SimonHarlingBlog Posts

Maybe.

Perhaps a more interesting approach is to find someone who can introduce their people to an idea and have those interested help build it.

I’d like to thank those who have shown up to help build Coach Camp into what it is today.

If you aren’t co-creating, you might be taking part in participation theatre.

If more is going on backstage than in front of the curtain – the scope, budget, and key decisions of a project are a done deal – it’s participation theatre.

One is a polished performance, and the other is messy in the middle.

It might be time to put down the camera, pull back the curtain, and ignore the viewing figures.

Co-creation sounds like a great idea. Free-flowing ideas, an emergent and unpredictable endpoint. What’s not to love?

A messy middle – when things are not clear since no one can predict the finish.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

Avoid setting timelines until you know what can be delivered and when. If you are in a rush, now is not the time.

If it feels like you are in a hierarchy you most probably are. Check that terms and conditions are not the way. The word, co-creation, for example.

Avoid groups that already have an end in mind. What’s actually happening then is people are messing about in the middle – that’s different.

Learn to make an offer instead. Try: “I’ve built this, I think we can do better.”

If you are ready to invest in your idea, and then have others break it down, then you are ready to co-create. Worry less about your idea and more about the conditions in which to do your best work.

If not, you are probably just messing about in the middle.

We know it’s easier to see the mistakes of others than it is to see our own and that’s not helpful when it comes to the question: Do you know what you are doing? Compared to you, I might be foolish enough to think I do.

Proxy measures don’t help either: You win more, you earn more; you must be getting better.

I’ll leave you with a question not from HR, but from a place of curiosity: How do you know you are getting better at what you do?

I break my own rules all the time – one of them is coaching my kids. 

Grassroots coaches are in the majority, and nearly all stick around in their sport only as long as their kids do. We might talk about community, knowledge sharing, and the love of the game, but nothing it seems, is as strong as your kid playing on the weekend. When your kid quits, or moves on, your reason to coach goes too. 

Yesterday, my kids were not at football; they were at Grannies. I stood on the sidelines shouting at other people’s kids. Mostly, about shapes and spaces, but you get the idea. 

I used Uno cards in an experiment to decide who played and who didn’t. I stood on the side of the pitch and talked to the kids who weren’t playing about what they could see on the pitch, what they were going to do, and how they were going to do it. 

But, more than anything, I wondered what grassroots sports would be like if coaches wanted to be there more than they wanted their kids to be on the team.

Who in their right mind puts on an event if they are not an expert in their field? There you go, play with that idea, and you will likely find your competitive advantage.

I’ll give you a clue.

Who is your event for?

The organiser to make money

The speaker to sell their services

Or, and this is rarely the case: The attendee.

Leading with your intention might well mean that fewer people show up to your events, take your call, or, engage with your thinking.

Leading questions or leading with questions, the difference is permission.

If you want someone to improve their skipping, you might have a plan.

But, if you are less interested in how well they skip and more interested in the conditions under which you work, you have a strategy.

If coaches want agency, meaning, and belonging then I’m willing to bet the question isn’t “How do we create a better coach education strategy?”

It could be:

How do we help coaches build authority, influence, and status?

Or,

How do we help coaches build their practice?

Perhaps it’s,

How do we help coaches find their Elvis?

If you already know the answers then better questions are helpful.

For coaches working in the sports and physical activity space: 

There has been a subtle but significant shift at Coach Camp. The prompt “What do you want to talk about at Coach Camp?” has changed to “What are you working on now?” 

Some folks might find the change a little challenging. After all, it’s a question that puts the spotlight on the creator. “What are YOU working on now?” 

It’s a shift from passive to active, outside to inside, from talking to action. The coach is now at the centre – Coach Centric. 

What about “Affirm” and “Challenge”? Isn’t that what we do as coaches? And if so, leading with a challenge puts us out of order. 

No question the order in which we do things matters. Run, walk, crawl is not the same as crawl, walk, run. To affirm is to understand, the first step in any system or relationship building, a chance to “Get to the beat.” 

There is an important question that comes from systems thinking: How did we get here?

Konstantin Stanislavski, a renowned theatre practitioner famed for creating engaging characters on stage, offered these three questions to his actors:  

Who am I?

What just happened?

What do I want?

My hunch is that if you ask any coach what their coaching is for, you will get a whole host of answers. Some of which have nothing to do with coaching and everything to do with community, belonging, and status. Are we even talking about coaching or some other unmet need?  

Coach education is based on the assumption that people understand what a coach does. My argument is they don’t. I had no idea; I thought being an expert was the same as being a coach. 

“What are you working on now” is a question for coaches, not of coaches. If the task is to build a community of creative coaches, then the skill is to build an environment in which coaches are affirmed and then challenged. For some, yes, it’s going to feel like a challenge because it’s new, but for others, it’s their time to share what they are working on now.

Coach Camp doesn’t have the answers to Coach Development but it does have some of the questions. A shift towards action and learning through assessment—is what I’m trying to do going to work? 

If this reconsideration of coach education and assessment sounds cumbersome, time-consuming, and idealistic, it is. Communities of practice that support people in finding and developing meaning within their roles don’t appear overnight. 

And the payoff?

Open, curious, and ready to learn.

But risky, no! Talk of compliance, safety, and safeguarding are design features of any workforce development, not inhibitors of change. The principles of service, decency, and public life are prerequisites.

We can either match the skills to a task that we are working to understand or match the skills to a role we assume we understand – the choice is ours.

I sat in on a coach education meeting yesterday, and the cry went up, “We don’t have the time!”

