Coach Wellbeing Hub
Coach Wellbeing Hub
Wellbeing is the state that supports coaches to learn, thrive and contribute to the community during their time in HP sport and life afterwards.
A successful HP culture relies on coaches finding the right balance between wellbeing, engagement in activities outside of training and competition, and the requirements of their elite sport.
The Coach Wellbeing page centralises resources and services delivered by the AIS that are available to Australian HP coaches coaching within the athlete categorisation pathway to help coaches thrive.
Services are delivered by several divisions across the AIS to offer HP coaches support and development opportunities.
Explore services available to support wellbeing.
The Coach Wellbeing Hub has been designed to support and empower our HP coaching community to manage their personal wellbeing by equipping them with the support, knowledge, and personal development opportunities to navigate their personal and professional lives as they coach.
Bill Davoren, HP Coach Development Manager, AIS
Support and development
Mental Health Referral Network (MHRN)
The AIS Mental Health Referral Network (MHRN) is a group of expert psychologists and mental health clinicians who understand the pressures and complexity of life in a HP setting. The MHRN is available to coaches to assist when things are tough or if you want some advice on how to improve your wellbeing.
Talking to someone makes a difference.
Connect with the MHRN to access free and confidential support for yourself or to refer someone else.
Career Practitioner Referral Network (CPRN)
The Career Practitioner Referral Network (CPRN) enables Australia’s HP coaches access to a variety of professional career advice and guidance services.
A national network of professional career practitioners is available in all Australian states and territories, including those living regionally and internationally via online capability. Career practitioners have worked with those in HP and provide up-to-date knowledge about career development and the impact of the changing world of work.
Areas such as career guidance, exploration, planning, skill building and employment support are all available through the CPRN.
Wellbeing Toolkit
The toolkit comprises of three distinct modules that provide coaches with practical, evidence-based tools, to improve their wellbeing and personal capacity, to enable peak performance. Learning outcomes are delivered in the following areas:
- Knowledge: Increase knowledge and understanding of your strengths and how to use these to improve your performance in HP Sport; a deeper understanding of how emotions influence our behaviour (and others) positively and impacts our wellbeing and performance.
- Skills: Increase your ability to manage negative emotions, setbacks and critical transition points; utilise support networks for healthy relationships; identify, utilise and build strengths in self and others; recognise and take opportunities to activate your strengths in the HP environment; recognise and interpret interactions with others to benefit performance outcomes.
- Values/attitudes: Appreciate the value that our strengths play in achieving peak performance; appreciate the impact positive emotions and wellbeing can have on physical, social and intellectual health, as well as our resilience.
- Behaviours: Be someone who is agile in successfully navigating the HP journey, including managing emotional dynamics; self-aware to effectively respond to challenges and opportunities; recognising and interpreting interactions with others to benefit performance outcomes; proactively managing setbacks and critical transition points; and utilising support networks for healthy relationships.
This program is delivered upon request from HP-funded NSO Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement Managers.
- Target Audience: HP coaches coaching categorised athletes
- Nomination process: Nomination by HP-funded NSO Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement Manager
- Contact: professionaldevelopment@ausport.gov.au or your NSO Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement Manager
Wellbeing stories
Rohan Taylor (Head Coach, Swimming Australia) discusses how he keeps on top of his wellbeing.
Myriam Fox (National Senior Slalom Coach, Paddle Australia) on the importance of wellbeing.
Olympian and former Australian Men's National Hockey Head Coach Barry Dancer speaks candidly about his personal challenges with mental health both during and post-career.
Wellbeing reads
Why coach self-care is essential for better leadership
By Dr Vanessa Thiele, Psychologist
AIS-Coach-Wellbeing-articles_Self-care.pdf
It’s unlikely that the topic of coach self-care comes up in your formal reviews or daily training environment. But maybe it should.
Coaching in the high-performance arena is a demanding role. It requires a great deal of passion and dedication to withstand the pressures of competitive sport. In an industry that celebrates people for their physical and emotional toughness, coaches recognise the importance of self-care for their athletes – but is their own self-care overlooked?
‘Toughness’ is not something that is inherent in our personality; it’s the resilience developed to function well under high workloads and challenging situations. Resilience is a capability within all of us, and it requires intentional development and investment.
The term ‘self-care’ tends to get a bad rap, conjuring images of candlelit bubble-baths and crystals. While that’s nice for some, self-care is much more than that. Self-care is any deliberate action you take in order to support your mental, physical, and emotional health. It can be taking a walk outside to gain fresh perspective, calling a supportive friend after a rough day, or asking the assistant to take training one morning a week to spend time with your family.
