The seeds of burnout are sown in October.
October is the hidden season. The quiet month before things really get hectic. For most of us, teams aren’t fully in it yet. Playoffs are far in the future. Report cards haven’t landed. Your evenings still belong to you. Your to-do list isn't a novel.
Which is exactly why October is the most dangerous month of the year.
The coach who burns out in February is not a victim of decisions made at that point. February is just where the body finally quits. You make decisions in October that make your season unsurvivable in February. In October, nothing feels wrong, so nothing gets audited.
The hidden season has a specific shape.
You start answering parent emails before you drink your coffee. You take a call during family dinner. You skip the walks or the gym because the season is “almost here, I’ll get back to it when things settle.” You tell your spouse you’ll be more present in two weeks. Then three. Then whenever the schedule opens up.
The schedule, of course, never opens up.
None of these feel like problems in October. Each one is tiny. Each one, on its own, is survivable. They are seeds, not storms.
But February is often when the storms arrive. And every seed you planted in October grows roots beneath the surface.
The lie underneath it all
The lie that lets the hidden season happen is a quiet one. It sounds like this: “I’ll handle it when things settle.”
You will not.
The version of you in February is tired and overbooked, running late and snapping at your athletes. That version of you is not going to make better decisions than the version of you reading this right now. The February version will be in survival mode. Survival mode is not the time to install new habits. It’s when you fall back on the old ones.
If you want a sustainable coaching life, the work must get done before things get hectic.
What I learned the hard way
I’ve been coaching for twenty-five years. I have burned out and watched good coaches around me burn out. I have had family dinners in the gym, missed my kids' events, and had a marriage fracture, all while I kept chasing an orange ball and a scoreboard.
Every single one of those stories started in countless Octobers.
Not with one big catastrophic decision. With a hundred small ones that nobody noticed at the time.
Here is what I know now that I wish I had known in year one.
The coaches who last are not the ones who are tougher in February. They are the ones who were honest with themselves in October.
The Hidden Season Audit
Twenty minutes this week will save you later in the season. Here is the audit I started to run every October before things got hectic in November.
1. Write your non-negotiables. The three or four personal practices that keep you a functioning human. For most of us: a sleep window, some kind of movement, one meal a day with the people you love, one block each week when you are not reachable. Write them down. Put them in the calendar in ink before November. These are not goals. They cannot be aspirational.
2. Set your email boundaries now. Decide this week what time you stop responding to parent and athlete emails each evening. Choose what time you will start in the morning, which emails get a same-day response, and which can wait 48 hours. The boundary you set now must hold through the end of the season. The boundary you try to set in February has no hope of holding in the storm.
3. Pick one protective ritual. Not an hour at the gym. One short, sacred thing that will still happen when you are at your worst. A 15-minute walk after practice. Ten pages of a book before bed. Sunday morning coffee with your spouse before the day starts. The ritual that survives the storm is the one short enough to always do.
4. Keep a one-line scorecard. From November through playoffs, write one line in a notebook at the end of each day. Not what you accomplished. Not what won. One question. How did I protect my energy today? That single question will show you in real time whether the Octobers are holding. The six-month-later audit is always too late. Too many times I protected everything else at my expense.
5. Have the conversation this week. Sit down with your spouse, your partner, your closest person. Tell them what the next four months look like. Explain the three non-negotiables you will not sacrifice. How will they tell you that you are slipping? And how will you react? Done in October, this is planning; in February, it is an intervention.
The questions worth sitting with
What am I already starting to say yes to that I know I will resent in six weeks?
What small thing have I already started to drop because the season is “almost here”? The walk. The real breakfast. The Thursday night with my kid.
What is the first lie I will tell myself about my own capacity in the next thirty days?
October will not punish you for ignoring these questions.
February will.
What is actually at stake
This is the connection that almost every coach I work with fails to make. This isn’t really about you.
Burned-out coaches do not just hurt themselves. You hurt your athletes. You become short-tempered when it matters most. You stop seeing the quiet kid who needs you. You coach from fear instead of purpose.
And more importantly, what are YOUR KIDS getting from you at that point? How about your spouse?
No one needs you to grind yourself to a fine paste. The people you love and the people you coach (sometimes the same people) need you to care enormously about something and still have a balance in your life.
The vision
Picture March for a second. Playoffs are here. The pressure is at its highest point of the year.
The coach who protected themselves in October is not frantic. Not snapping. Not missing their own kid’s recital. They are tired, sure. But they are present. They are coaching from a full tank. One they can refill, not a leaking one. Their family still recognizes them. Their body still works. They know who they are.
That coach was not born tougher. They just did the quiet work in October that nobody saw.
The hidden season is right now.
Protect your Octobers to be your best in March.
-Jason
P.S. Aligned: The Inside Out Path to Coaching Excellence comes out on Tuesday, and I can't wait for you to read it.
Podcast Episode of the Week
I am going to share some of my favorite coaching podcasts each week. I have been keeping a list of the best podcasts for five years, so there's plenty to choose from.
This episode from Finding Mastery features Dr. Gervais sitting down with Master Coach and Pitching guru Tom House. It is a great listen.
Are you or your athletes struggling to be their best?
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I help coaches thrive.
As a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and basketball coach with 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
- Teach mental skills to your team via Zoom
- Work 1-on-1 with coaches
- Work 1-on-1 with athletes
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If you’re feeling the weight of expectations, pressure, or burnout, you don’t have to figure this out alone.
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Have A Great Weekend.
