While it is important to feel responsible for the safety of your players, a team of UK-based academics found that feeling guilty when players suffer serious injuries can have a long-term negative impact on your well-being and coaching experience.
Feeling guilty may seem like an intuitive response to something going wrong in an environment or situation that you are responsible for, but serious player injuries are classified in the DSM-5, the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals, as traumatic for coaches.
A team of academics in the UK, who studied the psychological impact of serious player injuries on coaches, claimed that coaches should instead work on managing their feelings of guilt in relation to adverse events such as player injuries, as that puts them in a better position to support their injured player’s recovery and has a positive impact on their own well-being, improving the experience for themselves and their participants.
How can I manage my feelings of guilt?
UK Coaching Research Team
About the Author:
The Research Team at UK Coaching is passionate about applied research and is helping to shape coaching practice and policy through robust, high-quality research and analysis. Our goal is to improve the evidence base for coaching and to become a hub of research excellence for coaching in the UK.