The Sunday Scaries

Issue 155- Jason Payne, CMPC

You know the feeling.

It's Sunday night. You start thinking about the week ahead, practices, games, maybe a tournament. You're doing what you love; you should be excited, or at least ready. Instead, something in your body feels heavier than it should be. Not tired or stressed about a specific play or a specific player. Just off.

Most coaches call it burnout. Or fatigue. Or the season is getting to them.

It's usually none of those. Not yet anyway.

That Sunday-night weight, most of the time, comes from misalignment.

Your nervous system is telling you something you have not allowed your mind to name. There is a difference between who you are and how you are coaching. It creates tension

The gap between the two is what your body is feeling on a Sunday night as you think about the week ahead.

Where the misalignment usually lives

There are many places where a coach can be misaligned. Misaligned with an assistant, an AD, or your team's parents. Those matter, and they cost you.

But the deepest, most exhausting misalignment is almost always with your own values. The ones you claim to hold. The ones you would write on the whiteboard if someone asked you.

And here is the specific pattern. The tension does not come from naming those values. It comes from not living your values. When you allow those values to slide in your program, one small step at a time. And then the poster in your team room says one thing, and the behavior and actions on the floor suggest something entirely different.

Your body knows before your mind does. Sunday night is your body's report.

When alignment exists in your coaching, it creates positive energy. It feels like you are headed downstream; things are easy and enjoyable. It still takes work because everything worth doing does. That work will be easier because the pressure is gone.

When alignment is missing, you pay the price first. You value growth but measure success only by results. Practices feel heavier. Games become draining. Burnout rarely comes from long hours alone; it comes from misalignment, from carrying values that exist only on paper. Without something deeper than results to lean on, even the most passionate coaches eventually run out of fuel.

The exercise

I built a tool for The Aligned Coach Workbook designed to help you address this gap. It takes one week to run.

It is called the Values-in-Action Audit. You can download it here:Values-in-Action_Audit_-_Worksheet.pdf​

Here is how to use the framework:

At the top of a fresh page, write your three team values. The ones you would say your program stands for.

For the next seven days, at the end of each practice, take 5 minutes and write down every meaningful coaching decision you made. Who you started. Who you sat with and why. Who you held accountable. What you allowed to slide. What you praised. What you ignored.

At the end of the week, sort each decision under one of your three values. Some decisions will fit under multiple categories. Some will fit under none.

Then ask three questions:

Which values were actually enforced this week?

Which were merely stated?

Which do not show up in my decisions at all?

That is it. One page. One week.

What almost always shows up

Two things happen almost every time a coach runs this exercise.

The first is that one value does not show up in the decisions at all. Not once. That is the value the coach inherited from somewhere. A mentor. A program they used to work for. A coaching philosophy they picked up at a clinic. But never actually adopted as their own.

The second is that at least one decision every day violates a value the coach claims to hold. Not for good reasons. Just for convenience, or fatigue, or the desire to avoid a hard conversation.

Neither of those is a moral failure. Both are data.

What to do with the data

Do not rewrite your value statements. Not yet anyway.

Just pick the one value where the gap between what you say and what you enforce is widest. Just one.

This week, in one specific moment where you would normally let it slide, enforce it instead.

That is it. Small. Deliberate. Once.

The Sunday-night weight starts to lift when you close the gap by even a little. Not because you fixed everything. Because your body finally has evidence that you are fighting to align.

Sundays don't have to be scary.

— Jason

P.S. Three quick things.

The Aligned Coach Scorecard now has 92 coaches who have completed the exercise. If you have not taken it, it is here:

Kindle pre-order for ALIGNED: The Inside Out Path to Coaching Excellence is live on Amazon. Pre-orders help the book find coaches beyond my list. Amazon uses early velocity to determine where to rank the book at release, so if you were going to grab it anyway, pre-ordering today will certainly help me out.

The launch list gets early notice and early access to The Aligned Coach Workbook, where the tool above lives in full.
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And if you want to be on the list for the book launch, ALIGNED: The Inside-Out Path to Coaching Excellence releases October 27. Launch-list readers get first access to a workbook companion I am building and will receive the introduction and first chapter in their inbox next week.

Are you or your athletes struggling to be their best?

Let's find a solution together.

I help coaches thrive.

As a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and a basketball coach with over 25 years of experience, I understand the barriers to peak performance for both you and your athletes.

I would love to help you or your team build a competitive advantage.

Here are a few ways I can help:

• Consult with your team or coaching staff
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• Work 1-on-1 with coaches
• Work 1-on-1 with athletes

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Schedule a discovery call here.

Shoot me an email at jasonpayne@evolutionmpc.com. I love talking about coaching and seeing how I can help you.

Coaching is hard; let's make it easier.

Check out my website at http://jasonpayne.ca​

Thanks for reading, and have a great week.