Reflections: How to deal with Pressure

Pressure isn’t a detour in coaching—it’s the road itself. We open up about the weight leaders carry, from constant decision-making to public scrutiny, and why stress doesn’t signal failure but commitment. Instead of wishing problems away, we talk about building the muscle to walk through them, drawing on research-backed ideas about process-focused mindset shifts that shorten the emotional downtime after hard calls and tough losses.

From there, we get practical. We lay out how to build a clean on-off switch so coaching mode doesn’t follow you through the front door. Think small, deliberate rituals: write tomorrow’s first task, pause in the car before you walk in, leave your bag by the door, and, if work truly can’t wait, move it to a neutral space like a café. Presence at home isn’t a luxury; it’s a skill that strengthens your presence on the field. The sharper your boundaries, the clearer your judgment and the more patient your conversations with players, staff, and families.

We close with the third anchor: a controllable outlet that answers to effort. Training, running, lifting, reading, writing—anything with predictable feedback—gives your mind a stable win when sport gets chaotic. Set goals you own, track progress, and let that rhythm remind you that you’re more than a weekend’s result. Put together, these three habits—endure, disconnect, and control one thing—help you bounce back faster, coach with steadier energy, and enjoy the craft for the long haul.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a coach who needs it today, and leave a quick review so more people can find these tools. What’s your best switch-off ritual? We’d love to hear it.

For all your sports equipment and some of the most innovative rugby products going around, head to silverfernsports.com.

If you want to chat directly or explore options for your school or club, flick an email to ben@coachingculture.com.au
.

Great gear. Built for coaches.

Chapters

• 0:00 Naming Stress In Coaching
• 4:03 Stress As Proof You Care
• 7:45 Build Strength To Endure
• 11:18 Bounce Back And Move On
• 13:23 Don’t Take It Home

