SimonHarlingBlog Posts

Nobody likes being told what to do. But that might just be missing the point.

There are broadly speaking 4 types of knowledge. The first two are explicit. “Propositional”, do this, don’t do that. And “procedural”, follow this process to get this outcome. It works. Until it doesn’t. 

Now if you are feeling triumphant at this point, hear me out. 

“All models are wrong, some are useful.” This amorphism by the statistician George Box reminds us that it is better, to begin with, something that makes sense than point at the flaws and do nothing at all.

Solving people’s problems by telling them what to do is useful. Especially when time is running out. Since there is little time to waste on experimenting. 

I’m thinking here about helping kids develop fundamental movement skills. But I could equally apply the same argument to novice coaches or just about any other pursuit in which you are green. 

Rob Parsons, author of The Sixty minute Father has this to say. “Eighteen years of our children’s lives contain 6570 days. If your child is 10 years old, 3650 days have already passed. You have 2920 days left.”

If you don’t like what you see when you ask your 10-year-old child to do a press-up, a pull-up, a squat, and pick something up from the floor.  Here is a model to help you see where you sit in the process of Crawl, Walk, Run. We need you to step up and become decisive about your role in the development of your child’s fundamental movement skills.

You can see from the table. In the Crawl stage, you follow directives. Do this, don’t do that. The application of defined constraints. Since it’s mostly body weight, there is very little risk and lots of upside. Anyone can play in this area, and they should. 

	Crawl	Walk	Run
Description of each stage	Can YOU help me to control my own body weight?	Can I control the external load (to body weight)?	Can We create a high-performance environment?
	Product of the environment Copy  Monkey See Monkey Do	Shapeshifting Earn the right to lift external loads	It’s on ME When do I do my best work?
	BE: Define	Do: Shift through trial and error	SAY: Create meaning
Prescription	Directive bases fitness.Application of defined constraints.	Application of directives until they don’t work.	Development of directives or guardrails through the creative process of trial and error.
	Innate ability to move	Retain the innate ability to move	Retain the innate ability to move
Delivery	Volunteer CoachesSupported by subject expertise	Mentorship: Coaching the gap	Coaching
	Propositional KnowledgeProcedural Knowledge	Perspective Knowledge	Participatory/Experiential Knowledge

And if you are wondering about the other two types of knowledge. 

Perspective knowledge provides us with a new lens through which to see the world. A shift in perspective. 

Participatory knowledge is gained through lived experience. Experiential learning. 

Although easily bluffed, true implicit knowledge is gained through trial and error. The type of error that stings you so bad you want to, need to, learn from the experience. And that’s not for everyone. 

To truly learn from experience we need to answer the question. What is the point? 

Seth Godin, calls it the dip. “I’m in the shit.” “ It’s not working the way they said it would. Now what?”

In the dip, we quit. 

Actively quitting to protect our resources. 

Passively quitting because we feel overwhelmed.

Or we push on. 

If trial and error is your strategy simply because you don’t like people telling you what to do. Now would be a good time to reconsider that strategy. Because without the explicit directives of procedural and propositional knowledge, there will be little or no framework on which to sit your learning. 

With no time to waste. No conceptual framework on which to base your learning. The smart question might be. 

What do you need me to do?

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Somewhere between being unassertive and assertive sits compromise. Chris Voss, author of the book Never split the difference, tells us why. “The person who offers to meet you in the middle is usually a poor judge of distance.”

Far better, but requiring more work is collaboration.  Collaboration is closing the distance between people, finding the overlaps. The work of helping others sees the distance between what we believe in and what matters to them.

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Or experience. The rest is up for debate.

So let’s have that debate. According to David Minton from the Leisure Database company  “If the fitness industry grew its membership base from the current 1% to 15% of members aged over 65, it would double in value and size.” 

But what is the point?

An impressive bench press won’t help you with babysitting. So why look to extend the warranty if you are not going to use it?

Nobody is going to push their elderly relatives into going to the gym to double the economy. Come on Grandma, this one is for the budget deficit! 

The grey pound might be powerful but is unlikely to be a force for change. 

On the other hand, mentorship can create change.

