IGMT #060 | Being prepared for the job does not mean someone prepared you for everything surrounding it.
Hey HeyReader!
When I accepted my first college head coaching job, I felt prepared.
I had been coaching for years. I knew how to plan a practice, evaluate players, teach skills, manage a match, and build relationships. I had studied the game, worked under other coaches, and spent plenty of time thinking about the kind of program I wanted to lead. I knew there would be challenges, but I believed I had enough experience to handle them.
Then I started the job.
It did not take long to discover that coaching the team was only part of being the head coach. There were forms I did not know existed, processes that apparently everyone understood, deadlines I did not know were approaching, and questions I did not know I was supposed to ask.
Somewhere, someone knew how all of it worked. The problem was that the information lived in conversations, old emails, institutional habits, and the memories of people who had been there longer than I had. There was no single place to find it. There was no manual sitting on my desk with a note that said, “Here are the things you will need before you realize you need them.”
Most of the time, no one was intentionally withholding anything. They simply knew what they knew, and because they knew it, it was easy to forget that I did not.
…and it got me thinking.
We often assume that people are struggling with a job because they are not prepared to do the job. Sometimes, however, they understand the work perfectly well. What they do not understand is everything surrounding it.
Every environment has a hidden curriculum. It has unwritten rules, unspoken expectations, preferred ways of doing things, and small pieces of knowledge that people collect simply by being around long enough.
We learn which questions are acceptable to ask. We learn who really makes certain decisions. We learn what “whenever you get a chance” actually means and whether “that should be fine” means it is fine or that we should probably start worrying.
None of those things appear in the job description.
This happens far beyond coaching. Someone can be fully qualified for a promotion and still feel lost during the first few months. A student can understand the material but not understand how a particular professor wants an assignment completed. A new employee can know the technical part of the work while having no idea how the office communicates, prioritizes, or resolves problems.
Even joining a new family, social group, or community can feel this way. Everyone else appears to know the rhythm because they have been moving within it for years. The new person is trying to hear the music while also pretending they already know the dance.
Then we make the situation worse by confusing familiarity with ability.
The experienced person moves easily through the environment, so we assume they are more capable. The new person pauses, asks questions, or misses something that was never explained, so we begin to question whether they were ready.
But knowing the work and knowing the environment are not the same thing.
This can be especially difficult for people who rely on clarity, structure, or direct communication. “You’ll figure it out” may sound encouraging to the person saying it, but it can feel like being dropped into the middle of a movie and being told to follow the plot. Everyone else knows the characters and what happened in the first hour. You are still trying to understand why everyone is suddenly running.
There is also a strange pressure that comes with being hired because of your experience. Asking questions can feel like admitting you were not ready. You start thinking that perhaps you should already know things that no one has ever told you.
So you guess. You watch other people. You search old emails. You try to piece together the rules without revealing how many pieces you are missing.
Sometimes a person does not need more confidence, discipline, or motivation. They may not need to work harder, believe in themselves, or become more comfortable with uncertainty. They may simply need someone to explain the part everyone else forgot had to be learned.
There are probably people around us doing that right now. They were prepared for the job, the class, the team, or the responsibility, but they are still trying to understand the environment surrounding it. What looks like hesitation may actually be someone searching for information. What looks like a lack of initiative may be someone trying not to break a rule that no one bothered to explain.
I sometimes think about how different those first few weeks would have felt if there had been a manual waiting for me. It would not have needed to contain every possible answer. A few names, a few deadlines, and a few honest explanations about how things actually worked would have been enough. Even a page titled “Things Nobody Will Think to Tell You” would have saved me from piecing everything together one unexpected discovery at a time.
That imaginary manual would not have made me a better coach. It would not have run practices, built relationships, or made difficult decisions for me. It simply would have cleared away some of the uncertainty surrounding the work so I could spend more of my attention doing the work I had been hired to do.
I never found that manual sitting on my desk. Eventually, I started writing my own.
Of course, the problem with writing your own manual is that it becomes difficult to decide what belongs in it. The important deadlines certainly make the list. Contact information is useful. Instructions for requesting transportation probably deserve a page. But after you have spent enough time in a job, you start adding oddly specific reminders such as, “This key opens the storage room, but only if you lift the handle, pull the door toward you, and ask it nicely.”
That is how institutional knowledge is born. One person struggles with a door for twenty minutes, then teaches the next person the sacred ritual.
Eventually, the ritual becomes something everyone knows. Five years later, a new person stands in front of the same locked door wondering whether they are qualified to be there.
I wonder how many people around us are doing some version of that right now, quietly collecting the instructions they wish someone had handed them on their first day. Maybe they do not need us to judge how quickly they are figuring it out. Maybe they just need us to remember which parts were once invisible to us, too, and offer them the page we never received.
If this brought back a memory of something important, ridiculous, or strangely specific that no one told you when you started a new role, hit reply and tell me about it. I would love to know what would have appeared on the first page of your missing manual.
Bonus points if it involved a door that required emotional support.