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:06

Hey all. Welcome to this week's Reflections page. What an awesome one it is today because I've had uh some amazing chats this morning, actually, about stress in the coaching profession. And it is something that is very prevalent and not often talked about. It's it's talked about a lot in terms of general modern society about uh mental well-being and all that stuff, but it's not specifically addressed to coaches and whatever sport you're coaching. And I think it's important that we actually do have a little bit of thought around this. This morning's conversation with a man who's doing wonderful things, who I'll talk about in a few episodes, time is doing some amazing things and just bringing it to light. Now, this is the cool thing about stress, is stress is a massive part of coaching. It is the job, essentially. It's if you can deal with and manage the stresses involved in coaching, and it is stressful, you're going to do better than most. In fact, most people that start up coaching and don't perform well inherently don't like the stress that it brings. Sometimes you don't appreciate the role. It's a leadership role. You're standing up in front of people, you're making calls, you're making decisions. It is a stressful role, it is stressful by nature. And so to take a bit of time to actually just sort of dive into a couple of things that it's important to remember when we're coaching around the stress levels that occur is important. And just when you hear it from other people, you and and what others do, it actually gives you a little bit of insight and a little bit of thought process around your own awarenesses of what stresses are driving you. And look, stresses are always here as coaches, no matter how far you go, you talk to some of the very best in the world and they are feeling the stresses. It's just slightly different contexts. Whereas the best in the world are dealing with media and you know, public scrutiny through social media channels, and they're getting slandered. When someone gets sacked, it's public, you feel it. But it's across all levels of coaching. So I just want to dive in today around this concept of stress. Now, stress in coaching is not a sign you're failing. And that's the first thing to just be aware of. It's actually a sign that you care. Coaching by nature, coaches are there because they want to do their best to make people their best. And whenever you get that little feeling that you're not doing that, it just reverberates round in your head, right? And it goes round and round because you care. You want to be the best at what you're doing to help people. It's the nature of it. So if you're in it properly, if you're responsible for young men or women, for staff, for standards, for directions, there will be weight. Pressure is a part of that privilege, as they say. The mistake is not feeling the stress, the stake is the mismanaging of the stress, thinking it's you being useless or you're not a great coach and all that stuff. Feeling the stress is not a bad thing because it's always there and it will always be there. It's just how you respond. So I want to just talk about three things which I keep coming back to because the stress is always there for me. Well, however my role shapes, it's always there. It's always nice to hear other people's thoughts. So I want to go through a few that get me thinking. Firstly, just to be aware of the strength it takes to get through sometimes. Um, coaching is not a passive thing, it demands decisions and after decisions, conversations after conversations. And as a coach, you often absorb a lot of stuff: disappointment, frustrations, emotion from others. You front the media, maybe, your front parents, your front players. You sort of carry that uncertainty sort of quietly to yourself. And there is strength in that. Um, and sometimes the stress you feel is just simply the cost of that leadership. So instead of saying, why is this hard? It can be also really useful just to say, what's this doing to me? What's this building in me? I had a lovely conversation with a friend of mine who is a devout uh religious man, and he talked about the science of prayer. And I love this because there's a lot of studies being done in prayer, and it showed the difference between what you pray for and how successful it is. And he said, when people pray for an outcome to stop, Lord, whatever your religion is, please stop this happening to me. When you pray like that, it doesn't often work. He said, the the feedback and the stats show that when people pray for give me the strength to get through this, they find that those prayers are more likely to read uh lead to better results. Lord, give me the strength to get through this. So that's you understanding the context and saying, not asking for it to be stopped, but to give you the strength to keep going. And I think that's really powerful. There's some science, and there's there's been research done to show that praying like that has better outcomes than praying for the thing that's causing the stress to stop. And I think it's important for us as coaches to know that as well. This is part of the job. The better you get at going through this, the better coach you'll be. So understand is part of the process. Get through it and you'll get better at it. It will never disappear because inherently stress is part of this job. That's why people, not all people can do it. So to keep telling yourself, find me the strength to get through this, find me the strength to get through this, give me the strength to get through. And you're repeating that sort of thinking, that sort of mindset, because it's going to lead to the outcome we want, which is a better coach. You'll be a better coach for being able to deal with this stress. I think that's lovely. Not to hide away from the fact that this is a stressful job or profession or love, but to just go, it's part of it. And I'm prepared to take that on. I'm prepared to work at this. And some people love that. Some people go really well. And I think all the best coaches in the world have a very good bounce back from stress. I've seen some beautiful examples of uh coaches at a very high level making some massive calls, wearing it publicly, and then just being able to bounce back and move on. It was horrible in the time, but they've reduced their downtime, their stress time, that swirl in the head. And I think that's cool. The second point I want to make about stress is do not take it home. And this is a big one for coaches, because coaching, as I talked about, is a profession where you care. You want people to do well, you want to do well so people can do well. And so your head is in a swirl. More often than not, there's those voices that bounce back, reverberate inside your cerebellum, and you start thinking about all the stuff and it doesn't switch off. You almost get a little bit OCD on it. Some coaches watch scores and scores of footage. They get home and they just keep watching. Sometimes at the detriment of their family life, where they're just never quite present because they're always ticking over what little thing they could do. But to be honest, you need to step away, like anything in life. If you're going to go hard in the gym, for example, you need to have some downtime, some recovery time where you're actually not in the gym. Sure, when you're in, you go hard as you can go. But when you're out, you need to be properly out. And you're out, you've recovered, you've done all that stuff, and there is a time to just sit back and switch off from that. And I think that's really important. I want to talk about this because there has to be a deliberate line, sort of a ritual or something that signals that work is done for the day, or rugby is now done. Now, for me, I used to tell the players I want them to physically mentally transform. When they cross that white line onto a field, they leave behind whatever they wear off and they become something else. Because rugby, you have to. You have to have a level of aggression that is different from your everyday life. You can't operate as a mild-mannered uh person on the rugby field. You've got to have a bit of aggression. So you've got to flick if you're not that. Likewise, when you come off it, you've got to switch back to something which is in line with the way society moves. You can't be that aggressive person running around trying to thump into people. And likewise, it's the same with coaches. You don't want to stay in the coaching mode 24-7. You will burn out. So having that sort of metaphysical thing. I used to have an orange door in my house in Japan, and I made a point, every time I walked in there, I would switch. And before that, I would stop at the convenience store and have a little ritual where I'd buy a coffee and I'd sit in the car for five, ten minutes till I finished it, made sure everything was out of my mind, and drove the last five minutes to home, walked in that orange door, left my bag and my computer there, and I wouldn't open it again until morning. So I never left the office, uh the rugby field till I was everything I thought was done, and I wouldn't get it out. And if for some reason something happened where I needed to open up the laptop and look at a game or whatever, I had a rule to myself that I'd have to go down to the Starbucks on the corner and check it there. That was just my little thing, and it put me off. It made me just say, hold on, Ben, this is too much. You've you've been going at it for 10, 12 hours. You need to need to chill out, take a break. And that's something important to have. The best coaches I know, when they're fully in, they are in. And when they're fully out, they are out. And that is a skill set to practice. So it might be as simple as just closing the laptop, riding down tomorrow's first task. It might be a walk before you go to the front door. It might be deciding that once you're home, you're present. And having those little interactions that actually make you stronger and a better person outside of the coaching field. And just remember, too, that coaching isn't all about just the nuts and bolts, looking at games and all that stuff. Being able to talk to people, you know, get, you know, see people, be really present is a skill set of coaching. And that is something that you need to do when you do switch off. Thirdly, the a really important one is just to actually find an outlet, something you can control. So coaching is full of variables you cannot control, referees, injuries, selections above you, weather, the bounce of the ball, other people's moods. If all your emotional investment is to tie to these uncontrollables, stress magnifies, multiplies through the roof. So you need something in your being, in your life that belongs to you. So whatever that is, for me, it was always training, like in the gym. When I started doing that as a practice, a coaching practice, I just found my stress resilience was so much better. I had something I was focusing on. So whilst I had my internal goals for rugby, I also had over to the side these other physical goals. I needed to get to this weight or lift this thing or be able to do this many reps or reach this time. So it was something completely separate where I could actually have something that I could control, because I could control those things. Now, that's that's important, whether it's training your own body, it might be reading, it might be writing, surfing, lifting, gardening, running, something that responds to effort in a predictable way. And if you have something else in your life where you can do that, that you're into, gosh, it gives you an amazing outlet, it recenters you. And it reminds you that sort of progress is possible and that you are more than a result. Now, I I just think that's something that you've got to get into. Finding something that you can control control and then release what you cannot. Return tomorrow with a clear head. So stress in coaching is not going away, and nor should it, but it can get very carried away. So it's important that you find the strength to endure it because it's the job. Have the discipline to switch off from it. And make sure you always have an outlet that you can steady your own mind. Now, these are not soft things, these are things that the best coaches in the world all have. They're not soft, they're a sign of strength. And that's how you sustain a coaching career or even just the enjoyment of coaching. They're my three big ones. Love your thoughts. If you have any thoughts around this sort of stuff, share it with me because often a problem shared is a problem halved. And if you're dealing with it, there's a high probability someone else in this profession, in this industry, in this love game of coaching, someone else is dealing with it as well. Love to hear your thoughts until the next episode. Take care, stay safe.