LET’S TALK ABOUT “TRUST THE PROCESS”

DON’T LET A MISCOMMUNICATION DERAIL YOUR COACHING RELATIONSHIP

Almost everyone who has worked with a coach has heard the phrase “trust the process” at some point, a cliché that can either be a harmless reminder on one hand and a relationship-wrecking miscommunication on the other. When it’s a potential relationship-wrecker, “Trust the Process” is one of those last resorts in the coaching toolbox, and deploying it can be avoided through regular, trusting, and open communication—you know, the kind of thing every coach and athlete should prioritize throughout their time working together. Today we’ll talk about how we arrive at this last resort, and how the phrase often means totally different things to coach and athlete. Finally, we’ll offer some solutions to this outdated phrase.

1. How it comes up

2. POV: athlete

3. POV: coach

4. How to avoid it in the first place

5. What to do if the phrase seems unavoidable

How “trust the process” comes up

“Trust the process” tends to appear in coach/athlete relationships when regular communication has broken down, and the athlete and coach aren’t hearing each other effectively. Often two things are happening: on one side, the athlete has a question about their training or racing. On the other side, the coach fields a question about training or racing from the athlete. In a positive and healthy relationship, the athlete asks the question and the coach answers it, and the flow chart ends. But when the relationship isn’t functioning as normal due to prior missteps and miscues between coach and athlete (usually brought about by poor or infrequent communication), this ask-a-question-field-a-question two-step can snowball quickly into disaster. Let’s examine a few different scenarios and see how we can extricate ourselves from this possibly relationship-ending minefield.

POV: The athlete

As athletes, we have a lot going on when we think about our coaches. Hiring a coach is no small expense for an athlete, and represents a significant investment on that athlete’s part, roughly on par with purchasing a new bicycle every calendar year. Athletes rightly expect to be able to ask their coaches almost anything, as long as we’re sticking to the realm of training for and competing in their sport of choice. Athletes expect their coaches to answer questions thoroughly and promptly, just as they would expect a good teacher to do so.

Not every coach, however, has a background in solid teaching principles. If a student asked a teacher to explain iambic pentameter, or how the quadratic equation works, they would be stunned to hear the teacher say “trust the process,” in answering their question, essentially telling the student that their question is pointless and they should simply sit in their chair, listen, and not ask questions. When you think about “trust the process” appearing in this context, it is as toxic as very old-school teaching methods, the ones that expected students to simply absorb information like hard drives. At this stage in educational theory we know that not all students work that way, so we can’t approach all students that way. As coaches it is our job to hear a question and do our best to explain ourselves, keeping in mind the different ways that our athletes learn from us.

So if you’re an athlete and you get “trust the process” from your coach as the first way that coach answers your question, we would urge you to find a different coach. If an athlete hears “trust the process” as the initial response to their sensible question, what that athlete hears is, instead, “I am either too lazy, too uniformed, or too uncaring to answer your question, even though you are the employer and you pay me for my services.” This deployment of the phrase is coach-athlete communication at its worst, its most paternalistic and cynical. By saying “trust the process” in this way, with no further explanation, the coach essentially tells the athlete “it isn’t important for you to understand the process, and you should implicitly trust me because I am in a position of authority.” Unfortunately for that coach, however, using TtP in this way deeply undermines their authority in the same way that the sycophantic courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes undermine their authority by placating the naked emperor.

POV: The Coach

Setting aside the toxic coach we’ve just described above, let’s come at the statement from a different perspective. Let’s picture a good coach, one who seeks to deeply know their athletes and answer their questions to the best of their ability. These patient, hardworking coaches strive to learn their whole careers in order to serve their athletes and help them improve.

