress is that stress is a feeling, and you can't actually control how people feel,” she adds.