How Athletes Struggle With Impossible Expectations
This post is part three of a series on the struggles of recovering athletes.
In my last post, I talked about the struggle many athletes face, even into their retirement, with the belief that their personal worth is based on their achievements. This is a belief that is closely connected to the next theme of struggle: perfectionism.
Athletes whose whole world rises and falls with wins and losses expect themselves to be flawless. A perfectionist ignores the fact that mistakes are human, that they cannot be completely eliminated, and that they are an important part of learning and growth. To a perfectionist, a mistake is a dangerous opportunity to lose precious seconds or precious points, and it’s a dangerous invitation to be blamed by all who watch, especially their coach. In the perfectionist’s mind, these dangers must be eliminated, which leads to an exhausting (and unwinnable) battle that drags them through incessant anxiety, general disappointment, oftentimes serious injury, and (as mentioned in the last post) battered self-esteem — all culminating in burnout. Contrary to popular opinion in the sports world, turning human beings into little perfectionists using any means possible turns out to be neither good for the person inside the athlete, nor for their performance.
The Connection Between the Quest for Perfection and the Quest for Safety
Athletes who struggle with perfectionism often relay the experience of having grown up in an environment where standards of robotic precision were (unironically) expected by coaches and criticisms were yelled out every few minutes, starting at a very young age. Athletes interpreted this as, “The coach is never satisfied, and I am never good enough.” “I have to be perfect to please the coach.”
The surprisingly consistent stories from athletes in a variety of sports reveal the pattern for how the drama typically played out: The coach’s criticisms were typically voiced with anger and accompanied by an array of insults, threats, and demands for constant repetition. Comments like “You’re wasting everyone’s time,” and “You’re not worth the space you take up in the gym,” were typically coupled with accusations that athletes were lazy (“You look like a flopping fish”), stupid (“What’s wrong with your brain?”), and un-coachable (“You’re impossible —the worst I’ve ever coached”). And let me emphasize that we’re talking about athletes who practice 20+ hours a week and sacrifice much of a normal childhood for their sport — far from uncommitted or lazy. Once these comments were exhausted, the final order would come: “You can’t leave until you do it right.” Any athlete considered “a problem child” would then be left alone and required to repeat whatever the “pain point” was until exhaustion or injury, only to then be assigned inordinate amounts of conditioning as a punishment. Under these conditions, athletes felt persistent and consuming pressure to perform flawlessly in order to avoid the wrath of the coach, often leading to daily anxiety, dread, an inability to concentrate, and stomach aches on the way to practice.
The athlete’s quest for perfection in these training environments turns out to be closely connected to a quest for safety: an attempt to protect themselves from the aggression of the coach by “pleasing” him or her with a flawless performance. As is well known, perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies typically go hand in hand – and in this case, they both find their origin in scenarios of fear and danger.
A Quest Doomed From the Start
As I listened to athletes’ stories about their quest for perfection — which on a surface level seems like an obvious goal (to athletes, coaches, parents, and fans), since in competitive sports “you have to be perfect if you’re going to succeed!” — it became clear to me that there were multiple reasons why this quest was, in fact, doomed from the start.
First, as I think we all know rationally, perfection is just not possible for a human being. We aren’t robots, and mistakes can’t be fully eliminated. The expectation of perfection every time — the thought that you can control chaos completely 100% of the time — is just not realistic, and so the quest is going to fail for that reason alone and is a setup for a whole lot of disappointment.
Second, mistakes are an essential part of the learning process and play a positive role in our growth. Without trial and error, without risking mistakes, without in a sense “making friends with mistakes,” one can’t learn what works, what doesn’t, and why. If coaches punish mistakes, causing the athlete to have to avoid them at all costs to avoid the coach’s wrath, then the process of learning and improvement is cut off at the root. The athlete simply can’t grow if mistakes are taboo or considered some kind of crime of the gym.
There’s a third problem going on in these types of old-school training environments that makes the quest for perfection or even improvement doomed: the coach’s unwillingness or inability to offer the athlete a method for improvement. When I’ve asked clients if the coaches who were of the “yelling” persuasion ever tried to show them how to make the changes they wanted, or how to learn from mistakes, the answer from athletes was a resounding “no.” Sometimes the coach would point to a teammate who did the skill well and say, “See, why can’t you do it like them?” — suggesting they imitate another’s moves, but still giving no suggestions for how to imitate them. Their approach was just to yell out orders and insults to the athlete.
