Take home message

BIAS: IT IS A NECESSARY FILTER.

For Coaches

Experience is a great filter. But history is not a predictor of the future, merely a guide. Be mindful of your bias.

For Athletes

It is good to have a bias towards training practices that have worked well for you. You should know yourself well. Does not mean that there are not better ways.

Bias. It can be framed as negative, as though to be biased is bad. The reality is, we are overwhelmed by information every second that bias is critical to our attention and decision making. We have to know what we are going to pay attention to and what we are not. Bias is a necessary automatic filter. A bias can be defined as a disproportionate weight for or against an idea. Where it can be a problem as a coach is the ones we don’t know we have.

But as coaches, as humans, we have biases and they influence our decision making. I’m biased towards injury and likely to treat every niggle as a potential injury until I’m confident that it is not. I’m more likely to think a player who skips recovery early once or twice skips every recovery. I’m biased towards my playing group. They’re angels in the gym and if an athlete left weight on the bar,” it wasn’t one of mine - It was one of the T&F athletes cause they are always doing it” (two biases in one hit!).

Bias can be a positive. It can act as a filter, letting us ignore superfluous details, or heighten our awareness of important ones. However, when it comes to critical decision making, I find I am asking myself more and more where my bias is the process.

Am I disagreeing with that person because they annoyed me last time? Or is what they are proposing actually wrong?
Did that player run less in training because they are lazy? Or did they run as they needed too and I did not design the task well enough?
Is this kid rude today, because they are ‘always’ rude? Or are they having some troubles away from training that I need to be empathetic to?

It’s a hard skill, probably because it requires elements of patience and open-mindedness, two qualities that I am probably not renowned for, but I am working on. The skill for me is to take a brief moment and clear my head to ensure that my subjective decisions are as free from bias as possible, and open to alternative points of view. That is perhaps why it is so important to surround yourself with a range of people, then you can benefit from their bias which is likely different to yours. That offers you a perspective different to your own.

Another key for me is to be aware of my bad biases. I’m ok with my bias towards bad things, like driving situations that may lead to an accident. But to have the bias that ‘he/she is always late for training’ or ‘if someone was going to cut a corner, it was them’, are probably filters I need to be aware of and rectify.

Remember, having a bias is not necessarily good or bad. They help filter information. Just take a moment to reflect how you are filtering.

Cover photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

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Thanks again. BA.