500 Words a Week - Culture & Community

When looking at sport, I believe culture and community has a huge impact on performance. As mentioned in the past Steve Magness beautifully summarizes how culture is filling people’s basic needs. People need to feel valued, to make them feel this we need to ensure 3 things:

1, Make them feel that they belong

2, Make them feel they can get better

3, Make them feel that they have a voice

Magness states this is your foundation. No fancy motivation tactics matter if the foundation isn’t set.

This has some commonalities with the 4 principles for promoting mental health from the book “High Performance Training for Sports”, which the quotes below are taken from.

Principle 1: Value the whole person – “Athletes and coaches stressed that the best sporting environments they had been part of valued the person as well as the performer.” Links to making them feel they belong, as we value athletes/ coaches beyond performance alone.

Principle 2: Provide informed choice and autonomy – “If our choices are taken away from us and every second of every day is planned for us, then it is likely our mental health will suffer.” Links to making them feel they have a voice.

Principle 3: Promote connection with other people – Links to making them feel they belong.

Principle 4: Prioritize self-care and recovery

By placing an emphasis on culture and community, we will not only hopefully enable a better performance environment but help with promoting mental health also.

If culture and community is valued so highly in sport, should we not try also apply this to our personal lives? There is a large body of evidence supporting that loneliness, social disengagement and group-level segregation are associated with mortality. Social contact with 6-7 friends on a weekly basis had a lower mortality risk than those in contact with ≤1.

An interesting point is on group-level segregation, what this refers to is those who belong to a social group with a relatively small diameter. For example, if a friendship group has a diameter of two, every person in that group is either each other’s friend or a second degree association of a friend (a friend’s friend). They may have many friends, but even if they were to extend the degree of connections as far as possible, the total number of social ties they could reach would be small, thus they are segregated as a group. (Study this is taken from).

This makes me think about how we can be guilty of just associating or being friends with those that also work in our profession. I believe this can also be negative from an ability to generate new ideas/thinking to improve our work. If all you surround yourself with is S&C’s, all you’re going to think or discuss is S&C. Widen your horizon. This was something I was guilty of once starting within S&C, majority of my friends were S&C coaches, majority of what I read about was S&C. By saturating yourself with a topic, you are bound to absorb and remember some key points, so doing this early on in your career will help. However, I believe this does not lend well to a sustainable long term career.