Brené Brown

I'm thinking about, have we talked about the research on NBA players who had abusive coaches?

You and I have offline, but we should talk about it here.

I think it's important.

Julian Barling and his colleagues published this study where they looked at coaches who were consistently berating and belittling their players and compared them with coaches who didn't.

And so you have a, every coach gets a score on how abusive they are.

And then you track what happens to players' careers if they happen to have a coach who was higher on the abusive end of the spectrum.

And it turns out those players go on to perform worse for the rest of their careers, even when they're not under that coach's thumb anymore.

Yes.

And, and one of the key mechanisms there seems to be that they have more emotional outbursts.

They are more dysregulated.

They commit more technical fouls.

They, they end up struggling more to coordinate with their teammates.

And like the, in the paper, the researchers talk about it as like, these players are a

They never fully healed the wounds of feeling like if I don't perform today, it means there might be something wrong with me.

And I never thought about it through a shame lens until you brought shame into this conversation.

But I think part of that scar is those abusive coaches are leaving these players with a lasting sense of shame that interferes with their ability to concentrate on performing their best.

I mean, a hundred percent.

A hundred percent.

Shame impairs performance.

I am actively working with teams right now who were talking about this a lot.