Ok, I could go on about priorities and lack of focus, and maybe that’s true.

But there is something else going on;

Sal Khan has taught us that traditional education is constrained by time, not mastery, and therefore feeling like you don’t have time is as much about systems as it is about personal effectiveness.

Learning is about challenging our assumptions, and time is one of them.

Today I learned there are three types of learning assessments:

Assessment of learning – at some point we have all sat in a large hall, hoping the questions we have studied are on the test.

Assessment for learning – who hasn’t sat there thinking “Please don’t ask me!”

Assessment as learning – self-reflection and iteration are important skills here – “I can do better than that!“

I’m willing to bet that the one you now rely on to figure things out is the one you used least as a kid.

When sports became professional, their status changed. Those who remained amateur were different from those who made money. And over time the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has grown.

People with pensions, salaries, and holidays talk to those who take time off work, away from their families, and with little recognition about how they can do better. Better, not in the monetary sense but in the metrics of engagement, diversity, and performance. Unsurprisingly, it’s not going well.

Exploiting commercial interests at the same time as nurturing social value in the community is a dance that few get right. If you can’t do the conga I don’t want to watch you try to waltz. It’s time to split the commercial from the social and ensure we do both right.

There is a project in the offing, and a friend of mine has asked for my CV. “Just give me your top 5 successes and failures. The committee wants someone they know, and I want to make them another offer, a different perspective.”

I checked my CV: it is full of highlights – things I’ve done (that have worked out) – and the time I’ve done them.

The idea is to show that each time I throw the dice I get a 6 – show the success, and make the failures invisible.

If you have ever thrown a dice you will know that although possible throwing a 6 consistently over time is unlikely to happen. Life is not a game with 6 sides and even if it was I still don’t like the odds. A CV of failures might just be the best indicator yet that the person in front of you shows up.

The rest well, just don’t confuse skill with luck.

When progress is slow, frustration is high and tasks are plentiful this might be the question for you.

Retiring cycling legend Mark Cavendish once said “Don’t look for the effort, let it find you.”

Some hide from the effort for fear it will hurt, and you can’t argue with that. Others race towards it because that’s what you are supposed to do, right? But the more experienced amongst us, whether it’s writers, elite athletes or entrepreneurs wait.

Why?

We sit at our desks, work out at the track, and develop our strategy because we know it’s coming, and when we are ready, it will find us.

According to Prof Brian Cox, there is only one philosophical question worth asking: “What does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe?”

If you can’t get your head around being stood on this ball of cheese, we call the world, hurtling around a star, there is still value in this question at a much simpler level.

Stood on the side of a football pitch for example, or, at your child’s recital.

What am I doing here? You might be surprised at the answer. I’m willing to bet it won’t have anything to do with what’s in the news, on a spreadsheet, or what was bothering you this morning.

Looking for feedback when you really want permission is a trap. You don’t want to get it wrong, so you ask for feedback. Yet, the chances are someone, just like you, has already done the thing you are doing.

All you are doing is trying not to fail.

Waiting for feedback instead of people saying “no” is the perfect place to hide.

Both my kids have them – full of things like hairbands, money, brushes, toys and so much more – just in case.

It’s one of my favourite things to ask on a walk:

“What’s in your just-in-case pocket?”

It makes sense to set up a coach education business to make money; after all, it’s a business, and the point of running a business is to make money and educate coaches.

The lens is simple enough: Will this make us money and educate coaches?

The alternative is to educate coaches and hope the business makes money.

But there is another way where hope is replaced with practice design using bootstrapping principles, scaling only when successful and deemed necessary. Decisions are taken using the simple prompt; Who is this benefiting? 

“Centric” means to be at the centre. When there is nothing else to do but focus on the centre, whatever that may be, then you are “centric”. At the heart of all that matters.

I once ran a boxing event company turning “contenders” into “boxers.” We put the student at the centre of everything we did, and when we did that, it changed what we did. With no clue about boxing, I had no choice but to shift from being an expert, controlling what I thought should happen, to focusing on the experience I wanted to provide, and what could happen. 

Recurring certifications make sense when a Coach Education company is run as a business. But when the coach is at the centre of the experience, matching the solution to the problem makes more sense. What matters to the coach, is unlikely to matter to the business, unless it’s designed that way. 

Coach-centric coach education will feel chaotic, uncertain, and difficult to manage. After all income streams from certification, events, and resources are a proven business model. But so, are customer-centric businesses like CD Baby created by Derek Sivers and written about in “Anything You Want; 40 Lessons For a New Kind of Entrepreneur.” 

Using design principles that create an environment that is agile and responsive to the user experience a coach-centric business is modeling the very behaviour we are teaching. 

What does success look like? 

Active Users: In a flip of the model used by coach education companies in this model the resources are created collaboratively by the participants themselves, with the educator acting as a facilitator. Any resources created are shared with those who are also actively seeking solutions but would prefer to be told what to do. 

Ultimately, success is defined by the degree to which the coaches feel empowered, supported, and able to address their real-world challenges through this collaborative process – not by traditional business metrics.

A thriving community of engaged, “active users” is the primary goal. And if that sounds like a tough business metric, it is. But, that might just be the point.

Watch what people do not what they say.

Accepting someone else’s answer when you don’t feel smart might feel like the way to go.

A more generous approach is to ask a question.

You learn a little bit more about where the answer came from and just how useful that answer might be.

Surprise yourself – you might have the smarts after all.

You could wait until you have more information – the idea looks a little smarter. Or better still, when you think you know the answer.

