Chantal Valle: Rise and grind, but watch for burnout

Chantal Valle is a five-time national champion head coach of the University of Windsor Lancers women's basketball team, leading her teams through good times and bad.

With pressures on the court and on campus, Valle has spent a lot of time acting as a coach and a counsellor to her student athletes.

Valle is using that experience to offer advice and insight to CBC. Here is the second lesson in her ongoing series with CBC's Windsor Morning. Follow this link for her first lesson on how your mindset affects your performance.

Rise and grind

A few months ago I got an email from a former player, who had lofty goals and achievements for herself, and she's achieved most of them.

She graduated a few years ago, but she emailed me and said:

"Coach, I am confused. Here I am doing what I always wanted and I am bored. I don't know what to do. Do you think I should quit? Should I make a change?"

I've been the coach at the University of Windsor for 11 years, it goes by really fast. Through this time, I've had my share of dry periods. I am a motivated coach, I love my job but there are times where work is a drag.

In sport, we call this the grind. We have to push and push and push to get through. I told this player, you're entering a dry period and the most important thing to know is that it happens to everybody and it's normal.

It's OK to not be motivated to go to work. These dry periods will end, we just have to keep at it. Evaluating one's motivation is important.

When I went through my dry periods, I thought 'How is my personal life?' When I realized it's only my motivation to go to work, I realized, I was feeling the grind.

Watch for burnout

The problem comes when our emotions outside of work are not going well. Then we might be headed to something more serious a burnout.

It's important for me to evaluate whether I'm at one or the other.

I try to avoid going into burnout with a simple rule: Evaluate my emotions and give my life a rhythm. I have a 6-1 rule. I work hard six days a week but for one day, I shut everything down. I don't check my phone, I don't check my email and I don't answer my players. I take 24 hours to rest and have fun.

Sometimes when the grind is tougher, you might need two days, but that's OK.

If you keep a rhythm and make sure everything remains in check you should be able to power through those fallow periods when you just don't feel like getting out of bed.

Valle appears every other Wednesday at 7:30 a.m. on Radio-Canada's Matins sans frontieres 105.5 FM and 1550 AM and at 8:10 a.m. on CBC's Windsor Morning, 97.5 FM.