Being a Sports Coach Taught Me... | Virtual Assistant for Photographers

Did you know that I used to be a sports coach?

Before I transitioned to becoming a virtual assistant for photographers, I was a club sports coach for 6 years. 🤯

I spent all those late nights running practices, writing workouts, traveling on the weekends, managing parents & athletes: the whole shebang. 🏊🏻‍♂️ (I know more about the sport of swimming then I will ever need again haha)

Being a sports coach taught me a lot of things, but one thing that I found carried over from to entrepreneurship (and honestly every area of life) is: mindset.

And you probably hear about it like 50,000 times a day on social media, especially as a business owner. But when you hear about “mindset”, it can be vague & unhelpful. But addressing your MINDSET as a business owner is one of THE most helpful things you can do. I won’t stop talking about it, because it’s so freaking impactful. But it doesn’t help if it isn’t p r a c t i c a l.

So I wanted to break down the mindsets that being a sports coach taught me, that help the most when it comes to running your own business.

ONE:
You have to believe in yourself.
PUMP THE BREAKS: I don't mean rainbows and butterflies and unicorn dust bullshit. What I mean is… even when, deep down, you are worried…you still sit there and make a conscious choice to tell yourself that you are going to do it come hell or high water. You ARE going to make this happen. Period. No if, ands, or buts. End of conversation. It will be happening. You don't have to believe it. But you need to choose to view it that way.
You aren't waiting for the feeling of self belief. It's a choice and that should feel empowering, you know?

TWO:
The second successful mindset being a sports coach taught me… have a “zoomed out perspective”. So for sports, I would coach my athletes & talk about goal setting. We would look at a larger chunk of time in order to accomplish their goals. So every race, or every practice, fit into that larger cohesive picture of where they wanted to take their athletic careers.
As a business owner, I see a lot of people get caught up in the details and minutiae of things. That is really pulling their energy away from the leadership that their business needs from them. Having a ‘zoomed out perspective’ means that you allow yourself to delegate. You outsource. You allow things to not go perfectly. You are not caught on the tiny details, but you are managing a living organism: your business!

Every single one of us struggles with maintaining a good mindset. The ebb and flow is to be expected. Like… we're going to have days where we feel like freaking out. We're going to have days when we feel extremely discouraged and wanna throw in the towel. We literally allllll have those days. I do too!

And if you can ride those waves, choose to not sink your teeth into those fears, and re-align your mindset... You're going to unhook yourself from those emotions and be able to keep moving your business forward.

This is absolutely crucial to the success of your business. I've worked with a lot of photographers and mindset is the number one thing I've seen, propel or halt a business.

If you really want to dive into mindset work, I recommend this book by Carol Dweck.