It seems quite common that those rare coaches who are able to emotionally regulate themselves, and are calm and collected in the gym, tend to be the ones who analyze, strategize, and problem-solve with an athlete; but those who are erratic and turn to yelling tend to do so as a replacement for teaching, either because they do not know the steps an athlete would need to take to learn a skill correctly and safely, or because, out of impatience, they are unwilling to take the time to teach. The athlete is left not knowing what to do or how to make things better — while being faced with impossible standards of perfection and the danger of what punishment they might endure if they don’t get it right.
This is the point at which a lot of athletes get injured or quit. At this point, so many athletes’ bodies are wrecked from the incessant battering, their spirits are crushed from constant criticism, they spend the day at school unable to concentrate and anxiously dreading what punishment they will endure that evening at practice, and they are no longer getting the returns or enjoyment that might match their investment and work. Furthermore, they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place; they can’t find a way forward with their current coach, and they can’t find a better coach with whom to train.
The Drama Turned Inward: From Self-Brutality to Hyper-Productivity to Burnout
Perhaps you’d think that quitting is a great liberation. The athlete can finally move on to independent activities and heal from all of these experiences of being demeaned, threatened, and punished, right? Wrong. Time after time, when athletes tell me of their day-to-day struggles in their lives beyond their sport, it’s clear that they’ve found a way to replace their coach’s voice with an internal voice that bullies them with brutal self-talk.
When trying to learn something new, whether at work or school or in a new recreational athletic activity, they might say to themselves, “Why do you keep screwing up?” “Why are you so stupid?” “You don’t belong here.” “No one is going to want to work with you.” The coach’s demands for perfection and insults get replaced with intense self-criticism.
Likewise, the coach’s penchant for excessive repetition gets replaced by an inner demand for hyper-productivity — sometimes as a form of self-punishment, and sometimes because it has been communicated to them that they can never be a success (in terms of winning) unless they are constantly working to the point of collapse. Retired athletes readily admit their feelings of guilt about ever resting, even long after they’ve left their sport, because they have been told their whole life that if they rest, they’re lazy. Their competitors are not resting. If they rest, they simply won’t accomplish — and don’t deserve to accomplish — anything good in their lives. If they rest, they’re a loser. Constant work is yet another part of their quest for perfection and protection from blame.
Not surprisingly, with the perfectionistic-people pleasing-hyper-productive approach to life, athletes (and former athletes) often struggle with mental and physical burnout. The cycle often carries over into jobs and romantic relationships, where they believe they must be working at all times to please their boss or their partner, be flawless in order to avoid criticism, and ignore their own human needs for rest, care, and kindness, which they tell themselves are signs of weakness and invalid. At a certain point, the body and the mind say “no” to living this way, and illness or injury may force them to get off the hamster wheel, for which they often feel incredibly guilty and even morally at fault.
Final Thoughts
Coaches need to understand the heavy and long-lasting impact of their behavior, their beliefs, and their values on a young athlete’s life. As we’ve seen, when the coach is absent, the whole drama of the athlete’s experience with them turns inward. Expectations of perfection, incessant criticism, and general brutality become self-inflicted. (Imagine how different this story is when the coach is respectful, affirming, encouraging, collaborative, and has a whole different set of beliefs and values related to “success.” More on that in a future post.)
At the root of the perfectionistic and hyper-productive ethos that’s internalized by the athlete lies fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of being criticized or blamed. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of letting others down. And, at the root of that fear is a set of beliefs that the old-school culture of sports reinforces and makes very sure you never forget: Other people’s opinion of you is everything, you exist to please others (in particular, your coach), you depend on the praise of the coach to be “ok,” others won’t like you or want to work with you if you make mistakes, mistakes are always a bad thing, and the only thing worthwhile about you is your performance. You must sacrifice everything (including mental and physical health) to win and appease others.
It takes a whole lot of work in philosophical counseling to call into question, examine, and unwind all those beliefs and their effects, and to then consider alternatives and new ways of operating in life. But one thing that I hope is clear from this series of posts is this: We have to stop thinking of the suffering that athletes face as “personal” mental health problems for which they are responsible, and face directly the normalized culture of abuse and crisis of ethics in sports that causes these problems in the first place. Ethics reform and culture change will require resistance in thought and action to the old destructive forces in sports, the reformulation of beliefs and values in sports culture, and the creation of new, healthier coaching methods.