That could be less about the confidence you have to commit to the idea and more about the confidence you have in yourself. Better plans and a greater understanding of projects and systems are all helpful, but so is being wrong.

It’s better to know than assume but it’s quicker to assume than know – no, because when we assume, we already think we know.

It’s worth the ask.

Speak up but don’t settle.

Win, but not at any cost.

Know the cost of losing.

Just don’t sell out.

The information you have – what do you do with it?

Share it?

Hide it?

Display it?

Find it?

The Human Library is brilliant, unconferences can be surprising, and workshops are a great place to build something new.

What do you do with the information you have lost or newly found?

Tom Bennett will tell you that classroom routines, responses, and relationships are important.

The clearest example is a martial arts student and a sensei bowing out of mutual respect, with the student saying “Onegaishimasu” – meaning “I request to work with you.”

At home, we are tidying up a room to allow me to easily produce content without having to rearrange the space each time.

The room has been tidied countless times before but this time it’s different. This time, we can see it. We could see a tidy room before but not like this. Now you walk in and there is a calmness, a sense of order and purpose.

A reminder to me, at least, that when we can all see what the dream looks like, it’s different. Same people, same application of effort, different outcome.

Confident on the outside, not so confident on the inside.

Coach education is hard, it’s hard because the Armadillo problem is real. Telling people what to do is not nearly as helpful as showing people what they can do. Yet, discovery is not on the agenda when the agenda is: “Tell me what to do without showing the others I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve just built a new coach education experience by showing the group that no one knows what to do until we figure it out. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Being curious about tomorrow brings us ideas and suggestions, plans and strategies – and while that’s helpful, it’s also a trap. The cyclist in Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist is recognisable in draft, but the movement, and energy obscure their form in future iterations. The origin of action, of course, is in the present – now, not sometime later.

I’m writing a new coach education experience, and I’ve come to see the beauty in returning to the start and seeing it as if it is for the first time. Through knowledge and understanding, we get to work with what we know to create new ways of doing – returning each time to not stop but to stand still.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot.

“Learn to work without applause,” Ernest Hemingway once said.

Whether you are writing a book, creating a course, or building an event such as Coach Camp, your mind will inevitably turn to what success and failure will look like. 

How many people will turn up to your event or buy your book? What will you do if it doesn’t work out?

The opportunity cost of practice is to put aside the outcome and focus: focus on telling a good story, developing tension for the learner, or facilitating a space where coaches learn to have better conversations.

This is hard because others will have their own ideas about what success and failure will look like. And that matters, it matters because you might be in the business of keeping everyone happy, but it also matters because when we change what we pay attention to, it changes what we do. 

Are you working for yourself or the attention of others?

The easiest way to think about culture is through fractal design – how you do anything is how you do everything.

If not, it’s not embedded and is therefore not culture.

That’s a wrap! Thank you to those who attended. Here is a word cloud comprised of words used to answer the question: What did you like about Coach Camp.

You can sign up for updates and news of the latest events here.

In youth athletes, using competition for development is not the same as assuming competition will develop players.

Is the problem you face real or imaginary?

I’ve sat through enough studies and opinion polls to realise it’s a question worth asking.

Imaginary problems feel real – and that’s the problem.

Why are 80%* of physiotherapists podcasters men?

Recognising that an imaginary problem feels real is the first step to a better conversation about what’s actually holding us back.

*Made up statistic based on a rant I once sat through.

Put one foot in front of the other. It’s how we move forward when we are tired, broke, or overwhelmed. It’s as obvious as it is helpful.

Last week was one such occasion. The fog was thick and it had come down fast – I just couldn’t see a way forward. My writing felt pointless.

But then I read a line from To Kill A Mockingbird to remove the adjectives and keep the facts: I was doing it. Good or bad, I was making an offer – I like to think I’m working something out unconsciously in my head, and maybe that’s true but even if it’s not I’m doing it.

Learning to put one foot in front of the other – one foot at a time is a skill and it’s one worth having.

Let’s say you are launching a new coach initiative.

What does success look like?

What is the change you seek?

Success could be lots of people attending the launch meetings. It could be clubs or organisations taking on the initiative in the early days of heavy promotion and interaction.

But, the change you seek?

What will it look like in 6 months from now when the fuss has died down?

How about 3 years from now?

Getting off to a good start is helpful, but so too is the stuff that happens when you aren’t looking. Who is going to carry the baton is way more important than how many turned up on the first night.

What are you paying attention to and how is that going to help you in the long run? Pass it on.

It’s worth considering if you need to know more about your chosen field of expertise, or if you need to learn how to get people who work in your field to connect, interact, and grow together.

If you are a coach in grassroots sports this opportunity is for you: 

A friend of mine attends a weekly meeting. When the developer speaks everyone listens; the same is true of the Sales Director. However, when the person who answers the customer queries speaks up, others dismiss their ideas.

Maybe what you have to say doesn’t matter if the boss doesn’t like it. 

But that doesn’t matter in grassroots sports because you don’t have a boss. There are hardly ever any meetings. And just because the kids run around like lunatics, parents are busy, and the committee has better things to do, that doesn’t mean that……oh wait a minute.

No one is listening. 

The term “grassroots” means to gather people at a local level to create change at a national level. Oddly, sports organisations structure things the opposite way – starting at the national level to create change at a local level. It’s easy to think that how we organise sports is out of order.

But there is a solution, and the boss – if you had one – probably wouldn’t like it: it’s called a Community of Practice (CoP).

To understand the difference between a project team or a task force and a community of practice, it helps to think about the task. 

If you organise to the task, that’s a project – let’s say you are planning on putting up a new clubhouse. Once all the jobs are handed out and the clubhouse is up, that’s it, it’s done.

