Coaching in the high-performance arena is a demanding role. It requires a great deal of passion and dedication to withstand the pressures of competitive sport. In an industry that celebrates people for their physical and emotional toughness, coaches recognise the importance of self-care for their athletes – but is their own self-care overlooked?

‘Toughness’ is not something that is inherent in our personality; it’s the resilience developed to function well under high workloads and challenging situations. Resilience is a capability within all of us, and it requires intentional development and investment.

The term ‘self-care’ tends to get a bad rap, conjuring images of candlelit bubble-baths and crystals. While that’s nice for some, self-care is much more than that. Self-care is any deliberate action you take in order to support your mental, physical, and emotional health. It can be taking a walk outside to gain fresh perspective, calling a supportive friend after a rough day, or asking the assistant to take training one morning a week to spend time with your family.

Neurologically, there is an unbreakable link between self-care and performance. Engaging in self-care activities helps to turn off the stress hormones in the brain, adrenaline and cortisol, and engage the relaxation response, by releasing dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. These performance-enhancing neurochemicals improve the quality of your thinking, focus, and problem-solving. That all boosts your attitude, benefitting your coaching and the performance of your athletes.

Ironically, the toughest people among us are often those who know when to be gentle with themselves. Self-aware enough to listen to what they need, they invest in practices that nourish their mental health and wellbeing. The result is an ability to stay in the zone, and experience the energy, focus and enthusiasm that comes with being in a ‘flow’ state.

The Performance and Pressure Curve illustrates the empirical relationship between an individual’s performance and their level of pressure. The bell-shaped graph indicates that when we have an optimum level of pressure we perform at our highest level, and conversely we experience boredom with minimal pressure, and stress and burnout at high levels of pressure.

So how do we know what is the optimal amount of pressure? The fact is that it varies between different people. Not only that, but it will also vary for the same person over different days. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, some days we feel bulletproof, and other days we struggle to cope with the load we easily bore yesterday.

You see, what makes any amount of pressure optimal is our perceived ability to meet the challenges and demands we face. It all boils down to how resilient we are feeling. Looking after ourselves and practicing wellbeing-enhancing behaviours makes us feel more resilient. Therefore, self-care is literally the difference between pressure that breaks, and pressure that builds performance.

Here are three outdated mindsets to avoid, plus practices to strengthen your resilience as a coach:

• Stop wearing burnout as a badge of honour. Instead, recognise your personal warning signs of stress and ensure you’re getting the rest and recovery you need.
• Stop pretending you’re superhuman. Instead, acknowledge the toll work takes on your mental wellbeing, and seek support to help process the challenges you face.
• Stop labelling self-care as ‘soft’. Instead, make self-care a daily priority, keeping you in the optimal performance zone.

Today, we understand the science behind high performance. We recognise the role that rest and recovery plays in sport, along with varying the intensity of training, diversifying exercises, and including the element of fun. There’s clear evidence that managing wellbeing is critical for high performance, because our performance on the field isn’t just a product of our physical fitness, but also our mental and emotional fitness.

How would you describe your work week as a coach? If terms like ‘crazy-busy,’ ‘high pressure,’ or ‘flat out’ spring to mind, you could be like the overtrained athlete, putting in maximum effort for minimal gains. Unfortunately, ‘busy’ and ‘productive’ are not the same thing, which can result in a downward spiral of working harder to produce less, leaving you physically and emotionally wrecked.

Besides being detrimental to our health, the habit of working at a frenetic pace and nudging the boundaries of burnout sets a terrible example for the athletes we lead. An ability to role-model work practices that support wellbeing is critical for coach credibility and team confidence.

We can overcome this decline to burnout with a common high-performance strategy. We know that high intensity interval training (HIIT) is an effective training technique because it enables us to push the boundaries of physical capability, through balancing intense bouts of work with brief recovery breaks. From a brain perspective, the HIIT technique is also ideally suited to maximise performance.

Achieving maximum productivity, engagement and high quality work is all about focus. Studies into the neuroscience of attention reveal that our brain cannot sustain focus endlessly. Just as muscles need rest to regain full power, so does our brain. Research indicates that 60-90 minutes is the limit of our attention span. Therefore, optimising our mental capacity includes planning for intense periods of focus followed by short intervals of rest, fun or play.

Recent neuroscience studies have proved that micro-breaks can aid memory and learning. For new information to become memory, it must pass through an emotional filter called the
amygdala to reach the prefrontal cortex. When our brains become frustrated, anxious, confused or overwhelmed, the activation of the amygdala surges until this filter becomes a
stop sign. The passage of information cannot get past the filter, and new learning no longer reaches the prefrontal cortex and sustained memory.

Having brief brain breaks not only allows us the mental space to regulate our emotions, but also switches the type of mental activity from one area of the brain to the other. Much like resting one muscle group while you work another in weight training, this intermission allows the brain’s chemicals to replenish and our capacity for focus to be restored.

Strategies to optimise your performance and wellbeing at work:

• Program your day so after every 60-90 minutes you have a 5-10-minute recovery micro-break. Use an alarm.
• Use your mini-break to do something completely different. For example, if you’ve been sitting at your desk, get up and have a snack or drink of water out in the fresh air. If you’ve been on field or deck training, seek a quiet place and do a 5-minute meditation or deep breathing.
• Plan longer breaks into your day, at mid-morning, lunch and mid-afternoon to further recharge your productivity. Use these 20-30 minute breaks to go for a walk and listen to a podcast, have lunch with someone, or engage in a hobby. Learning, playing and socialising are the best recovery breaks, because they change your inner state of focus as well as recharging your battery.