"To hell with circumstances. I create opportunities." -- Bruce Lee

In eighth grade my parents somehow convinced me to join a softball team. To be clear, I am not, nor have I ever been, an athlete. Mostly I was terrified of making a mistake and making the whole team mad at me (which I did all the time).

One day, I even managed to hit the ball (despite shutting my eyes when I swung). I felt AMAZING. I even made it to second base!

But once there, I decided to do the baseball players I saw on TV do and started creeping towards third. Apparently, you can't "lead off" in softball, and the ump called me out.

Humiliated, I trudged off the field with everyone watching.
The coach came up to me a few minutes later as I was stuffing my face at the snack bar, trying to figure out how I could literally disappear. I stared at the ground, avoiding his gaze.

"Hey, did you see that tall girl hit that double just now?" he asked.
I shook my head and mumbled "No."

Why was he asking me this? The LAST thing I was interested in was the game after I'd just humiliated myself.

He stood there and said nothing until I looked up at him. He was smiling. Finally, it dawned on me.

"Oh," I said. "You mean me?"

"Yeah! You smacked the hell out of that ball!"

It was a stupid "dad joke" kind of thing to say, but it actually made me feel better at a time when I thought nothing could make me feel better. I even stayed on the team through the end of the season because I thought maybe I could get better at hitting (I didn't). This was my first experience with coaching, and it's stuck in my head ever since.

Today, I remember that softball coach as I coach my own student veterans. If he could break through all the anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that I felt as an awkward eighth grader, it's possible I might offer the same to my students.

What is Coaching?
Coaching is a process that aims to improve performance and focuses on the "here and now" rather than on the distant past or future. It's unlocking a student veteran's potential to maximize their own performance, transforming your students from just barely scraping by into confident, successful students and leaders.

But where do you even start? It can be intimidating to sit down with student veterans to try to help. This quick guide can help you better understand what coaching is, how it can help you and your students be more successful, and give you a solid foundation from which to build advanced coaching skills.

How Student Coaching Works
Not all coaching is about sports. For our purposes, coaching offers students a safe space to voice their concerns about succeeding in college, and gives them tailored strategies that will help them feel more comfortable as they make the transition from Soldier (or Sailor, Marine, Airmen, etc.) to student. Coaching can either be one-on-one or in small groups.

Coaching is unique in that it does not focus on healing the past (that's what therapy is for), and instead focuses on the present and future. (It's worth noting that you need to be aware that some of your students may actually need therapy first, due to serious past trauma, before they can be coached. Obviously either the VA or your university can offer resources for that kind of work.)

The process is most successful when you, as the coach, fully believe in your students -- even when they cannot believe in themselves. The best coaches, whether on the field or off, believe each player has the potential for greatness (just like my eighth grade softball coach believed in me).

Besides you believing in your students, you must also have some degree of buy-in. If they don't want to be coached, or are unwilling to change their thoughts or behaviors, nothing you can say or do will change their mind. With that being said, be patient with your students; transformation isn't going to happen overnight. They might not "get it" or it may not "click" until you've met a few times.

One very important element of coaching is that you must be able to meet the student where they are, and give them space to fully feel their feelings, without telling them what to do.

Acknowledge that whatever emotions they're going through, it is really hard, and it's totally understandable that they are frustrated, anxious, angry, sad, whatever they're feeling (even if you don't fully understand why).

Finally, I've found it helpful to get really focused and clear your mind of any stress or distraction that you might have in your life before you sit down to coach students. This is not about you. Personally, I work hard not to take any student reactions personally if they happen to get defensive.

Benefits of Coaching Student Veterans
So why coach your students? When done correctly, the benefits of coaching are tremendous:

• Boosts students' sense of "belonging," both to the campus in general and the student veteran community specifically
• Creates a safe space for self-reflection (not something vets typically have access to)
• Increases self-awareness (not something vets typically are great at)
• Empowers student veterans to take responsibility for their own success
• Increases student retention (and indirectly, recruitment)
• Long-term, increases graduation rates and GPAs
• Increases engagement with you, so you're better able to tell when things start to go wrong
• Helps student veterans with class attendance, time management
• Builds resilience and confidence
• Increases student veterans' perspectives on issues that affect them
• Builds specific skills -- communication, writing, studying, test-taking (Your on-campus academic success center can help with these skills, though be sure to train your colleagues on how vets are different than typical undergrads -- PsychArmor has some great videos to help with this)
• Helps student veterans work more easily and productively with others
• Positions them to be more successful in the workplace

Finally, coaching helps you because when your students improve on all the points listed above, you look like a superstar in front of your administration. Which of course is just gravy after you've built a myriad of strong relationships with such incredible students, but it doesn't hurt to have a great performance evaluation on top of everything else.