Neurologically, there is an unbreakable link between self-care and performance. Engaging in self-care activities helps to turn off the stress hormones in the brain, adrenaline and cortisol, and engage the relaxation response, by releasing dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. These performance-enhancing neurochemicals improve the quality of your thinking, focus, and problem-solving. That all boosts your attitude, benefitting your coaching and the performance of your athletes.
Ironically, the toughest people among us are often those who know when to be gentle with themselves. Self-aware enough to listen to what they need, they invest in practices that nourish their mental health and wellbeing. The result is an ability to stay in the zone, and experience the energy, focus and enthusiasm that comes with being in a ‘flow’ state.
The Performance and Pressure Curve illustrates the empirical relationship between an individual’s performance and their level of pressure. The bell-shaped graph indicates that when we have an optimum level of pressure we perform at our highest level, and conversely we experience boredom with minimal pressure, and stress and burnout at high levels of pressure.
So how do we know what is the optimal amount of pressure? The fact is that it varies between different people. Not only that, but it will also vary for the same person over different days. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, some days we feel bulletproof, and other days we struggle to cope with the load we easily bore yesterday.
You see, what makes any amount of pressure optimal is our perceived ability to meet the challenges and demands we face. It all boils down to how resilient we are feeling. Looking after ourselves and practicing wellbeing-enhancing behaviours makes us feel more resilient. Therefore, self-care is literally the difference between pressure that breaks, and pressure that builds performance.
Here are three outdated mindsets to avoid, plus practices to strengthen your resilience as a coach:
- Stop wearing burnout as a badge of honour. Instead, recognise your personal warning signs of stress and ensure you’re getting the rest and recovery you need.
- Stop pretending you’re superhuman. Instead, acknowledge the toll work takes on your mental wellbeing, and seek support to help process the challenges you face.
- Stop labelling self-care as ‘soft’. Instead, make self-care a daily priority, keeping you in the optimal performance zone.
It can be hard to prioritise looking after ourselves when ‘real work’ feels more productive. Ultimately, we need to acknowledge that self-care is the real work – it makes us a better coach, a better leader, and ultimately, leads to bringing out the HP in our teams and athletes.
It’s unlikely that the topic of coach self-care comes up in your formal reviews or daily training environment. But maybe it should.
Using micro-breaks as the key to coach longevity
By Dr Vanessa Thiele, Psychologist
AIS-Coach-Wellbeing-articles_Self-care.pdf
Gone are the days when we would push athletes to work at their absolute maximum level, repeating the same training routine, with minimal recovery, often for months on end. More than likely, come competition time, we’d end up with a bunch of overtrained, injury-prone, and exhausted athletes.
Today, we understand the science behind high performance. We recognise the role that rest and recovery plays in sport, along with varying the intensity of training, diversifying exercises, and including the element of fun. There’s clear evidence that managing wellbeing is critical for high performance, because our performance on the field isn’t just a product of our physical fitness, but also our mental and emotional fitness.
How would you describe your work week as a coach? If terms like ‘crazy-busy,’ ‘high pressure,’ or ‘flat out’ spring to mind, you could be like the overtrained athlete, putting in maximum effort for minimal gains. Unfortunately, ‘busy’ and ‘productive’ are not the same thing, which can result in a downward spiral of working harder to produce less, leaving you physically and emotionally wrecked.
Besides being detrimental to our health, the habit of working at a frenetic pace and nudging the boundaries of burnout sets a terrible example for the athletes we lead. An ability to role-model work practices that support wellbeing is critical for coach credibility and team confidence.
We can overcome this decline to burnout with a common high-performance strategy. We know that high intensity interval training (HIIT) is an effective training technique because it enables us to push the boundaries of physical capability, through balancing intense bouts of work with brief recovery breaks. From a brain perspective, the HIIT technique is also ideally suited to maximise performance.
Achieving maximum productivity, engagement and high quality work is all about focus. Studies into the neuroscience of attention reveal that our brain cannot sustain focus endlessly. Just as muscles need rest to regain full power, so does our brain. Research indicates that 60-90 minutes is the limit of our attention span. Therefore, optimising our mental capacity includes planning for intense periods of focus followed by short intervals of rest, fun or play.
Recent neuroscience studies have proved that micro-breaks can aid memory and learning. For new information to become memory, it must pass through an emotional filter called the amygdala to reach the prefrontal cortex. When our brains become frustrated, anxious, confused or overwhelmed, the activation of the amygdala surges until this filter becomes a stop sign. The passage of information cannot get past the filter, and new learning no longer reaches the prefrontal cortex and sustained memory.
Having brief brain breaks not only allows us the mental space to regulate our emotions, but also switches the type of mental activity from one area of the brain to the other. Much like resting one muscle group while you work another in weight training, this intermission allows the brain’s chemicals to replenish and our capacity for focus to be restored.