This coach has a talented but anxious athlete, one who can’t seem to stop worrying about the pace of their development. The athlete has hopped from coach to coach over the years, never staying in one place for long. They usually stay focused on outcomes instead of steady development of their abilities, have trouble sticking to one consistent program, and often rewrite workouts or disregard session descriptions entirely. In short, they can be challenging to coach, because they often try to wrest control of the program from the coach, usually saying something like “I know my body best.” That is certainly true, but until this athlete actually trusts a coach and buy into that coach’s process, they are throwing money away each month. Since we’re assuming a good, principled coach, we can also assume this coach is doing a pretty good job of developing a program for this athlete. If the athlete is changing workouts or asking questions the coach has answered many times before, we may see the poor coach beginning to get exasperated. “I’ve answered this question every phone call for six months, now,” the coach says to themselves. “I don’t think I am being heard.” Frustrated and not sure what to do, the coach tosses up their hands and finally exclaims “I wish you would just trust the process!” Of course, this answer will not satisfy the athlete in question, since the answer is even *less* descriptive than the answers the coach has been giving, since TtP basically says “can we stop talking about this, please?” We’ve all worked with athletes that can try our patience, but telling them, in essence, that they shouldn’t be asking questions (even if it is the same question), doesn’t help at all. But let’s extend some compassion to the coach in this situation, since they’ve tried everything they can to get through to the athlete. In this case, it is the athlete who is driving the relationship into the TtP cul de sac.

How to avoid “trust the process”

TtP appears when coach/athlete communication has broken down. Maybe you’re an athlete with a bad coach who can’t or won’t answer questions effectively. As we’ve already talked about, saying “Trust the Process” basically says “please don’t ask me any more questions,” essentially “I don’t want to talk to you about this.” Maybe the coach doesn’t want to answer the athlete’s question because the coach feels it is pointless, and the athlete doesn’t believe in them or their philosophy or their approach to developing the athlete. We have seen both situations during our decades of coaching. Here is how to rectify the impasse from both perspectives.

The Athlete

If or when you hear your coach say “trust the process,” and you feel your question is good, sensible, and *new* (asking your coach the same question week after week will only encourage them to eventually toss up their hands and say “Trust the Process” or something like it—more on this later), then try using the following statement, adjusting it in your own words if necessary.

If your coach hears you say this and still doesn’t tell you more about their process or training philosophy, then alarm bells should be going off for you. This coach is either unable or unwilling to tell you how they work, and you should start looking for a new one post-haste!

The Coach

For a coach, when we feel impelled to say “trust the process,” the motivation is usually a perceived lack of trust from our athlete. If we are good, thoughtful, thorough coaches, coaches who know their athletes and work tirelessly to modify our training to the individual physiologies we are responsible for developing, then saying something like “trust the process” is often a last resort. We will do well to remember that athletes have made a significant investment in hiring us, and that training and racing represent an important aspect of their identities. Many athletes have lofty goals and those goals come coupled with an understandable anxiety about doing everything possible to achieve results. Couple that anxiety with the reality that an athlete often has a, well, accelerated timeline on which they’d like to achieve their results (a timeline that may or may not be synced to the coach’s timeline), and you have a recipe for friction.

When a good coach feels that they need to say “trust the process” (which really means “please trust me”), it’s usually because they have answered this athlete’s particular question time and time again, over weeks, months, or even years. When it seems like a repeated philosophy or explanation just doesn’t land, despite rephrasing the answer, the poor coach can begin to feel that this athlete will never trust the way that they work. That feeling is frustrating and enervating for a coach. Just as we did above, here is a quote that can work if you find yourself in this situation.

When to call it

“Trust the process” should be viewed as a symptom of a coach-athlete relationship that is not going well, because it is a statement that shuts down conversation instead of encouraging discussion. Good coach-athlete relationships rely on open, honest, and respectful discourse. Sometimes that discourse is easy, and sometimes it can feel like conflict. We should not shy away from these moments of conflict, because they help us understand each other better. Think of conflict or hard conversation with your coach or athlete as the process of sanding away misunderstandings between the two of you. Maybe the athlete needs a little more clarity about their training program; maybe the coach needs to see an athlete earnestly trying to adopt the philosophy the coach implements. There comes a time, however, when it is clear that the coach and the athlete are too far apart in terms of how they work best. This is no one’s fault—just a mismatch of coach and athlete styles. So “trust the process” need not be a death knell ringing the end of the relationship, but it could be an early warning sign that the two of you need to explore your different values, philosophies, and communication styles.