How is Coaching Student Veterans Different?
It's important to note here that coaching typical undergrads is different than coaching student veterans. Typical undergrads often struggle with issues like finding their identities and figuring out who they are as people. Student vets are more likely to struggle with transitioning from military culture and feeling like they don't belong in school (aka "imposter syndrome").

Since your students are mostly full-fledged adults, with a wealth of experiences and adventures (as well as burdens) under their belts, that should inform how you approach coaching. They typically have families and jobs and are financially independent, and they also tend to be more ready to learn and apply what they learn in their everyday lives.

What are Some Basic Skills of Coaching?
Coaching is a skill set that takes a lifetime to develop, but with some basic techniques, you can help move many students to the next level of success.

As mentioned before, when you coach it's imperative that you give students full space to express their feelings (within appropriate boundaries, of course). Don't tell them what to feel, or how they should feel. Definitely don't lecture them about what they should and shouldn't do. In fact, you should encourage them not to suppress the very real emotions they have, and to process them all the way through. (It's at this point when you might decide that they need therapy more than they need coaching.)

Some basic coaching tenets to keep in mind:

• Ask good questions in lieu of giving advice (unless they specifically ask for your advice)
• Try to tap into the vet's sense of purpose, and what will work best for them
• Put all your focus and attention on the student; remind yourself that this is not about you
• Encourage them to take notes during your sessions
• Start off a coaching session by saying you're a nonjudgmental sounding board and here to help them reach their goals
• Have them do an inventory of their experiences, strengths, and weaknesses; then use this data to help them figure out how they might be getting in their own way
• Advanced tip: Try not to buy into whatever negative story they may be telling about their lives. The student may think that graduating on the dean's list or getting accepted into grad school isn't possible for them, but that doesn't make it true
• Create momentum in sessions by keeping the focus on the future actions, goals, and beliefs
• Help them objectively see their strengths and the gaps that need to be closed so they can achieve their goals

Questions to Ask When Coaching Student Veterans
One of the most important skills you can develop as a coach is asking good, open-ended questions about what it is they really want. Dig deeper to get at the big "why" behind their goals -- it's often not the first thing they think it is. Here are some questions I use when working with students:

• What are your goals? (Is it to get through the semester in "one piece"? Achieving a certain GPA? Attending class regularly? Three job offers when you graduate?)

• What are you doing that's holding you back from your goal?

• What is the inner dialogue that constantly goes through your mind?

• Why do you want what you want?

• What would it look like, feel like, sound like, smell like, taste like to achieve what you want?

• What else? (This is a great all-purpose question that gives them the opportunity to go deeper. Use it liberally.)

These are all questions that student veterans have probably never been asked before, so give them time and space to answer them. Don't be afraid to sit in silence for a few moments. You might even have them go home and reflect on the answers through journaling, if it makes sense.

Creating the Action Plan
Once you feel like you have a rapport, as well as a good inventory of strengths, weaknesses, and goals, it's time to create a plan of action. This could be a whole other blog post itself (coming soon!), but some great starting questions might be:

• When will you study?
• Who can support you when you start to struggle?
• What will you do when things get hard?
• How will you stay accountable?
• How will you stay connected and have fun during the semester (take care of your mental health)?

Final Words
"It's not what you know, it's how you think." -- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Coaching won't perform miracles, but done right, it can transform lives. It allows your students to create a future that's different from the future that would have arrived by default if they didn't have a coach.

Basically, it gives your students a secret weapon, a competitive edge that their un-coached peers do not enjoy. This, in combination with their military experience, basically makes them unstoppable. So why not give them that opportunity? You are the secret weapon that just might be the one thing that makes a difference between a student veteran graduating on the dean's list and dropping out after their first semester.

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