How Invisible Beliefs Shape Our Coaching Decisions
Coaches often assume their decisions come from experience, knowledge, or logic. But in reality, many of their actions start much earlier, in the beliefs they hold about how players learn and why teams fail. These beliefs are usually invisible and shape how a coach interprets everything that happens in a team.
Let me start with a familiar story.
Two coaches, Nick and Jhon, work with the same League of Legends roster. They scrim together, review together, and share the same goals. After a week focused on teamfighting, they finally win a late-game fight against a strong opponent. They walk off stage feeling confident. The work is paying off.
The next day they play a weaker team. They lose every teamfight. The match ends in under 30 minutes.
Nick walks backstage furious. In his mind, the didn’t try, didn’t focus, and didn’t care enough to apply what they learned.
Jhon sees something else. He believes the week’s concepts were too complex. He thinks the players are still integrating the new ideas and need more clarity.
Two coaches. Same week, same players, same information. Two completely different explanations.
This article is about that hidden layer. It’s about how a coach’s beliefs influence their perception, decisions, and behavior, often without them realizing it.
The Hidden Engine Behind Coaching Decisions: Beliefs
When people describe a “strong coach,” they usually talk about knowledge, communication, leadership, or structure. Those things matter. But they’re built on top of something far more basic: the stories you tell yourself about how players learn and why teams succeed or fail.
A belief is simply a mental shortcut. It’s your brain’s way of saying, “This is how the world works.” And it shows up as simple, almost invisible rules you carry around.
Things like:
“If players care, they will focus and execute.”
“If something is not working, it is because we are not teaching it well enough.”
“Pressure reveals who is truly competitive.”
Most of the time, coaches are not consciously aware of these stories. They sit in the background, filtering every scrim, every mistake, every conversation, and guiding how they respond.
Beliefs shape three important things:
How you see reality.
You never see a situation in a neutral way. Your belief system highlights some moments and dims others.
Where you place your attention.
Your mind naturally looks for things that confirm what you already think and ignore the ones that could challenge it.
Which options you consider.
Your belief narrows the list of solutions before you even notice them. It filters them automatically.
In the story, both Nick and Jhon watched the same games and the same mistakes. Yet for Nick, the loss confirmed a belief about effort and caring. For Jhon, the same loss confirmed a belief about learning systems and teaching quality.
Once that belief kicks in, everything that follows is different. How they talk to players. What they change in the next week of practice. What they demand and what they forgive.
The Belief-to-Action Chain
To understand how this works in practice, it helps to think of coaching behavior as a chain. When a situation hits you (good or bad) you go through a sequence without realizing:
Beliefs → Shape what you think is possible and what you think explains results.
Perception → Shapes what you notice and pay attention to.
Knowledge → Shapes how you organize and explain what is happening.
Skillset → Shapes what you feel capable of doing about it.
Action → What you actually do in response.
Let’s revisit Nick and Jhon through this chain.
Step 1: Beliefs
After the loss, both coaches ask themselves, consciously or not, “Why did this happen?”
Nick’s belief: “If players know what to do and still fail, it is because they are not trying hard enough or do not care enough.”
Jhon’s belief: “If players know what to do and still fail, it is because the teaching and learning process is not good enough yet.”
Both are trying to explain the same event. But their answers pull them in different directions.
Step 2: Perception
Their beliefs guide what they notice.
Nick pays attention to body language when they lose a fight, the hesitation, slow reactions and tone of voice. He labels these moments as lack of focus or effort.
Jhon pays attention to clarity of calls, confusion between concepts and when the execution breaks down. He labels these moments as learning issues and overload.
They’re watching the same game, but focusing on completely different details.
Step 3: Knowledge
Next, they use their knowledge and experience to make sense of what they see.
Nick’s interpretation:
“We repeated these concepts all week.”
“We showed them in review and in drills.”
“If they still fail, discipline and motivation must be the problem.”
Jhon’s interpretation:
“We introduced several new layers of detail in a short time.”
“The players can repeat the concepts in scrims, but not under pressure.”
“The problem is how we structured the learning.”
Their knowledge bends around the beliefs they already hold.
Step 4: Skillset
Then each coach looks to their own strengths to respond.
Nick’s skillset:
He feels confident using strong speeches, emotional pressure, and high standards.
He knows how to tighten rules, increase accountability, and push intensity.
These are the tools he reaches for when he thinks effort is the core issue.
Jhon’s skillset:
He feels confident redesigning drills and breaking concepts into smaller steps.
He knows how to adjust the structure of reviews and practice blocks.
These are the tools he reaches for when he thinks learning design is the core issue.
Each coach does what feels natural based on the story in their head.
Step 5: Action
Finally, we see the visible part.
Nick’s action
He explodes after the game.
He gives a harsh speech about effort, caring, and professionalism.
He may decide to increase scrim volume or tighten rules next week.
Jhon’s action
He tries to understand where players got lost in the execution.
He suggests simplifying concepts, changing how they teach teamfights, or reducing the amount of new information.
He may propose different drills, more focused reviews, or clearer in-game priorities.
These actions might look emotional or spontaneous from the outside. But they’re the logical end of a belief-to-action chain that started long before the match.
A Simple Framework for Examining Your Beliefs
Recognizing that beliefs shape your coaching is the first step. The second step is learning how to examine them.
Here is a simple framework you can use whenever you find yourself reacting strongly, making a quick judgment, or feeling stuck in a cycle with a player or the team.
1. Ask what else could explain the behavior
Start by questioning your first interpretation. Pause and ask:
If I couldn’t use my initial explanation, what would I say instead?
If a coach I respect faced this challenge, what would he say?
Is this a pattern in every situation, or only in this specific context?
Force your mind to look beyond your default belief.
2. Gather more information
Most coaching mistakes come from acting with too little information. Before deciding, collect data:
Watch the same play from multiple perspectives and with communication.
Ask players how they understood the concept you taught.
Observe their body language during reviews and scrims.
Look for the moment where the confusion actually starts.
The goal is not to understand the situation well enough to ensure the belief is not doing all the interpretation for you.
3. Test alternative interpretations
Pick one of the alternative explanations and act as if it were true for a moment.
If the issue is understanding, not effort, what drill or exercises would I use?
If the problem is overload, how would I simplify the concept?
If the player learns visually, how would I explain this with clips instead of words?
These questions will help you discover new solutions you would have never seen otherwise.
4. Adjust your coaching approach
Once you see which explanation fits best, adjust your coaching accordingly:
Change how you teach the concept.
Change the pace of learning.
Change the difficulty of drills.
Or change the way you give feedback.
When you challenge your beliefs, you gain access to a wider set of tools and your team gains access to a better version of you.
Closing Thoughts
A coach’s actions are the visible end of a much longer chain. Before the speech, before the frustration, before the decision, there is a belief shaping how the coach sees the world. These beliefs influence perception, interpretation, and solutions, often without the coach realizing it.
As coaches we work on gaining new knowledge or refine our methods and we undervalue how mental filters guiding our decisions. When you examine your beliefs, you gain a clearer, more accurate view of your team. You unlock strategies that were invisible to you before.
It is about becoming aware of the assumptions you bring into each moment so you can choose how to act instead of reacting automatically.
As you look back on the situations where you struggled the most in the past, ask yourself:
What belief was guiding how I interpreted the problem?
What did that belief make me notice and what did it make me ignore?
Where in the belief-to-action chain did my coaching break down?
These questions help you refine the invisible part of coaching, the part that shapes everything else.
Once you begin to explore it, your actions become more intentional and your decisions more accurate.
And your players will feel the difference.
