Personality
Throughout these coaching sections, I’ve repeatedly mentioned the importance of getting to know the athletes you’re working with. While everyone is different, we can still broadly understand personality traits and have a general idea of what to look for. So, it’s beneficial to understand these general concepts of personality, so we can adapt the environment and our coaching styles to best fit individual athletes. Any tensions or misfits between an athlete’s environment and their personality will lead to stress and ultimately hinder performance.
One of the dominant models of modern personality trait research is the ‘Big Five’ model of personality. The five key traits are: agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extroversion, and openness. Let’s look at each of these and have a brief discussion about how they apply to trail and ultramarathon athletes.
First up, we have agreeableness. Agreeableness relates to how participative, helpful, cooperative, prosocial, team-oriented, and amendable a person is to instructions. An athlete with a high level of agreeableness will tend to be more cooperative and friendly, whereas an athlete with low levels of agreeableness will tend to be more suspicious and antagonistic toward others. While this trait is not directly related to athletic performance in an individual sport, it will still influence teamwork and social interactions, which may be relevant during group sessions. It is also positively associated with task-oriented coping mechanisms (i.e., focusing on the challenge at hand). Understanding how agreeable an athlete is will give you a clue as to how long it might take to build trust with this athlete and how well they will interact with others in group settings.
The next trait is conscientiousness. This relates to how reliable, trustworthy, orderly, dependable, and rule-following an athlete is. Conscientious athletes tend to have high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, and focus on goal-directed behaviours. They are organised and mindful of details; they plan ahead and will think about how their behaviour affects others. This trait is very prominent in endurance athletes, as they tend to be quite disciplined. As conscientiousness also correlates with how consistent an athlete tends to be in training, it’s important to have a good gauge of how an athlete scores in this trait. Athletes who strongly display this trait will tend to be disciplined and organised and have an easier time sticking to a consistent training schedule. However, athletes who score low on this trait may need more assistance in organisation and planning of details around training and races.
Our third trait is emotional stability, which is essentially the inverse of neuroticism. This reflects an athlete’s level of adjustment and emotional resilience in the face of challenges and pressure. Athletes who score low on this trait will be more likely to experience mood swings, anxiety, irritability, and sadness. High levels of emotional stability are beneficial in endurance sports as they can contribute to better stress management and fewer physical complaints. Meanwhile, less emotionally stable athletes may need more reassurance and assistance from you during stressful or high-pressure times.
Fourthly, we have extroversion; you may be quite familiar with the concept of an introvert versus an extrovert. Extroversion relates to the tendencies to be social, outgoing, expressive, and talkative. Extroverts tend to be more likely to seek the company of others, whereas introverts are more likely to enjoy time alone. Of course, a person’s level of extroversion may be rather situation dependent. For example, someone might be quiet and reserved and enjoy their time alone, and yet among their friends be quite loud and gregarious. Extroverted athletes might be more likely to want to have friendly chats with you and gain a lot of enjoyment and meaning from training with others. Introverted athletes, on the other hand, may be more inclined to do most of their training by themselves and really enjoy that time alone inside their own head. I find it’s important to make sure that your more extroverted athletes are getting to train with others regularly, or else they tend to stop enjoying their training.
Finally, we have openness, which is how receptive and open someone is to change, innovation, new experiences, and learning. Someone who scores highly in openness tends to be characterised by a good imagination, high levels of curiosity, and a wide range of interests. They will be more likely to engage in creative and abstract thinking and be comfortable with novelty and change. This trait will give you an idea of how willing someone might be to try new training methods and adapt to different environments and challenges. An athlete who scores high in openness might find it really exciting to constantly try new training methods and races. However, someone who scores lower in openness might prefer to stick to the tried-and-true methods that they know work for them and keep going back to their favourite events.
While it might not be practical to give all of your athletes a personality test, it is still useful to keep these Big Five personality traits in the back of your mind when getting to know an athlete. By doing so, you will hopefully be able to better adapt your coaching style and recommendations to best suit their preferences.
Key takeaways
1. Misfits between an athlete’s environment and their personality can lead to stress and underperformance
2. The Big Five personality traits are agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extroversion, and openness