I'm so tired of it.

The "high-performance culture" we keep talking about. I know controversial coming from me... So let's dig in.

So let's begin with the "raise the standard" crowd. The "no days off, no excuses" language that's been passed off as excellence for so long that we've started calling it THE path to becoming great.

And look... I've been inside that world. I played professionally. I heard it, grew up in it, believed in it too.

BUT what I have a problem with is that belittling that happens in these cultures that is dressed up as "tough love". The high standards that is actually just condescending behavior from the leaders.

The constant signal that your value is the next result, and your character is whatever the latest performance says it is.

We normalized it. And we told ourselves it was the only way to become great.

It isn't.

There's a version of "hard coaching" that works. It's honest. It's demanding. It holds people to a high standard without letting them off the hook.

Athletes who've had that kind of coach usually remember them with complicated gratitude.. usually the person who saw more in them than they saw in themselves.

Then there's another version.

Shame-based coaching.

It sounds like this:

"What is wrong with you?" after a missed shot.

"How are you not getting this? We've trained all week." said with just enough contempt for everyone in the room to know that this person is not getting it.. So it must be their fault.

"You're too short. Too fat. Not enough. Not something enough to be good." .. dressed up as high standards and superiority.

And when someone questioned it, the culture had a ready explanation: this is what greatness looks like. If you can't handle it, maybe you don't belong here.

(Any of you heard those words or frames..?)

I keep thinking about a gymnast describing her screaming coach: "I knew she cared about me. The motive was to make me the best."

That's a person who has learned to tolerate something harmful and frame it as necessary for their success. The belief has been wired in. The harm has been recruited into the story of how greatness is made.

But surviving something isn't the same as thriving because of it.

The research backs this up. Julian Barling and colleagues studied abusive coaching in the NBA across 693 players and 57 coaches across the 2000/01 to 2005/06 seasons.

They rated coaches' biographies for abusive leadership. They measured athlete aggression and task performance from objective sources. And they found that exposure to abusive leadership influenced both the trajectory of aggression and task performance over players' careers. Controlling for tenure, salary, team winning percentage, and injuries.

The harm didn't end when the chapter ended. The body kept the score. The loop kept running also after they were no longer coached by those abusive coaches.

 >> The "high standards" that were supposed to make them better had made the rest of their careers and lives measurably worse. <<

Brené Brown's work on shame tells us why.

Shame drives concealment. It makes people hide.

-> Don't ask the question. Don't raise your hand. Don't say "I don't know."
Don't be the one who doesn't have the answer.

Don't suggest the new idea, the creative angle, the thing that might not work because what if it doesn't, and what if everyone sees.

We trade the growth, the creativity, the performance that was actually possible just to avoid being seen wrong or trying.

Shame also destroys the ability to come back from failure. And coming back from failure is the top predictor of athletic success.

The coach using humiliation to "build mental toughness" is dismantling the exact thing they're trying to construct.

Here's what I've come to believe:

The "standard approach" you might have been running your performance through is learned but it might also be doing more harm now than good.

It was installed by someone who taught you that pressure is a mind problem, and that pushing harder through the discomfort is the answer.

So when you keep pushing, performing, keep executing, keep delivering the result but the ceiling doesn't move, the results are not as good as you want them to be, the high level consistency is missing..

This loop connected with or driven by shame is likely running underneath the effort that the effort can't reach.

And the only way to break a learned pattern is to meet it at the level it was installed.

The so called high standards kept people small and the so called mental toughness kept the creativity, answers, potential surface level.. The pressure that they created kept also the body in survival and survival doesn't perform at a high level.

Survival plays it safe.

​​​If you recognize yourself from this.. I want you to know that a) the way you've been going about it, might not to take you where you need to go. and b) you can change this.

c) This is where you can start: email me "blog shame" at saana@saanakoljonen.com and I'll send you to the exercise I make my clients use to free themselves from these harmful patterns they learned when they were younger.