Coaching vs Judging

I used to believe that effort guaranteed success. Work hard, follow the right steps, and things will turn out the way you want. Then I started watching my stepdaughter compete in gymnastics, and I began to see things differently.

In track and cross country, where my stepsons compete, the rules are clear. You run your race, and the fastest person wins. If you train harder, get stronger, and execute your strategy, you see the results. No one decides your time except you.

Gymnastics is not like that. You can put in the same level of effort, sacrifice, and discipline, maybe even perform your best routine, and still get scored lower than expected. Success is not just about performance. It is about someone else's judgment.

I have watched my stepdaughter pour herself into training, hit every skill, and still get a lower score than she expected. The frustrating part is that she cannot control it. She can do everything right and still walk away feeling like it was not enough.

Raising nine kids in a blended family, I have learned that each of them is wired differently. What motivates one might shut another down completely. But I have also seen one pattern hold up across all of them: when they feel like they are constantly being evaluated, they stop focusing on growth and start focusing on not messing up.

Looking back, there have been times when I tried too hard to keep a kid on the right path. I would step in, correct, give advice, and push a little too much. In my mind, I was helping. To them, it probably felt more like being judged.

A track coach doesn't decide who wins the race. They help their runners train, set goals, and get better, but the athlete is in charge of their own performance. A gymnastics judge holds the scorecard. They decide what counts, and a gymnast can put in the exact same effort as someone else and still walk away with a different result, just because of how someone else saw it.

If I'm honest, there have been times I acted more like a judge than a coach, not intentionally, but when a kid feels like they're being scored all the time, on their grades, their choices, their attitude, it wears on them. The pressure to always meet someone else's expectations is exhausting, whether you're eleven and doing a balance beam routine or an adult at a job.

It's the same in leadership. The best leaders I've worked for offered guidance and a vision, then let people execute. The worst ones kept re-evaluating and second-guessing instead of trusting their team to do the job they were hired for.

One of the bigger things I've had to unlearn as a parent and as someone who manages people is that holding on tightly doesn't produce better outcomes, it just exhausts everyone involved, including me. Some mistakes need to happen. Some lessons only land the hard way. My kids don't need me keeping score of every misstep. They need someone steady, who gives them room to figure things out and shows up when they actually need help.

Now, when I feel the urge to jump in and correct something, I try to ask myself whether I'm actually coaching, or just scoring. I don't always get it right. But I know this much: kids will struggle, and employees will make mistakes, and sometimes they need to. My job isn't to prevent that. It's to be there so they know they're not figuring it out alone.