Hi – I was wondering what you thought about motivating rowers outside of practice, such as making healthy choices or attending practice more often. Sometimes when I try this I feel pretentious or nosy and even though I have respect from my teammates in the boat and at practice, they might not take me seriously or say something along the lines of, “thanks Coach”. Thanks for any advice.
Eh, I think this is one of those things where you have to know your audience and understand the culture of the program. If you’re a fairly casual team then having someone suddenly trying to inject in a level of enthusiasm and personal responsibility that isn’t typically there can come off as you being that “eager beaver” type of person that we all know and roll our eyes at. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to try to up the level of your team but … it doesn’t always work. It also depends on your experience level too. If you’re a novice and you’re walking down the hallways at school saying “make good choices!” to other people on your team then it can’t be hard to see how that would get annoying.
Personally, I really don’t like when people do this because it’s rare that it actually comes off as intended and not as coming from a place of superiority. It’s just one of those things that (maybe irrationally sometimes) really pisses me off, regardless of whether it’s happening to me or people around me. Making healthy choices, showing up to practice, etc. are things that people need to decide for themselves that they’re going to do and it can be really annoying to have someone in your ear telling you to do something that you aren’t fully committed to doing. It’s kind of like telling an addict that they need to get clean – most of them know that’s what they need to do but they don’t want to do it because someone’s telling them to, they want to do it because it’s what they want and choose to do. It’s a weird analogy but one of my coaches said that to us in college and it’s just always kinda stuck with me.
Ultimately I think you can go one of two ways here. One, just back off because this approach isn’t working. Two, talk to one person (your stroke seat or the person who seems to be the most committed out of the group) about why you’re doing this and get them to buy into it. It’s a lot easier to get other people to buy in if you’ve already got someone (influential) on your side. Think about how you’re communicating this too – if you feel like you’re coming off wrong figure out why. Is it just because people aren’t responding the way you want them to (you can communicate fine and still have people not respond) or is it because you actually do sound pretentious when you talk to them? This is a good skill to develop in general so I’d encourage you to do it regardless of what you end up deciding to do. Every situation is different but in this one I’d say it’s probably best to just let it go because it sounds like you’re (unintentionally) annoying your teammates more than you’re motivating them. I wouldn’t take it personally though, especially if you still get along well and they still respect you in general.
