By Aaron O’Connell
(March 1, 2022)

I have been coaching for over 30 years, and for the last ten years or so I have been placing equal importance on the personal and athletic development of my players. You could say I’m a holistic coach. So I got a great sense of achievement when I received the following message from a parent of one of my players: “You have fundamentally changed her outlook on life and she will rely on these valuable lessons throughout her life” (Parent of a youth player, 2020).

 I had left an indelible mark on this young person’s life and I had taught her life skills that she could apply outside her sport for the rest of her life. I recently conducted a research study into life skills coaching to further enhance my understanding of this area. In this article, I discuss what life skills are, their importance, and provide insight into how they are developed in sport. Are they a happy accident of coaching, or are they strategically and intentionally structured? I will conclude by providing some practical advice for coaches who are interested in following a similar approach.

What are Life Skills and How Important Are They?

Gould and Carson (2008) describe life skills as “internal personal assets, characteristics, and skills….that can be facilitated or developed in sport and transferred for use in non-sport settings”. Life skills development prepares the young person for the everyday challenges and risks they may face in life (Cope et al., 2017), and also helps to maximize their individual potential as a person and athlete. Like sports coaches, we “play the most crucial role” (Bowley et al., 2018) in facilitating that development. For example, we foster relationships with athletes and shape practices that provide them with a variety of learning experiences that reinforce the life skills message (Cope et al., 2017), but we may differ in our approach. Turnnidge et al. (2014) put forward two approaches that coaches use to teach life skills and promote transfer. The implicit approach rests on the idea that youth acquire life skills naturally when they experience the inherent demands of the sport as well as positive relationships with coaches, peers, and parents in sport. In contrast, the explicit approach posits that life skills and their transfer should be intentionally planned, taught, and enabled through definite strategies. 

How are Life Skills Developed?

My recent research involving 18 experienced athlete-centered coaches from 13 different sports provided insight into the strategies used by coaches in team, individual, and adventure sports. It explored how the nature of the sport affects the strategies used by coaches and provided a valuable understanding of the degree of intentionality in the development of life skills across the various sports types. The results indicated 38 life skills that were deemed important by the coaches with fourteen of these being common between the three different categories of sports (Figure 1). They also highlighted circumstances, where life skills emerged as a happy accident of participation or coach behavior, or as a result of deliberately planned coaching strategies, and these will be discussed in further detail here (Figure 2).

Life Skills as a Happy Accident of Participation

Surprisingly, the majority of coaches in this study did not include life skills in their session plans. Instead, life skills development emerged as a natural consequence of participation in either sport in general, sport with particular customs, or through specific practices within sessions. Let’s take a deeper look at these:

• A number of coaches suggested that “participation in any sport would give you some of those life skills”. For example, it teaches athletes to be very focused in their studies.
• Quite a number of coaches spoke how the particular characteristics of their sport lends itself to the development of certain life skills. Specifically, adventure sports coaches related how the outdoor environment “tends to be the great educator” where life skills get tuned and honed and developed in a way unlike traditional sports.
• Customs in sports like tennis and cricket require athletes to be able to think and act independently of the coach. For example, in tennis competitions it is not regarded as proper for discreet instructions to be issued by coaches, and athletes need to be taught to be self-reliant, so that they’re making the decisions on the court.
• Life skills were also seen as a by-product of session practices which saw rules, responsibilities and expectations of behaviour set by the coach . For example, time keeping rules that coaches set can help them form good habits that transfer to other areas of their lives.

Life Skills as a Happy Accident of Coach Behaviour

A number of coaches developed life skills as a by-product of their behavior, exemplified by a focus on building positive relationships, engendering control to athletes, role modeling expected behavior, and the use of questioning to build self-awareness in their athletes.

• Building positive relationships was seen by many as an essential precursor to life skills development, and that included both with athletes and parents.
• The majority of coaches focused on providing autonomy-supportive coaching climates. The adventure sports’ coaches in particular paid significant attention to promoting autonomy and independence from the beginning of their contact with athletes, where coaches want their athletes to be able to go away and perform the skill on their own as soon as possible within safety limits.
• Many of the coaches spoke about the importance of personally embodying the behaviors they were trying to instill in their athletes, and “being the change you want to see”.
• Quite a few of the coaches used questioning as a means of creating awareness, promoting self-discovery, and helping athletes in the decision-making process.

