Articles > Sports Psychology
01-Aug-2007
Issue: 19.05 August/September 2007
Leadership
What, Me Worry?
If you’re like most athletic directors, stress is a part of your job. But unlike most, this author has developed specific strategies to keep it at bay.
By Brian Cain
Brian Cain, CAA, is Athletic Director at Mt. Mansfield Union High School in Jericho, Vt., and the former Athletic Director at North Country Union High School in Newport, Vt. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Applied Sport Psychology at the University of Vermont and a "Peak Performance" coach. He can be reached at: brian@briancain.com.
You walk into your office on Monday morning, and as usual, the red light on your phone is blinking away, indicating you have messages. Maybe a coach wants to update you on a project. Maybe the booster club president has good news about the weekend’s fundraiser. Maybe someone wants to thank you for the long hours you put in for the athletic program.
You snap back to reality and take a deep breath. Most likely there’s a complaint from someone about your program waiting. Or there’s a message about a bus cancellation for the big road game that afternoon, or a coach who forgot to do something. Odds are good that, no matter how many messages are waiting, at least one of them will get the stress ball rolling for the day.
Being an athletic director means dealing with unexpected situations, problems, and complaints, which can easily lead to stress. How we handle that stress is often the key to surviving and thriving in this career.
WHAT IS STRESS?
Stress is an emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences. It is capable of affecting physical health by prompting an increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability, or
depression.
In the field of athletic administration, the most important thing to understand about stress is that your response to a situation dictates the level of stress you experience. I cannot stress you out. You let me stress you out. A situation does not dictate stress, but the reaction we choose to have to a situation can bring on the rapid heart beat and headache. A formula I use is E+R=O: The event plus your response determines the outcome.
Here’s another key point: The degree to which you allow stress to affect you is directly related to the amount of responsibility you choose to take on. If a parent calls to say she
thinks hazing may be occurring on the varsity soccer team, you can choose to ignore the parent’s warning and throw all the stress that may accompany it out the window. But that, of course, is not taking any responsibility.
If, instead, you realize that a hazing incident presents a dangerous situation for your student-athletes, with possible legal ramifications, you will likely feel stressed out. That’s okay. You are taking responsibility for a situation, and that is your job.
The trick, then, is to understand how stress affects you as an individual and learn how to manage it. You can’t ignore the fact that difficult situations arrive at your office daily, but you can work on developing responses that lower your anxiety. With practice, you can learn to turn stressful moments into another routine part of your job as an athletic administrator.
RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT
The first step in handling stress is learning how to control your reactions. You have to be in control of yourself before you can control your performance. If you let things get under your skin, you are letting your stress guard down and opening yourself to a knockout punch. Self-control in adverse situations is what separates great leaders from
good ones.
To control yourself, you need to recognize the signs that stress is building up. These can vary from person to person. Many people will feel hot, get sweaty palms, feel some tension in the lower back or neck, or become short-tempered with others.
Take some time to notice what you do when you feel stressed. If you can recognize your own signs, you can stop and de-stress before moving forward. Once you can realize that you are spiraling out of control, you can stop spinning before making a poor decision.
One method I’ve found helpful for recognizing stress is to think of it as approaching a stoplight while driving a car. When you come to a green light, you simply stay on the gas and keep moving forward. In our jobs as athletic directors, when things are going fine and we are crossing things off our to-do list, we’re in a green light mode—our heart rate is slow and steady, our muscles are relaxed, and we feel good.
When you’re behind the wheel and come to a yellow light, you either slow down or speed up depending on the situation, but you have to think before you act. On the job, when you have yellow lights such as a late official or bus that doesn’t show up, you have to slow down and recognize the situation is out of the norm. During yellow lights, our heart rate may pick up speed, our muscles are a little tense, or we may feel some anxiety or irritability creeping in.
If you panic at the sight of a yellow light and react out of emotion, you let stress take over. In a car, you might slam the brakes too hard or end up running a red light. As an
athletic director, you might get mad, make a rash decision, or simply elevate stress levels unnecessarily.