A community of practice, on the other hand, views the task based on its value. If the task has value, you stay on the task and practice. If not, you move on.

Being a good coach is about practice, yet formal coach education places the value on completion, not practice. It’s less about a lifetime of learning and more about getting the job done. So, how do you find the task that brings the most value to your coaching practice? What wall do you lean your ladder up against? 

In a community of practice, you won’t all be wearing the same colour polo shirt, and the boss won’t have called the meeting. That’s on you. In fact, the community of practice “finds the energy” in the room and set the agenda, not the people at the top. 

And that’s the opportunity that a community of practice offers grassroots coaches. Coach education shifts to what the coach needs, not what the sport or organisation thinks we want. Those who lead now serve, and those who have learned to follow, learn to lead. 

Here’s what to look for in a community of practice:

• Find the Energy: Find the energy, find the subject. A community of practice is organised around a subject that inspires practice.

• Find the Others: If your boss wants you to practice, it’s not a community, that’s a condition. On the other hand, if you choose to practice, it pays to think about the community with which you practice. 

• Adopt the Behaviour: People like us do things like this. If it works, adopt it; if it doesn’t, you might be in the right place to work it out and change the culture. 

In an ideal world, you already know the subject that brings the energy for you. But, that’s not often the case, and if you are anything like me, I could pick a few subjects to go deep on. So let’s take a look at what it takes.

Let your feet do the talking. The rule of two feet states “If at any time you find yourself in a situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use your two feet and move to someplace more to your liking.” 

The key to a community of practice is permission. People have to turn up off their own backs, not because it’s their job or the boss has told them but because they believe in what is happening in the room. It’s the one rule that, if broken, sees the mislabelling of a task force or a project group as a community of practice.  

I can tell you that I started Coach Camp not because I was ready to start a community of practice but because there was nowhere for me to go and talk about what I was working on. So I built it. And in building Coach Camp I realised that there was something way more powerful at play.

Advocacy.

Think back to the customer service rep at a work meeting. In speaking up on behalf of the clients, they are learning to speak up for what they believe in. When we believe in something bigger than us, it rubs off. 

“This is not my final answer” is the mantra of Coach Camp, because it’s a place where people accept your first answer not as your final answer but as a place to start. It’s also a place of practice. A place to build connections, ask about what other people are working on, and share what you have seen that interests you.

There is no rush to find a subject that inspires, guides, and binds you to others, but there is a need to practice. 

Finding a group of people, a community, willing to practice and interact is necessary. It’s also possible provided you are ready to do things a little differently. Vicki Pozzebon, of Prospera Partners, put a group of local farmers and chefs into a room to talk about how they could solve each other’s problems. After a little nurturing, the result was a new way of working that improved the supply chain. 

Could you sit around a table with a cricket coach, a squash coach, and a group of junior school teachers to talk about helping kids hit, throw, and catch a ball?

Probably. 

Ideas spread fast when birds of a feather flock together, and that’s one of the strengths of homogeneous groups, but its weakness is the stagnation of ideas. Not so in groups that are diverse and inclusive, only common ground is difficult to come by and communication can be slow. That’s the challenge -using both convergent and divergent thinking to solve the problems of the day. 

And that’s really what a community of practice is; an exchange of information across a newly formed group based on necessity. At the heart of a community of practice is the unavoidable need to do something. A desire to see new groups and new dynamics created as old and tired power dynamics are broken down.

New information creates new norms. Now, people like us do things like this. Only this time, people like us are chefs, growers, and consumers united by a new and shared repertoire.

The dictionary defines repertoire as “A range of things that we can do.” If you’re ready to develop, share, and create a new range of things you can do, then perhaps you will consider joining or creating a community of practice. I don’t need to describe the alternative; you already know what this looks like.

The choice is yours.

“Luck is not going my way at the moment, but that can change.”

If feeling downtrodden is a tactic to make you believe that good luck is on the way, it’s a terrible move.

Luck turns up not becuase we want it to, but because, well, it’s luck.

Learn to live without it if you can.

You may get to the top of your profession without anyone asking you if you are any good. And that sounds absurd. But aside from some diligent form-filling, a tub-thumping speech at a high-profile conference, and the ability to get along with your colleagues, it’s entirely possible that no one has ever asked you “Are you any good at your job?”

No one has ever asked me if I’m any good at coaching? A few people have challenged my technical knowledge but never my thinking or my behaviours. Interesting, don’t you think?

Rather than waiting to be asked, maybe it’s time we started asking ourselves.

To those who clock watch, a pet hate of mine:

The challenge is not to manage our time but to manage ourselves, we optimise to within an inch of our lives and often to the detriment of our relationships.

Tx Stephen Covey.

An OG; the stuff of nightmares, a goal in the wrong net,

One would do well to avoid such an obvious failure.

And yet, nearly every OG is from someone who dares to try.

Until you learn to look, you may miss the player who hides and avoids putting themself in a place where they might fail; understanding our relationship with success and failure matters.

A friend of mine must return to the office 3 days a week. It’s easy to confuse a return to the office with a return to work. But that’s missing the point.

And to prove the point, this week, after a change in working patterns unrelated to a return to the office, productivity soared.

The reason? The team created extended periods of uninterrupted focussed work. Team members field inquiries, calls, and interruptions from colleagues on rotation, leaving the rest of the team to do the work.

Going to work is not the same as going to the office. Going to work is about setting the conditions to do the work, and if that’s in the office then great, but don’t confuse the two.

Much like a task force or project group is not a Community of Practice (CoP).

