The Iceberg
All my teams got the iceberg talk. We had a paper handout – clearly before digitization – that we passed out for our players to put in their notebooks on Day One. An enormous floating glacier shelf provided palpable fodder for an important conversation with our team about what the outside world sees and what it doesn’t. The players the media doesn’t feature, the traits that must support the skill sets, the stuff most would call mundane—we had to understand how much it mattered, regardless of the attention it did or did not garner. Though we marvel at the shiny, frozen chunks that proudly poke out above the water, ninety percent of an iceberg’s mass lies below the surface.
The metaphor fit the players with the notebooks in their laps, but it also fit the coach at the front of the room distributing the analogous document up and down the rows. Coaching’s not as easy as it looks.
When people enter the profession, most think they know what they’re getting into. They love the game, the ball, the goal, the me-against-me and the me-against-you. Dancing at the edge of their comfort zone is what makes a coach’s heart sing. The lure of a gym or a field or a course or a court as an “office” is enchanting. What could be better day after day than grinding toward dreams with people you love while getting paid to do so? Coaches don their Jordans and their logoed sweats, rise before sunbeams and attack the day. They coach because they can’t get enough of reaching for the sky. Their mouths water and their throats cry out for the indisputable high that comes from locking arms with others while trying to do hard things. To coach is to be alive.
But it’s not an easy way to live.
Nobody really tells you that, though. It’s the best kept secret ever--the arduous internal maze of the trek. There’s not much talk about the invisible dragons that live inside the profession-- the ones that lurk around blind corners with the capacity to reduce you to soot. Nor is there mention of the camouflaged sinkholes that litter the way, some having the capacity to swallow you whole before you even realize you’re standing on top of them. And absolutely no one is prepared (as if one could ever be) for the weight of what they’ll be asked to carry around. Only those who’ve slept with the backpack sewn into their shoulder blades could try to explain it. Even then it would be a difficult grasp.
Coaches get jobs and just take off running, doing what they do. They love the process. They live for the chase. They relish the up-and-down, up-and-down, up-and-down hard. And then before you know it, some do well. Then really, really well. Then somebody hands them some scissors to cut down a net, or a trophy to hoist from a stage, and a whole legion of people start chanting their name, taking their picture and reaching out to touch them as they pass.
From the outside it can look pretty perfect, but . . .
That’s only the glamorous window the world gets a chance to look through. The inner experience is a roller coaster ride without a seat belt in intermittent driving rain. Coaching is marvelous and it’s devastating. It’s thrilling and it’s terrifying. It’s a pack mule grind up a steep, rocky incline.
Coaching is a whale of a way to spend a life.
The rewards from leading people into battle are deep engravings--not on plaques or statues on the lawn-- but on the soul. Anyone who has ever taught another and watched her learn, knows the “wow” that boomerangs back. The front row seat that coaches get for observing people as they stitch themselves together in a way that defies unraveling is seductive. Those who’ve tied their own hands behind their backs while letting a struggler build her wings, know the gift that awaits. What the profession gives those who give themselves to it can’t be calculated or captured in a jar. Its gifts are simultaneously amorphous and sustaining. And they’re practical, too, like the knife set you got that Christmas, the one you never knew you needed but can’t imagine life without.
But coaching is not a thing you can do with half of your heart. It asks for all of you. A demand that can have some debilitating side-effects over time, if you’re not vigilantly careful. And maybe even if you are.
Perhaps the downside of “all-in” professional coaching doesn’t get much airtime because the upside is so good. Or perhaps the egos of those in the trenches-- sweating while plowing their guts out --won’t allow it. Maybe coaches don’t talk about it because the tension is tough to name at the time. Or maybe—simply because by trade—leaders feel pulled to appear unfettered, neatly put together, whether their armor is a three-piece Armani or a hoody with the sleeves cut out. Coaches don’t like to get dinged nor do they like to show it if they do. They don’t like for their hair to get rumpled (unless of course they wear it that way), and they don’t talk about what’s hard. Certainly not about what hurts or that which is too big or too embarrassing. It’s in the fine print of the contract, I think. The invisible one they sign with the world.
So coaches soldier on, trying to figure out what to do with the wins as much as the losses. Trying to crack the code mostly by themselves or, if not alone, in sympathetic silence alongside one another. They pretend the journey is a Ferris wheel ride around the moon. Except it’s not. Even though it does occasionally take them there.