According to the Mayo Clinic’s website, burnout is the state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. 

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Easy to see why coaches who experience burnout can be the downfall of a team.

But how does a coach reach this point? And how can we avoid it before it starts?

Founder of dailydiscipline.com Brian Kight has some ideas, specifically applied to football coaches. “I hear people being burned out from [things other than] the core portions of the work,” says Kight. “In other industries people get burned out with the work, not as much with coaching … I’ve been pretty hard on coaches and I’ll continue to be on how much wasted energy coaches put into things they need to stop wasting energy on.” 

The list of possible energy wasters and distractions is long. “[Right now] coaches are burning energy on youth entitlement, on digital addiction, on administrative incompetence, you name the issue … we could just keep going, and going, and going on things of wasted energy,” adds Kight. “And what happens is the most common form of burnout is, ‘I am spending so much time and energy on things [that are] not the game that I don’t even have any left to do the game itself. I’m out.’ That’s basically what I hear.”

Addressing these causes of burnout can come in a few different ways. “We need to look at [three] things, and when I say look at I mean evaluate and do something about [three] things,” says Kight. “Attention, time and energy – look at those three things. I was having a conversation with a coach in the pros about this yesterday … way too much is wasted.”

Kight is also a proponent of identifying what gives you energy and how you create energy for yourself. “I think the most underrated skill that’s maybe the most important skill in the world is the capacity to create your own energy,” adds Kight. “The number of things that pull energy away from us and that we give our energy to have increased in volume as well as how much energy they take. [They] have significantly outpaced how we create our own energy, and in fact, it’s even distracted us.”

For those coaches who have made it this far without reaching the initial stages of burnout, Kight has an additional piece of advice. “Be disciplined,” says Kight. “Be intentional, be purposeful, and be skillful about not wasting your energy on anything that would run you into the ground or put too much of an emotional strain on you that is a burden you can’t carry, or is not particularly valuable.”