Strategies to optimise your performance and wellbeing at work:
- Program your day so after every 60-90 minutes you have a 5-10-minute recovery micro-break. Use an alarm.
- Use your mini-break to do something completely different. For example, if you’ve been sitting at your desk, get up and have a snack or drink of water out in the fresh air. If you’ve been on field or deck training, seek a quiet place and do a 5-minute meditation or deep breathing.
- Plan longer breaks into your day, at mid-morning, lunch and mid-afternoon to further recharge your productivity. Use these 20-30 minute breaks to go for a walk and listen to a podcast, have lunch with someone, or engage in a hobby. Learning, playing and socialising are the best recovery breaks, because they change your inner state of focus as well as recharging your battery.
Coaching can be an intense role, and coaches expend a lot of energy, every day. But that energy must be continually restored for career longevity. The idea of resilience has become confused with ‘toughing it out’ or being a workaholic, when this isn’t scientifically true. Resilience and longevity is about how you recharge, not how long you endure.
It’s unlikely that the topic of coach self-care comes up in your formal reviews or daily training environment. But maybe it should.
Wellbeing a key to successful coaching
By The Australian Institute of Sport
In the past 14 months Stacey Marinkovich has become a mum, the Australian Diamonds netball coach and has found far greater balance in her career than ever before.
Marinkovich will speak at the AIS World Class to World Best Conference, February 23-24, and encourage Australia’s High Performance (HP) coaches and sporting leaders to prioritise their own wellbeing too, along with the athletes they naturally tend to put first.
“I think Australian sport has led the way with the focus on athlete wellbeing, we’ve always thought about their performance psychology as well as their life balance with study, work and evolving as a person. Sport made that a focus,” Marinkovich said.
“But I don’t think coaches or sport leaders necessarily follow the instructions we give out in that regard. In elite sport, wins and losses can determine whether you keep your job, there’s expectation, the job’s become more complex and the time commitment has expanded. Generally as a coach you’re on call for your players 24-7 because you want them to be happy and healthy.
“But you also have to be energised when you’re a coach, players know when you’re on song and when you’re not. The reality is, you have to make big decisions and often in high pressure moments and you want to make sure you have absolute clarity in what you’re doing. So a coach’s wellbeing is important to be able to perform your job at the optimal level.
“It’s great that we are increasing the focus on the coaching side of wellbeing too, making sure we don’t burn-out because it can be easy to do.”
Marinkovich began her national playing career with the AIS in 1999 and is also now a member of the AIS National High Performance Coach Development Taskforce, launched late last year with the aim of making Australia the world leader in modern HP coaching development.
Marinkovich believes an increasing focus on coach and leadership wellbeing will benefit not only the individuals, but also have a sustainable impact on the Australian sporting system.
Last year, with the support of Netball Australia and her club, the West Coast Fever, Marinkovich had her baby son with her in the quarantine Hub for the 2020 Suncorp Super Netball season.
“I’ve really jumped in the deep end in the past year and I’ve got a bit going on,” Marinkovich said, laughing. “But it’s actually balanced my life out and made me prioritise the right things at the right time. It’s very easy to get all wrapped up in the HP world, but you’ve got to find the ability to switch off too. I think I’m more purposeful within the training environment and at work, but I’m able to balance that with being at home and embracing my down-time.
“You want coaches to stay in the system for a long time because that means you’re retaining the intell and experience to continually evolve. To have people who are balanced in their lives means they can still enjoy their coaching for long periods of time, it’s only going to strengthen the development pathways to our elite programs.
“I feel privileged to be part of the national coach development taskforce because we’re looking to drive all Australian sport forward, not just the sports we represent.”
Marinkovich will join Olympic triathlete and Triathlon Australia CEO Miles Stewart and Australian Para-cycling coach Warren McDonald for a discussion on ‘Driving performance and coach wellbeing’ at World Class to World Best (#WC2WB).
World Class to World Best is Australia’s premium HP sport conference and this year will feature an incredible line-up of Australian and international speakers. International coaching icons like Eddie Jones (rugby) and Judy Murray (tennis) will feature. The conference will also draw on leadership advice from outside sport including: former Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Centre Ellen Ochoa; Mental Performance Advisor for Cirque du Soleil, Veronique Richard; and New York Times best seller David Epstein.
Stacey Marinkovich Australian Diamonds netball coach. Photo courtesy of Marcela Massey and Netball Scoop.
In the past 14 months Stacey Marinkovich has become a mum, the Australian Diamonds netball coach and has found far greater balance in her career than ever before.
More information
For more information, please email hpcoachdevelopment@ausport.gov.au.