Deliberately Planning for Specific Life Skills – The Explicit Approach

Only a small number of coaches planned and targeted specific life skills. One coach adopted a three-phased approach to developing confidence, leadership, coping skills, and work ethic in her athletes.

• Phase 1 involves creating and facilitating a psychologically safe environment where “people feel comfortable” to be able to ask questions.
• Phase 2 involves the adoption of an explicit mantra, in this case “attitude and work rate”, which is within players’ control and is consistently referred to.
• Phase 3 involves putting athletes into situations, such as presenting on a group project, where they have to test themselves.

A very novel ‘theming‘ approach was used by one coach to develop skills that were important to him through “character coaching”.  In one such project, they used the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and looked at the role of astronaut Michael Collins, and the life skills selflessness, hard work, and humility that he could promote through it.

The Importance of Transfer Discussions

One additional finding from the research was how there was a lack of consistency in coaches’ approach to transfer discussions. Transfer represents a crucial, intermediary process (Pierce et al., 2017) between life skill learning in sport and skill application in another context. In this study, three strategies emerged for discussing the transfer of life skills to non-sport contexts.

• A small number of coaches rarely if ever conducted a discussion and expected athletes to “join the dots themselves”
• The majority of coaches held discussions that were informal, reactive to situations, and driven by what was happening at the time, where the coach has noticed something and jumped in to reinforce the link to outside of sport.
• Just one coach used a formal approach, which took the form of a wrap-up at the conclusion of a task or as part of a reflection at the end of the season. This helped the athletes identify the different transfer possibilities and prepared them for life skill application beyond the sporting context.

Athletes need support to make those linkages and connections to their learning, and to be able to transfer those life skills (Martin et al., 2021). The absence or hit-and-miss nature of discussions to enable this does not optimize life skills development (Bean et al., 2018).

What Can Coaches Do to Optimize Life Skill Development?

In order to maximize the learning outcomes, it is argued that coaches must consciously and deliberately focus on life skills development through planning, rather than expect that growth to occur as a happy consequence of participation in sport. It “should not be left to chance” (Camiré et al., 2012, p. 258). My research highlights a number of simple strategies that coaches can take to do this and these incorporate both implicit and explicit approaches:

• Create a safe environment where athletes can take risks, learn from mistakes, and meaningfully engage with others
• Pay attention to your soft skills (building relationships, autonomy, questioning, etc.)
• Select a life skill of the day based on athletes’ needs
• Build it into your coaching session activities
• Use debriefs to plant seeds and to help athletes make connections to non-sport domain
• Connect with parents and tell them what life skills you are working on. Get them to help
• Close that loop with a short check-in for progress at the beginning of the next session

In summary, life skills development can be both a happy accident of participation in sport or our coaching behavior. However, if we are to optimize the process, it should not be left to chance. Coaches need to plan and target specific life skills, and to help their athletes make connections to their learning via transfer discussions.

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References

Bean, C., Kramers, S., Forneris, T., & Camiré, M. (2018). The implicit/explicit continuum of life skills development and transfer. Quest, 70(4), 456-470.

Bowley, C., Cropley, B., Neil, R., Hanton, S., & Mitchell, I. (2018, September). A life skills development programme for youth football coaches: Programme development and preliminary evaluation. British Psychological Society.

Camiré, M., Trudel, P., & Forneris, T. (2012). Coaching and transferring life skills: Philosophies and strategies used by model high school coaches. The sport psychologist, 26(2), 243-260.

Cope, E., Bailey, R., Parnell, D., & Nicholls, A. (2017). Football, sport and the development of young people’s life skills. Sport in Society, 20, 789–801.

Gould, D., & Carson, S. (2008). Life skills development through sport: Current status and future directions. International review of sport and exercise psychology, 1(1), 58-78.

Martin, N., Camiré, M., & Kramers, S. (2021). Facilitating life skills transfer from sport to the classroom: An intervention assisting a high school teacher-coach. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1-25.

Pierce, S., Gould, D., & Camiré, M. (2017). Definition and model of life skills transfer. International review of sport and exercise psychology, 10(1), 186-211.

Turnnidge J, Côté J, Hancock DJ. (2014). Positive youth development from sport to life: Explicit or implicit transfer? Quest, 66(2), 203-217.