10 Ways to Treat a Gymnast Like a Human Being

Hello folks in the gymnastics community!

​This year I decided to devote a portion of my counseling practice to you!

I'm an ethics specialist, philosophical counselor, and former gymnast. Over the past few years I have watched the stories of the culture of abuse in gymnastics (and sports of all kinds) come into the public consciousness. I see an awakening and a reckoning taking place that encourages me. But I also see the same old stories of toxic training environments that we (former gymnasts) dealt with decades ago and are still healing from. Watching those same stories repeat (even in the midst of some enlightenment about humanizing sports) makes me think there's a lot more work to do.

My hope is to provide conversational spaces where we can examine the values and norms that have taken over competitive sports, talk about their effects, and create positive solutions for empowering current and former athletes so they may heal and flourish. 

Learn more about counseling for the gymnastics community here.

10 Ways to Treat a Gymnast Like a Human Being

1. Ask questions. Recognize that your athletes have thoughts and feelings. Be curious to learn what they are. Listen to what they have to say with interest and seriousness. Show that they matter to you and that you care. Talking at athletes, barking orders, and demanding silence and blind obedience shows that you would rather work with robots than human beings. It’s insulting, dehumanizing, and demoralizing for the team. 
   
2. Collaborate. Invite athletes to be participants in their own training plans. They actually know stuff about themselves! That knowledge will be very helpful to include when developing strategies for their learning and motivation. Collaborating also builds trust and respect in your relationships with your athletes.
3. Encourage deliberation and choice. Your athletes, if young, are on their way to becoming autonomous adults who will need to deliberate about what’s best for themselves and make choices. Encourage that they learn how. Making them dependent on you does not help them to grow. Requiring them to obey a “master” blindly, and never ask questions or think for themselves, just turns athletes into little slaves, and (you guessed it!) disrespects their humanity. 
4. Teach, don’t force. Take your athletes through steps that break down skills into parts, and have them practice each part in a safe setting until they are confident and ready to move onto the next step. Forcing athletes to do things with their bodies that they are not ready to do, are afraid to do, can’t yet do safely, or don’t understand how to do is treating them like a thing, not a person, and violates them emotionally and physically. "Forcing" is what you do when you threaten, intimidate, or punish in order to “make” a human being do what you want. 
5. Lead with care, not intimidation. Show you care about your athletes’ health, safety, growth, and overall well-being. Teaching your athletes to fear you does not make them better athletes or better people. It defiles them, ruins trust and confidence, is a major distraction from their skills, breaks spirits (and usually bodies too), and is an abuse of your power (see the problem with “force” above). If you can’t control yourself from intimidating or belittling children, please remove yourself from contact with them and work with a therapist.
6. Tell the truth. “Tricking” your athletes does not serve them in any way. For instance, if you aren’t actually going to spot an athlete, don’t tell them you will then step out of the way to “prove” to them they can do it themselves. This not only destroys their trust in you, and creates long-lasting distrust of others, it disrespects the athlete to not let them know the information they need to make their own choice about launching their body through the air.
7. Celebrate joy, spontaneity, and individuality. Smiling, joking, dancing, and other creative and joyful expressions are sign of life, happiness, friendship, and enjoyment for human beings. Squashing them in order to maintain militaristic line-ups, total control, and uniformity shows you want your human team to behave like machines. Again – insulting, dehumanizing, demoralizing to all.
8. Make room for mistakes. Human beings aren’t perfect. And learning involves making mistakes. Mistakes should be expected as a normal part of skill, strength, and confidence building. Punishing mistakes shows your athletes that they are not allowed to be human, which does not make them more perfect, but only causes confusion, fear, and discouragement.
9. Make room for rest and healing. Human beings have a limit to how far they can exert themselves, both physically and mentally, before injury and collapse. They are not machines. Physical and mental exhaustion and pain are signs that rest and rehabilitation are needed. If you don't believe they are real, you are not recognizing obvious facts about human health and well-being. 
10. Show that you see and care about athletes as whole people. Athletes are complex individuals. They are much bigger than their bodies, performance, score, or rank. Acknowledge and appreciate that they have thoughts, feelings, virtues, friendships, families, creative and intellectual activities, aspirations, and futures beyond their role and rank on your team. Show them that you see and care about their broad value as whole human beings. Otherwise, you are reducing them to a sliver of their personhood.

Monica Vilhauer, Ph.D.
Philosophical Counselor, Ethicist, Former Gymnast
Examining gymnastics culture, building empowerment, creating positive futures.

Counseling for the Gymnastics Community
The Questioning Gymnast (Facebook Page)

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