The key to a CoP is permission. People have to turn up off their own backs, not becuase it’s their job or the boss has told them but because they believe in what is happening in the room.

It’s the number one rule that, if broken, sees the mislabelling of a task force or a project group as a CoP.  

The reason you go deeper when you scuba dive is because it’s designed that way.

I’m delighted to say we have several returners for Coach Camp III – I hope to see you there.

What does that even mean?

Are you busy and therefore a fool? Or did your foolishness lead to you being busy. And if that is true, why give the fool all the tasks? Who does that?

Easy to understand but often difficult to accept.

Grateful to those reading the next draft of my book.

Here’s to the best idea winning.

The fool might play the audience, develop the joke, and eventually figure out how to get the laugh.

But that’s not playing the fool, that’s reserved for those who confuse luck with skill and compliance with caring.

If you need to organise it, then don’t. It’s not fun.

It’s clear that if the boss wants you to practice it’s not a community of practice but rather a condition.

On the other hand, if you choose to practice, it pays to think about the community with which you practice.

Knowing makes all the difference.

We have a date for Coach Camp III, I hope to see you there.

We might think the mission is to run 5k, get a flat stomach, or return from a knee injury, but is it not just practice?

If you organise to complete the task that’s a mission. However, if you organise around the task, then that’s practice.

How many times do we complete a few mobility, stability, and strengthening exercises, see some improvement, and then think, that’s enough of that? 

“I’m on a mission, with no time to lose.” 

The alternative is to think of what we do as practice:

“Where’s the value in what I am doing, and what can I carry forward?”

Being on a mission and creating urgency in the offer might just be confusing many into believing that the value of taking care of oneself lies in the outcome, not the practice itself.

“Why are you always on your phone” to “I notice you are always on your phone” is a powerful switch.

Furious replaced by curious.

Take away the kit, and resources but leave yourself with time. What small step could you make that would leave you better prepared when the opportunity or need arises? Hmmm!

I’ve stopped my gym membership for a month – no kit, just me, myself, and I. Once, the jitters passed, the opportunity presented itself: Move better – use your body weight and explore.

I’ve come to see external load (weight moved) not as an end goal – how much can I lift? – but as an opportunity for feedback using a different constraint.

That’s it. You either have it or you don’t. Then find the others.

To understand the difference between a project team and a community of practice, it helps to think about the task. Do you organise to do the task, or organise around the task? If the task has value, you stay on the task and practice. If not, you move on.

Of course, formal coach education to this point places the value on completion, not practice. “Job and knock” will get your bathroom or kitchen done, a life time of learning, not so much.

Finally, a word on re-accreditation: even though my gas boiler gets a service every year, I still don’t know how it works.

The data tells you that you ran faster last week and that what you are lifting today is less than “optimal” for your size, goals, or current program.

The information that you, your trainer, or your peer group have on you confirms this. 

You know, and we know, that you can do better.

Perhaps you or I don’t understand why. 

But luckily, we have the wisdom to know that the data may lie to you but your grandmother won’t. 

Data is not the same as wisdom, act accordingly.

In the early days of The Doors, lead singer Jim Morrison was so nervous he faced away from the audience to sing.

When Elton John was a rising star, his manager told him to keep playing the small gigs; the big audiences could wait.

When you face the audience, two things are going on: the vocal and the physical performance. If speaking on stage fills you with dread, start by recording voice notes on your phone. This allows you to perfect arguably the most important half: your voice. 

You can wave your arms and pull faces while practicing; no one will ever know. As your confidence grows, consider sharing these voice notes with friends or on social media. Turning your back on your audience to perfect your craft might just be the smartest move you make.

There’s already a project that looks a lot like yours. “We don’t need another one.” Of course, it isn’t, becuase your boss hasn’t seen what you have seen, but your boss has already signed off on the one that’s running.

Is that a reason to stop?

Communities of practice are not popular with the boss, precisely because the boss has a different point of view to you, the person working on the ground, talking to customers, and dealing with the day-to-day.

While knowledge transfer is an important feature of a community of practice, perhaps the biggest is that of listening and building support, if other people see what you see, then perhaps it’s worth pursuing. Even if the boss doesn’t like the idea, yet.

Posting workouts on socials is a no-pain situation since there is no obvious cost to it being ignored.

Putting on a training seminar where no one shows up, there’s pain right there.

Any old-school bodybuilder will tell you slow and steady wins the race, and to do that you need to put up with some pain – maybe not the type you first imagined.

Meeting every Sat for a 5k run is not a community of practice, but it is a community of runners who share a common interest in running. Regular interaction and shared experiences is a fine thing. Organisation around the transfer of knowledge and experience to solve a particular problem makes it a community of practice.

For too long now sports have been organised around the development of the sport itself and not the people who play it. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge and name the problems we see in society based on inactivity and organise ourselves around them, not the badge on our tracksuit.

“I’m not looking for you to get it right.”

“But I am looking for you to show me what you can do.”

And that way we both learn something about the situation we find ourselves in.

Questions for when time runs away with you:

What did you do today that felt “urgent”?

What did you put off today that feels important but not urgent?

How did it make you feel?

How do you want to feel?

I can tell you that today, I struggled: work was dull – not urgent but important. My gift for hanging on in there and interacting with the content was a small insight – a way forward.

Reconciling the powerful gift of practice with how you want to feel is a work in progress.

To be continued……….

Ask “What do you want?” and then work back from the answer.

For example: If you want to run a 5k, in under 20 minutes, what would it take to run a 1k in under 4 minutes? Or 5k in 30 minutes then 25 minutes before running it in 20 minutes. The maths is simple enough.

