Sports Coaching: What It Is And What Are Its Benefits
Coaching is a discipline that has become very fashionable in recent years. And although it receives some criticism, if the professional who applies it is well trained, it can provide excellent results for the personal, professional, educational and sporting development of people.
Today we will talk about sports coaching a proposal that allows you to maximize the potential of a sportsman or athlete.
Coaches guide people through the process of change and help them achieve their full potential within a variety of areas and improve their well-being. They can work with individuals who want to achieve their life goals (Life Coaching: the secret to achieving your goals), with managers so that they can better manage dealings with staff (Coaching for companies: what does it consist of and what are its benefits?) and even with professors and teachers (Educational Coaching: a tool to learn and teach better).
But the coach not only works with the coachees (the coach’s client) individually, but can also do so with groups of people and work or sports teams. In this area, it allows adopting strategies to maximize the learning potential and management of psychological resources useful to achieve a goal.
Coaching is a methodology that helps to overcome those limiting beliefs that often prevent us from staying halfway between what we really want and what we can achieve.
The origin of sports coaching
The relationship between coaching and sport is a reality since the origins of this discipline. In fact, coaching as we know it today was born in the United States in the 70s, specifically in the field of sports. Its main precursor was Timothy Gallwey, a tennis player who later became a coach. He realized the importance of psychological aspects in achieving goals and in sports performance in general. in his book The Inner game of tennispublished in 1974, presents his ideas on coaching, which would later be used in other fields, especially work.
Now, the origins of coaching go further in time, for example, the contributions of Socrates and his methodical dialogue known as maieutics, the concept of self-realization of humanistic psychology, whose greatest exponent is Abraham Maslow, or the well-known practice of Emotional Intelligence initially proposed by Daniel Goleman, have shaped this discipline.
Benefits of sports coaching
Sports coaching provides many benefits for athletes. But what are these benefits?
1. Helps you get to know yourself better
Sports coaching allows athletes to know themselves better, because they develop Emotional Intelligence and learn to use tools to discover their own limits and impulses that hold back their full potential. With sports coaching, self-knowledge improves, which It is key to personal and sporting development
2. Helps plan realistically
Self-knowledge also allows us to know what path we want to take, and helps to plan realistically. This is key because it helps keep your feet on the ground and prevents frustration.
With the help of coaches, athletes develop resources, competencies and skills that allow you to maximize your performance and potential Coaching makes athletes go further by helping them eliminate mental barriers.
4. Helps overcome limiting beliefs
Limiting beliefs act as a barrier to reaching the potential that an athlete has, since the mind can be our worst enemy if we are not aware of how these negative thoughts affect us.
The sports coach offers the coachee techniques and resources that are aimed at enhancing talent at its maximum expression. In other words, Sports coaching allows us to identify weaknesses but also take responsibility for the change and take action to overcome any obstacle.
5. Promotes the management of emotions
Emotions can help or hinder sports performance. Thanks to coaching, athletes are able to know and regulate your own feelings, emotions, beliefs, judgments and coping strategies. Something that, without a doubt, allows us to obtain better results.
6. Increase motivation
Sports coaching is key to planning and setting realistic goals, but also to staying in the present moment and obtaining feedback on how we are behaving. Coaching is motivating because the person discovers their own motivations and achieves a greater capacity for challenge and ambition.
7. Increases concentration and greater performance
Staying in the present moment and acquiring a high level of awareness also promotes concentration and increases performance.
Furthermore, since coaching allows athletes to connect with themselves in the here and now, so that they reach the state in which the level of difficulty of the task and the motivation necessary to carry it out are maintained in an almost perfect balance. What is known as the “flow state” is favored.
Realistic goals and well-planned objectives help maintain high self-esteem, since people do not live with unreasonable expectations and become less frustrated. The coaching establishes medium and long-term action plans so it is beneficial to go step by step and live in the here and now.
9. Enhance leadership
Coaching empowers athletes, who feel responsible for their own actions thanks to this methodology. Athletes have greater learning capacity, decision-making power and acquire a positive mentality towards change
10. Improves group cohesion
Coaching can be done individually; However, and especially in the world of sports, group coaching or team coaching sessions can be carried out. When a group feels united and pursues a common goal, it is easy for them to perform at a high level. The coaching increases the feeling of belonging discipline and improve relationships within the team.