Red light behind the wheel? You better stop. A red light situation in your job is also a signal to stop so you can de-stress before you do anything else. Signs of being in red- light mode include sweating, a racing heart, a clenched jaw, or a general feeling of being out of control.
I actually place signal light stickers on my phone and computer that serve as reminders for me to check my internal traffic lights. I always want to be acutely aware of whether I’m in green, yellow, or red light mode. And when I am in yellow or red, I will not answer the phone or respond to e-mails—it usually ends up being counter-productive.
So how exactly do you deal with the stress of being in a red-light situation? I encourage people to develop routines they can use to let things go. For example, when I feel
myself getting into yellow or red lights, I will leave my office for a quick 30- to 60-second walk down the hall or outside the building to escape. When I get back, I decide if something needs to be done immediately about the stressful situation. If it requires a quick phone call, I make it. But if a situation can wait until I have more time to think about it, I add it to my to-do list as something to tackle later in the day.
Then, I symbolically erase the stress from my mind. I have a box of baby wipes I keep in my office just for this purpose. I take out a baby wipe, clean my hands, and throw the wipe away. With that physical motion, I throw away the red light tension I was dealing with earlier.
Another way I handle stress is to try to channel it into a positive action. When I’m in a red-light mode, I’ll sometimes exercise or socialize with our student-athletes. For me, those are both great ways to take a step back and release tension.
The key is to be aware of the situations that put you in yellow or red lights, how you feel when you get there, and how to release the anxiety. If you are aware that you are in yellow or red lights, you can then go through a routine to relieve the stress and get back to green.
LEARN TO LET GO
Another key is to quickly understand what is in your control and what is not—and to quickly release the stress that comes from things you can’t control. If you let things you can’t change affect you in a negative way, you are just spinning your wheels and getting
nowhere.
Mickey Rivers, the former New York Yankees outfielder, made one of the best statements I have ever heard about how to deal with stress: "If you have no control over something, ain’t no sense worrying about it —you have no control over it anyway. If you do have control, why worry? So either way, there ain’t no sense worrying."
So how about situations that are only partially in your control? Like when you present a flawless argument to your school board about the need for an athletic trainer and they still turn down funding for this position? Or when you hire a coach with a great track record and solid references, and he or she ends up making several poor decisions?
In these instances, I suggest trying to look at the outcomes as constructive feedback. Instead of thinking that the school board’s no vote is a failure on your part (or their’s), analyze what you might have done differently throughout the whole process. Maybe it wasn’t your facts, but how you presented the information. In the case of a coach making poor decisions, maybe it isn’t your hiring process that’s the problem, but your new
coach orientation program.
And sometimes, you just have to accept that something simply didn’t go well, even though you did the absolute best job you could. Being a mid-level manager can make us feel like we have no control. But we actually do. If you did your part and something happens that’s outside of your control, have the confidence to let it go and not take it personally.
TOUGH DECISIONS
Obviously, the most stressful situations arise when you have to make difficult decisions. This past winter, I had to help make a tough call about our boys’ ice hockey team, which is one of our most popular sports. Team members had received three ejections during the season, and we decided to bar the squad from the postseason tournament because
of poor sportsmanship.
Immediately, I received a lot of heat for that decision. There were hate e-mails and phone calls and negative letters to the editor in our local newspaper. Parents accused me of ruining their sons’ senior year of high school.
My strategy for handling the stress from the incident was to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Before we announced the decision, I thought about the negative repercussions. I visualized how I would react to any newspaper articles, e-mails, and phone calls. I visualized myself staying in the green-light zone and maintaining my self- control, even when angry parents, community members, and students confronted me.
I used the signal light stickers on my phone and computer to remind myself not to respond to any e-mails or answer the phone if I was in a yellow or red light. And after I finished a conversation or e-mail about the situation, I used my baby wipes to wash away my stress before moving on to another task.