However, is it the customer’s job to know what they want? Steve Jobs famously said “No!” If the end in mind is “Where can we take the customer?” “What experience are looking to create?” That’s less about feedback and more about how you make the customer feel.

How are they using and working with the product?

“What do want?” is a great coaching question, but it might not be such a great feedback question.

If you know the book The 7 Habits for Effective People (Book notes to follow), you will know it’s a chunky monkey. At the start of the week after a few false starts, I finally finished reading it.

Let’s talk about urgent and important:

Urgent and important tasks take your attention. For example, assembling your daughter’s wardrobe and desk over the weekend. “It wasn’t my idea.” 

On the other hand, Important but not urgent tasks bounce back –  however hard you try to put them off, they keep coming back. Reading the 7 Habits was one of those important but not urgent tasks. It took me over 10 years to finally read it cover to cover. 

Of course, the idea is to spend most of your time working on important but not urgent tasks – it’s a choice. Writing a book, learning Spanish, taking that once-in-a-lifetime trip. None of that is urgent, but it is important, at least to you. 

If fear and doubt are holding you back from what is important but not urgent, know it happens to us all, and that not all impactful tasks are sat on your to-do list. 

When I wrote the Good Coach Bad Coach Manifesto I took a chance. Who was I to write it? Then again who was I not to write it.

I’ll leave you with an interview with Mike Matheny, the author of the Matheny Manifesto.

The cry of a frustrated teacher, coach, parent, or the silent creeping doubt of a creative.

I have no cure for the afflicted but I do have words of wisdom from David Bowie “Always remember that the reason you started originally working, was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society.”

That should do it.

The attraction of going online to coach is clear. No more face-to-face interactions where clients might let you down – whether it’s not showing up, complaining about the traffic, or not doing what you ask them to do.

Online, on your sofa, on the beach. If you’re wasting time, it’s your own, not mine. And best of all it scales.

I know coaches who spend a lot of money on one thing: someone to explain the difference between what is important and urgent, and what is important but not urgent. All the money has done is focussed your attention on what was important but not urgent (systems).

My only hope is that you can recoup your investment and pass on what you’ve learned to your own clients. That way, you’ll both avoid reacting to the latest news, drama, or crisis that washes up on your shores.

I wish you well.

More or less is an idiom often used to describe a rough approximation, “give or take”, or “somewhat.”

When you don’t have enough clients, money, or time for yourself, it appears that you need more, not less. “Or”, doesn’t come into it. The solution is clear.

Unless, of course, you are Einstein: ” You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”

So here goes:

What moves us away from thinking about “more or less,” an infinity axis, a few more or a few less? Definition.

Define your fears. Explore your edges. Find what it means to feel stable and secure for you.

The alternative is to be more or less happy with your lot.

I reintroduced yoga into my physical training routine a few weeks back. Every fourth week I have a down week and play with asymmetrical loaded movements, kettlebells, and body weight drills. But, for some reason, this time I went for yoga.

And for now, it’s become a staple of what I do.

Cricketer Olly Stone credits his recent return to playing Pilates. “You don’t realise until you get in certain positions on the reformer that you’re probably not as strong as you might think.” Also surprised.

Discerning reader, I can’t imagine that you are surprised at this. We rarely are after the fact. And yet…..

Lots of time and effort are put into studying the opposition becuase they hold you back, they get in the way, and perhaps if they win, you lose.

The antagonist-protagonist axis is fuel for many a story.

And yet, perhaps the best story of all is the one about why you are doing what you are doing – lest you forget.

A friend tells a story of being called into a meeting late Friday afternoon. The Managing Director stressed, warns that the company will be in trouble without a change of direction. Something has to change. 

He tells the management team to devise ideas over the weekend to save the company.

My friend reviews the minutes from previous meetings, picks out unfinished tasks, and rehashes the content. However, one of the members of the management team sees this as his long-awaited opportunity to tell his side of the story. 

By Monday morning, our hero prepares a document outlining steps to salvage the company. He distributes copies and instructs everyone to read the information before the meeting.

When the meeting time arrives, the MD enters, throws the report on the desk in disgust, and launches into a tirade.

Who are you to tell me what to do? he cries.

Everyone else awkwardly shuffles their papers and talks about moving the coffee machine or postponing the Christmas party. You get the idea.

If you are willing to be surprised and hear phrases like “I didn’t see that coming!” and “I hadn’t thought of it that way before” then consider a meeting with no agenda.

If, on the other hand, you have an agenda, it’s probably best that everyone else you work with knows it too.

We could try being consistent in running, skipping, or even skipping breakfast in an attempt to live longer, run faster, or feel a bit fitter. But in the end, the consistency that counts is when you show up for yourself.

Skipping can get boring, runners pick up injuries, and sometimes breakfast on a Sunday is nice.

Consistently turning up for yourself – perhaps that’s the consistency you need to focus on not the task that has taken your attention, for now at least.

How do you coach someone who you feel is better than you? Can you coach what you have not achieved? A successful CEO, an Olympic Gold medallist, you get the idea.

The answer is simpler than you might imagine.

I’m sitting on the wrong side of the table, looking through my lens, not yours.

In an audition, pitch, or interview, the idea is the same – do you tell them what you think they want to hear or do you show them where you are?

I recently completed a pitch where I took the second option. Since then, the organiser has ghosted me.

Where does that leave me?

Well, for me it was a win. Just as it’s a win if an actor gets a chance to show the producers of the show what they can do – it’s all we can control. Show up, treat the audition as the job at hand, and do your very best to put across your take on the matter. If you do that, you win, every time. Show up, do the work, and accept the result.

