906 words | 5 minute read
If you coach mountain biking, you might recognize this conversation. Someone asks how much you rode last week and you give them a big number, five or six days, then shrug: “But it was all work.” Every ride was a lesson, and the bike that used to come off the rack on a free Saturday now mostly comes off it when someone is paying.
That shrug captures a shift the research helps explain. Turning something you love into your income can slowly change “I get to ride” into “I have to ride”, until you're spending plenty of time on the bike without having much of it to yourself. It's an understandable shift, and there are two high-leverage ways to push back: changing how you talk to yourself about the work, and protecting rides that are only for you.
We touched on that second one in a recent post, about getting out once a week for a ride that's just for you. Part of why it works is physical, since actually pushing your body on a real ride clears your head and leaves you feeling better, and you come back with more energy for yourself and the people you coach. This piece is about the mental side, why riding can stop feeling like yours in the first place, and how to get that feeling back.
Two Kinds of Passion
The psychologist Robert Vallerand split passion into two forms. Harmonious passion is where you're excited and engaged and the activity sits in balance with the rest of your life; you chose it, and it gives you more than it takes. Obsessive passion is the same love with a feeling of control attached, rigid and compulsive, where missing a day brings guilt. Harmonious passion says "I get to," obsessive passion says "I have to."
Being paid is exactly the kind of outside pressure that can tip a free choice into an obligation. A 2015 meta-analysis of a decade of passion research found harmonious passion went with positive emotion, flow and vitality, while obsessive passion went with rumination, burnout and conflict with the rest of your life.
It matters beyond the coach, too. A 2008 study found that harmonious coaches felt more positive emotion while coaching, which carried into better relationships with their athletes, while obsessive coaches' relationships suffered. The state you're in when you roll into the car park leaks into the session.
It's Not Exactly Your Fault
In 1973, researchers at Stanford promised preschoolers who already loved drawing a certificate for doing it. Weeks later, those kids spent roughly half as much free time drawing as children given no reward or a surprise one. That's the overjustification effect: once an outside reward becomes the reason for something you enjoyed, it crowds out the original reason. Later work shows it's expected, controlling rewards that do the damage, and for adults it looks less like quitting and more like a slow slide from joy into duty.
The sociologist Robert Stebbins calls what most of us did before getting paid serious leisure, a hobby pursued systematically that shapes who you are. Turn it into a job and it gets wrapped in income, a calendar someone else fills and client reviews, and if those feel controlling, "I get to ride" becomes "I have to coach to hit my number this month." Passionate workers also tend to accept, and be handed, unpaid hours and blurry boundaries, since everyone assumes the love covers the difference.
The encouraging part is that passion isn't fixed, and it drifts back toward harmonious when people feel more choice and ownership over what they do. So what do we do here? Well, two things do most of the work.
Reframing "Have To" as "Get To"
The damage comes from whether the work feels controlling, and that's a perception, so it responds to how you describe it to yourself. For one week, catch every "I have to" about coaching and swap it for "I get to." It will feel forced at first, but the point is to remember that you chose this. Then find the choice inside the obligation: before each session, pick one thing that's yours to decide, like the trail for the cornering block or the drill you've wanted to try, and on the drive in, name one thing you're looking forward to.
Ride for Yourself
Recovery research shows what restores people isn't just time off, it's psychological detachment, switching off mentally as well as physically. Most of that research comes from office workers who leave work at the building, but your office is the trail network, so detachment has to be built on purpose. Once a week, take a ride that's fully off the clock: turn off the GPS, keep it off Strava, skip the route plan and the lesson scouting, and ride trails you never teach on with friends who aren't students. If you catch yourself correcting someone's body position, let it go and look back up the trail.
Reframing the work helps you reconnect with what you enjoy about coaching, but it doesn't replace time on the bike that's just for you. Equally, a good ride on Sunday can only do so much if you're dreading work again on Monday. Together, the two approaches help keep your passion harmonious, so riding remains something you choose and enjoy, even when it's also how you earn a living.
So the next time someone asks how much you rode last week, how much of it was off the clock?
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Want to go deeper on the science?
Here are the sources behind this article, plus a few more for further reading.
Meta-analyses
Curran, T., Hill, A. P., Appleton, P. R., Vallerand, R. J., & Standage, M. (2015). The psychology of passion: A meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 631-655. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9503-0
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
Bennett, A. A., Bakker, A. B., & Field, J. G. (2018). Recovery from work-related effort: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 262-275. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2217
Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-talk and sports performance: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611413136
Passion in coaches and athletes
Lafrenière, M.-A. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G., & Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 30(5), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.30.5.541
Carpentier, J., & Mageau, G. A. (2014). The role of coaches' passion and athletes' motivation in the prediction of change-oriented feedback quality and quantity. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 15(4), 326-335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.02.005
Lopes, M., & Vallerand, R. J. (2020). The role of passion, need satisfaction, and conflict in athletes' perceptions of burnout. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 48, 101674. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2020.101674
How passion forms and changes
Vallerand, R. J., Blanchard, C., Mageau, G. A., Koestner, R., Ratelle, C., Léonard, M., Gagné, M., & Marsolais, J. (2003). Les passions de l'âme: On obsessive and harmonious passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 756-767. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.4.756
Mageau, G. A., Vallerand, R. J., Charest, J., Salvy, S.-J., Lacaille, N., Bouffard, T., & Koestner, R. (2009). On the development of harmonious and obsessive passion: The role of autonomy support, activity specialization, and identification with the activity. Journal of Personality, 77(3), 601-646. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2009.00559.x
Gillet, N., Morin, A. J. S., Austin, S., Fernet, C., Huyghebaert-Zouaghi, T., & Vallerand, R. J. (2023). On the nature, predictors, and outcomes of longitudinal work passion profiles. Motivation Science. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000307
Rewards, work and recovery
Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129-137. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0035519
Kim, J. Y., Campbell, T. H., Shepherd, S., & Kay, A. C. (2020). Understanding contemporary forms of exploitation: Attributions of passion serve to legitimize the poor treatment of workers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(1), 121-148. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000190
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204
Stebbins, R. A. (1982). Serious leisure: A conceptual statement. Pacific Sociological Review, 25(2), 251-272. https://doi.org/10.2307/1388726