For me, the true measure of how you are performing is the mirror test: Are you pleased with what you see when you look in the mirror? I have a mirror in my office and I constantly ask kids to look at themselves in the glass and tell me what they see. Do
they see someone who is telling the truth and living a life of no regrets, or someone who is holding back? I used the mirror test on myself a lot last winter after the ice hockey
decision. Ultimately, I found it was an opportunity for me to walk the walk and set an example for my coaches and peers as to how to react in a hostile situation.
I also learned that, as an athletic administrator, with every tough decision you make, some people will support you and some people will disagree with you. If you are going to be an effective administrator you cannot take criticism of your decisions personally. You must have a strong grasp of your mission as an athletic director and be able to use that mission when making decisions.
When people are upset with your decision, always remember that they are angered at the decision, not at you personally. They may not know that, but as long as you do, you will experience a lot less stress.
THE WORK-LIFE TRANSITION
Another big source of stress can be blending your work and personal life. If you find that your job is affecting your relationships at home or vice-versa, you need to develop a
routine to separate your life as an athletic director from your life outside of work.
For me, showering is an effective way to transition to where I need to be mentally. When I shower before school in the morning, I consciously make the commitment to leave all my personal life stress in the shower. I simply wash those thoughts down the drain. I also start thinking about what I need to do for that day at work and how to stay positive with the tasks ahead.
When I get home at the end of the day, I get into the shower as quickly as possible and wash away all the stress and negativity from work. Sometimes I am in there for two minutes, other times for 20 minutes.
This process works well for me, but each individual must find his or her own routine for compartmentalizing the different roles they play. Changing clothes, exercising, altering your physical space, or listening to music in the car on the way home are all effective techniques.
Stress is unavoidable in our jobs. If ignored, it can eat away at you. But if you face it head on, you can enjoy and find more success at your job. And, down the road, you will definitely find more green lights ahead.
Sidebar: TIPS FOR COACHES
If you know how to handle stress as an athletic director, you can help your coaches deal with the stress that arises in their positions. Here are five exercises coaches can use to turn stress into success.
Circle of Control: Ask your coaches to draw two circles and label them "circle of control" and "circle of concern." Next, ask them to list everything they feel negatively affects their performance, placing the things they have control over in the control circle
and the things that concern them but they have no control over in the concern circle. This simple activity allows coaches to see that most, if not all, of the things that stress them out are things they have no control over. I then challenge them to focus only on issues in their control, which are typically their attitude, preparation, and effort.
Why You Coach: It’s incredibly easy for coaches to get caught up in the negativity that comes with parental pressures or a tough season and lose sight of why they coach. To counter this, have your coaches share what they love about coaching and why they do it. Write their words down, take a staff photo, and put it all together in a collage. Then give each coach a copy of the collage that they can hang in their office or put on their clipboard. Seeing a list every day of all the reasons they love to coach, with a photo of their fellow coaches around them, serves as a constant visual reminder of why they are willing to put up with the trying times.
Visualize It: Psychology research tells us that whether information is vividly imagined or physically experienced, the brain processes it in very similar ways. Thus the body and brain can prepare for a parental confrontation or a stressful game situation by thinking about it ahead of time. Talk to your coaches about adverse situations and how they might respond. Help them visualize a clear image of what a successful response will look and feel like when a specific stressful situation arises.
Know Stress Signals: In a moment of calm, have your coaches identify and write down what they think, say to themselves, and feel when they are stressed. This activity will help them develop a heightened awareness of how they act when they are performing at their best and their worst. Encourage your coaches to develop routines so that when they feel an elevated heart rate, they know how to get back to positive thoughts.
Bad Day File: One of the best tools that coaches can use to keep stress at bay is a scrap book or "bad day file." This can include photos of previous teams, thank you letters from appreciative athletes and parents, motivational quotes, or funny stories— anything the coach can quickly turn to for a little lift on a bad day. This can help remind
a coach that, in almost all cases, negativity and stress will pass and another good day is just around the corner.
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