The alternative is to look for a win, in matters you can’t control, and that can be an exhausting place to be.

Selling out is the last rung on the ladder of human hope – failure not so much.

Self-help includes things like books, courses, and workshops. The idea, of course, is that we find a way to do something that until now, someone else would have to do for us.

I’ve just bought an Udemy course that will, I hope, help me build a few one-page websites for content and experiences I have created.

Deciding our obligation to ourselves and society is a good place to start.

When bootstrapping a project, there comes a time when you know how much it’s going to take to get it off the ground. It’s not much, but it’s not free. It’s an exciting and terrifying time.

Here’s a simple example:

You need £3k to kick start a project – not much, but enough to stop and make you think.

Here’s the math:

Product Price: £75

Upside after costs, including distribution: £45

Twenty units cover the set-up costs

The question worth asking at this point is this: What must you see to feel confident enough to ask a family member for the money?

Here’s my suggestion: Trial the cheapest prototype you can make and find 5-10 people who would be willing to buy whatever it is you are producing.

Earn while you learn.

Steven Pressfield calls it “depth of work“; you need both courage and foolishness, maybe not in equal measures, but you need them all the same.

Hubris, on the other hand, has no place unless, of course, you want it to be over. For soon, it surely will.

For the rest of us, ship it and move on to the next one for better or worse.

I could never remember which is which until looking at it differently; trust, interaction, action. A reminder that one without the others is not much use at all.

“If I get it right, I don’t need to be right.”

That’s an entry in my journal that I found today while going through my notes.

What do I mean?

Quentin Tarantino was once schooled in giving actors auditions by Harvey Keitel who told him to wait, don’t give direction – let the actor show you what they think. It could be the only time you have to understand what the actor is thinking. Don’t lose that chance.

Know when to follow and when to lead. Get that right, and you don’t always need to be right.

I can’t tell you how to distinguish between the trap of “Tell me what you want, and I’ll do my best to convince you that what you need is something else,” and asking the question for you to get clear on what you want.

However, I can tell you that while both are intentional, one has its roots in design, and the other in desire.

For example; if I can write for 3 hours a day, train for an hour, and cook dinner for the family, then asking “What do you want?” for a coaching client is important but not hard. The hard work lies in creating the freedom to ask that question without needing to hear a particular answer.

Even when writing a pitch document to a handful of people, you could still be asking too little from too many. As I was today. It’s a nice reminder that we seldom have an attention problem or a lack of followers; it’s much more likely to be a lack of clarity.

Few people want to hear the word “audit” being mentioned. People feel the same way about the word “manifesto”.

The act of publishing and sharing your manifesto with others can open up opportunities for feedback, dialogue, and collaboration. Other coaches, practitioners, or stakeholders may provide valuable insights, critiques, or alternative perspectives that can challenge your thinking and prompt you to refine or expand your coaching philosophy.

The word “audit” comes from the Latin word “audire,” which means “to hear.” An auditor would “hear” the accounts being read aloud and verify their accuracy. Perhaps it’s time to audit our skills as coaches, first for ourselves and then for others to verify their accuracy.

To get started on your coaching manifesto, join me here.

I’ve long thought about an agency that takes the “dirty work” of the coach – planning, paperwork, and performance. Few coaches enjoy it and most think it gets in the way of the job. Ignoring it works until it doesn’t; it’s often too late by then.

Planning after the event gives the illusion that we will do better in the future but that’s not true at all.

If you would like to consider the coach that you want to become then you would do well to consider this workshop.

I’m running a 6-week no-cost guided practice workshop. This workshop offers a rare chance to collaborate with peers and receive guidance as you craft your coaching manifesto.

Find all the details right here. If you know someone who might be interested, I’d appreciate it if you would forward this to them.

Telling you that fear and anxiety are emotions is unlikely to be helpful. Learning how to deal with them, on the other hand, is different. LeDoux’s theory, “Feel First, Make Sense Later,” suggests we feel then we make sense.

In short, talking about the emotions associated with fear and anxiety is helpful; thinking your brain is somehow doubling down on sending signals to your body, not so much.

Tx

Summarising what just happened to allow us to “understand” it is much less helpful than reducing an event to its core principles.

For example, resisting the urge to act on the feedback of one event versus reviewing the design of the event to consider central tenants such as ownership, leadership, and belonging.

The opposite of competence is incompetence, and that’s something we would rather avoid. Only, in avoiding incompetence, good enough might just be enough, and that’s a trap we seem to fear less, than incompetence itself.

Tonight I had a lot of fun assisting in a softball session. I’m not a softball coach, but I am interested in working with people to figure out what they want to do, particularly in sports.

One of the girls was as unconvinced about her batting prowess as I was convinced I had no clue about the right way to swing a softball bat.

“What do you want me to do?” I said while trying to demonstrate a shot. Of course, we know it’s easier to tell someone else what to do than it is to do it ourselves! Just ask a busy, disorganised dad what his kid needs to do.

Resist the urge and make a fool of yourself instead.

“Show me again!”

By their very nature, if they are not shared but owned by one, then they are likely to be selfish.

I know I’ve done it and as I sit watching the Olympics, I can’t help but wonder how many of those athletes have fallen into the same trap.

If I win (except in a race), then do you lose?

Not what I assume, or wish for, but what do I think is going to happen? What can I expect in the next 90 days? It’s a great question because if you can’t predict with certainty what is going to happen, then what can you expect?

I filled out my answers today:

Complete the script for the Udemy course by the close of the school holidays.

