The Performance Formula to Sustain Your Coaching

Issue 159- Jason Payne, CMPC.

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We all find that point in every season.

The honeymoon is over. You have run out of new stories. The energy you had at the home opener is not the same as the energy you have for a cold Tuesday morning practice. I got so I could predict the exact week this feeling would hit. January is cold and dark here. The reality of the season hit home, and there were still two more months. January 15th is always close to when I start to notice that I am a different version of myself.

For the first few years, I assumed it was the cost of coaching, so I put my head down and leaned into the grind. But it always took a larger toll, and by March I was a shell of my best self.

The world loves to embrace the concept of grinding. But it changes when we look at the word's definition.

That doesn't sound appealing at all. We can all aim higher than being pulverized.

Some of you are already experiencing this.

You have been experiencing this for two weeks and have been powering through. Some of you are surprised when it sneaks up on you. Or are pretending it won't happen this year because your team is good.

Wherever you are on that spectrum, you need to understand it and make a plan to prevent burnout.

I keep a formula in my head to make sense of what is happening in my season. It shows up in Chapter 19 of the book, and it is the clearest way I have found to hold on to the truth about what makes a coach's performance actually work.

Performance = Skill × Energy × Recovery X Joy.

It isn't a list or addition. It's a multiplication.

Which means if any single variable drops toward zero, the whole equation collapses.

Skill

What you know. Your tactical library. Your ability to teach a play, diagnose what is going wrong in a game, or devise or plan for practice. This is the variable most coaches heavily invest in. Clinics. Books. Watching film. Studying other programs.

But here is where that can backfire. Coaches will keep sharpening the skill long after they become proficient at teaching and coaching the game. At this point, it is no longer the most important variable in the equation. It feels productive and fills the calendar. Meanwhile, the other three variables are dropping, and no one is paying attention.

Energy

What do you have in the tank midweek in February? Physical energy from sleep and food. Emotional energy from the state of your family, your day job, your finances, the coach voice in your head. Six weeks into your season, this variable drops for almost every coach, and you don't notice until you are running on fumes.

A high score for the energy variable isn't a caffeinated version of you. It's present moment to moment. It is a coach who walks into practice, sees the athletes in the room, determines who is off, assesses the group's tone, and responds appropriately. A low score is a coach who is running the practice plan without ever really being there. Most coaches do not know they have moved from a seven to a four until they are already a four.

Recovery

What you deliberately do between the effort. Not what you passively do after collapse. Recovery is the walk, the nap, a day off, the training run, the film-free Sunday, the meal with your family or friends that has nothing to do with basketball. This is the variable coaches are most quietly ashamed of investing in. It is also the one that makes the others work.

Here is what makes recovery hard. It looks like (and can feel like) you are slacking off. There is no scoreboard for naps (I would be elite if there were). No championship banner for a Sunday off. The people around you cannot see recovery working. What they can see is the coach who skipped the workout, powered through an 11 p.m. film session, and answered the parent emails at breakfast. Recovery is an invisible investment. It pays out later in visible ways. Coaches who cannot stomach the invisible part never see the payout.

Joy

This can be the hardest variable to give your attention to. Cutting and breaking down film, dealing with parents, lining up volunteers, and planning practices can all consume time and energy and feel tedious. You don't need to find joy in all the aspects of coaching, but it is vitally important to keep the joy at the forefront of your mind. What do you love about the season? Lean into it and embrace those moments. Don't let the aspects that feel upstream steal your joy.

Multiply them together. Look at your number.

Perfect skill times strong energy times poor recovery times zero joy equals zero.

Great skill times weak energy times no recovery and some joy still equals a coach who shows up but is not actually there.

The most common way coaches misread this equation is by treating the variables as additive. As if a nine in skill can make up for a three in energy. It cannot. The math does not work that way. A team led by a coach with low energy will not be at its best regardless of their knowledge

The season seldom fails because your skill dropped. Six weeks in, you know as much as you have ever known. The season fails because you treat energy and recovery as optional. And the whole equation can't survive those areas being near zero.

The audit for this week.

Download the Assessment

​Performance_Formula_-_Sixteen_Question_Assessment (1).pdf​

Ten minutes. Answer the questions on the attached handout and reflect on how you can improve them.

Rate each of the four variables on a scale of one to ten, right now.

Skill: how prepared do I actually feel for the specific challenges this team is facing?

Energy: what do I have in the tank on Tuesday morning?

Recovery: what am I doing deliberately, not accidentally, to refill?

Joy: where am I finding joy in the day-to-day coaching process?

Multiply the four numbers.

The number you get is not the point. The lowest of the four is. The variable that threatens to sabotage your season if you do not attend to it.

Pick the lowest. Do one thing about it this week.

If skill is the lowest: pick one specific coaching problem your team keeps running into and give it two hours of your own preparation before your next practice.

If energy is the lowest: pick one nightly habit that is costing you sleep or vitality and cut it. Or one behavior that would restore energy and install it. Choose one. Not five.

If recovery is the lowest: schedule one deliberate act of recovery this week. Non-negotiable. Same discipline as a practice plan. Then do it.

If joy is the lowest: Remind yourself what it is you love about what you're doing and lean into it.

One note for your athletes.

The book extends the formula for athletes by adding a fourth variable.

Performance = Skill × Energy × Recovery × Joy.

Without joy, the willingness to keep showing up at the level the sport demands runs out. The skill stays. You can summon energy for a while. Recovery can be ignored for a busy stretch. But when the love is gone, everything else accelerates toward burnout.

If you grind without joy, none of the other three variables will save the ship. The formula is already collapsing in on itself.

Multiply your numbers. Attend to the lowest.

Sustainable excellence is a math problem. Skill times Energy times Recovery times Joy. Solve the equation, and you get the season you want.

— Jason

P.S. Three quick things.

The Aligned Coach Scorecard is at 109 coaches now. The diagnostic maps the same four cornerstones this formula sits inside.

Kindle pre-order for ALIGNED: The Inside Out Path to Coaching Excellence is live on Amazon. Twenty-five days to launch. Every pre-order between now and October 27 helps the book find coaches beyond my list.

Enjoy your week.