Look for 10 coaches to work through the content in September – Active Users.

Meanwhile, read through with AN Other for sense and takeaways.

Film content for the course when the narrative arc is clear and users have interacted with the content.

And actually, what’s really going on:

Creating the space to write for 3 hours a day.

Collaboration

Flexibility

Iterative approach

All of this doesn’t come “naturally” but I’ve come to expect it of myself.

What are you expecting?

The best idea wins, it’s that simple. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, it just has to be the best way to reach the end. And herein lies the real problem: What do you want? I mean really want?

In 6 words or less. Go!

The coach who wants her players to have belief in what they do is building belief in what she thinks is important.

The customer service rep who speaks up on behalf of her clients is learning to speak up for what she believes in.

When we believe in something bigger than us, it rubs off, try it.

Ain’t that the truth. How could you?

Amongst the hustle and the bustle, there is interaction. The artist who begins a story, a project, a self-reflective script, or anything that requires you to give a little. Of course, the end in mind is not the end we get, but that’s ok. We got what we needed; it’s just not what we wanted.

In giving a little (in the beginning at least), we learn a little bit more about ourselves and what we need.

If you are a coach, but not much of a writer, then write a self-reflective script. Not to understand what’s gone before, as that’s unlikely to be accurate, but to know more about what you are likely to pay attention to in the future.

It might surprise you.

Talking to a friend of mine last week, who’s heading out to the Scottish Isles, our chat turned to the practice of “crofting” and its undeniable inconvenience.

Hhmm!

Odd, then, that so many of us hanker for an organic smallholding somewhere far, far away. Crofters can’t pack it up quickly enough, and yet, the rest of us dream of an idyllic lifestyle of self-sufficiency. Convenience leads to boredom and monotony; inconvenience to trials and tribulations.

And just like so many things in life, it’s all or nothing – a life of seeking out one or the other. Of course, there is an answer, and that’s intentional design – a dash of inconvenience and a lump of convenience, or however else you want to slice it.

The truth is few of us spend any time thinking through our lives as a project in process. When was the last time you sat and looked at the assumptions you hold, the constraints that confront you, or the resources that are available to you? My guess is not at all.

I’m not off to take up crofting anytime soon, but I invite you to challenge your ideas around a desire for convenience and the real need for inconvenience in our lives.

Attendee Feedback:

What attendees liked:

• Meeting other coaches
• Discussing personal situations and listening to others
• SWOT analysis of coaching practice
• Communication methods
• Informal structure and environment
• Open group chats
• Social aspect
• Openness to share real challenges
• Flexibility in choosing topics on the day

What attendees wished for:

• Exploring a second subject
• More Coach Camps
• Coming prepared with specific ideas to discuss
• Coach Camps in locations beyond Cardiff
• Opportunity to hear from other groups
• More time for additional topics

One Thing Attendees Will Apply to Their Practice

• Co-produce coaching sessions
• Taking time to communicate beyond just physical aspects
• Having specific ideas to discuss
• Conducting a SWOT analysis of coaching
• Use a personal coaching/teaching diary for practice reflection

What excited me most about Coach Camp was the switch from focusing on external factors (engagement, elite coaching behaviours) to internal development and self-awareness – an “inside-out” paradigm perspective shift.

On the day, we spoke about creative tension; this idea that we live with both a good coach and a bad coach and that we need both. Well, here it is in all its beauty:

We all walked away thinking “I can do better than that.“

But it’s also worth remembering that we all did what we said we would do, which is show up and be open, curious, and willing to share our experiences. Chapeau!

The opposite of convenient is inconvenient, defined as causing trouble or annoyance for you. Convenience, on the other hand, is there when you want it: a car when you want to get somewhere, a snack when you are hungry, a phone for when you are bored.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to 4 years of inconvenience: bad weather, longer travel times, and dark winter nights. I’m going to miss the inconvenience of riding with my kids to school every day, so much.

I’ve learned that inconvenience is a feeling, and it’s well worth reconsidering what we think it is because the cost might be less than you think.

Diolch, Ysgol Melin Gruffydd. We will miss you in our lives.

Data drives decisions in sports science. We used to tell you where you were and where you had been, and now we can almost predict where you will be. But are we data-driven or driven by data?

If you are not clear on the question you are asking, then the data is driving you.

“It happens to the best of us” might just be a better place to start from.

Imagine that you are a 9-year-old child standing waiting to take your first steps onto an academy football pitch.

You have been chosen to take part in an Academy program that over the next 3 years will introduce you to the idea of Long Term Athletic Development. Together with football training and competitive football matches, there is a “FUNdamental” world of physical activity waiting for you.

As a 12-year-old looking back over those three years, what has to have happened for you to feel happy with your time at the Academy?

I’ve heard coaches say their job is to make the next coach’s job easier. I know parents who want their children to be happy, and successful, and above all to still be in the program.

You get my point.

I’ve designed events, courses, and even training programs that have the end in mind. Sometimes, I write a dream review, putting myself in the user’s shoes – what do I want to happen?

It’s a question worth asking.

What do I want to happen?

The 70:20:10 model suggests we learn via assignments, developmental relationships, and coursework or training. How did researchers develop this model? They used a questionnaire.

Yeah, you guessed it.

Coach the person, not the model.

Whether it’s applying for a job (putting your qualifications to use), applying a theory to real-world situations (putting knowledge into practice), or applying software to solve a problem (putting a tool to work), your application is only as good as the result it produces.

Being clear on the desired result might be a good place to start but since multiple applications are usually required, versatility is perhaps more helpful.