The social marketplace of mentorship is a place of possibility. A place where the value received far exceeds any value associated with the task. 

Who better to teach the consequences of inaction than those who have paid the price? In teaching their grandkids why they should keep touching their toes. And what happens if they don’t. An opportunity is created to relearn a skill they might well have lost.  

Pay attention and you might well double your marketplace. Trade experience for attention and you might well change a nation.

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When teaching your kids problem-solving skills. The big life journal reminds us to begin with emotion coaching.

The first step in emotion coaching is to name and validate emotions.

I’ve never met anyone who is quite unsure about an idea and yet quite curious. But I have met plenty of people who are curious and fearful. 

As simple as it sounds, starting with the right mindset might just be the hardest thing you do.

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This is Chick Corea’s advice to people wanting to play music in a group.

Chick’s advice came about not because he wanted to teach others. But because he had wanted to learn himself, then he taught the others.

Experiential learning requires self-initiative, an intention to learn, and an active phase of learning.

Learning to put pen to paper is part of the process.

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These prompts might be hard to answer but your coaching program will benefit.

What would happen if……

You replaced the fear of kids leaving your program with the responsibility to teach them skills they can carry forward?

You replaced the fear of not getting picked, not having THE most popular coaching program, with a curriculum that stretched the numbers you do have?

You replaced your anxieties with a focus on the change that only you can create?

A coach that learns to dance with their fears will be the GOAT. In the eyes of the kids they coach.  My Father in Law was this coach. When he passed the kids he once coached came to his funeral. 

Dan’s focus on the few turned into the many but that was never his point.

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From starting to play the violin to the day I quit, was less than 3 months. I didn’t care enough to stick around. There was plenty to learn, progress to be made, but not enough desire to see it through.

“It’s so unfair. My violin was too fiddly for me.”  

“My teacher didn’t like me.”

“Music is stupid.”

I don’t regret not learning to play the violin. 

I do regret not learning about skill acquisition. From understanding the probability of success to the design of the game I was playing. It would have made each interaction with skill development a little easier. 

Music. Physical Education.  Content does not matter.

Context matters. Teaching kids how to learn. 

Fun comes and goes. 

Learning to control our emotions is a skill that will last a lifetime.

We can make a lasting impression or we can worry about being on time for the piano lesson. And that’s nobody’s fault but ours.

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When my kid drops her ice cream on the floor she is not after a valuable life lesson, she wants another ice cream. I might feel the need to give her a life lesson but it is much more likely that I want an easy life. 

This is a quote from a government-funded agency. “The FUNdamentals stage provides an opportunity to teach and develop the basic skills and movement patterns required to participate in any form of sport, play or physical activity.”

Fun was inserted into FUNdamentals in the hope of keeping kids in the game. Yet, society has failed spectacularly in its aim to teach kids fundamental movement skills. Now is the best time to decide if FUNdamentals is a catchy slogan or a distraction from the truth. 

We need to make a choice.  

If we want an easy life keep FUNdamentals.

If we need to develop fundamental movement skills it’s time to drop the pretence of fun.

If we are not having enough fun. Book a clown.

If you want growth and development. Hire a coach.

If you are a coach who is paid to act like a clown know this. The sad clown paradox describes how performers attempt to get acceptance through fun and enjoyment, whilst feeling sad and empty inside. 

And that is no joke.

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Kids don’t move enough. 

But you are off the hook. 

You are not qualified to teach fundamental movement skills and besides, you might get told off. 

If there is an upside to being unassertive, it is that you can’t offend anyone, and that might just be the point.

But what would happen if you become more assertive? 

You would need just one piece of information. 

A learning outcome, one teachable point. 

A point that you can use to inspire and engage kids to look for insight and turn it into change.

And that point? 

If you think something is important to you. Don’t let people get in your way, including you.  

Teaching kids fundamental movement skills will offend some people, maybe most people. “It’s a waste of time.” “It will disrupt the kids.” “There are more important things to do.”

In the beginning, movement in any direction is progress.

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I caught my youngest daughter whispering to Alexa last week “Alexa, how much does a Zebra weigh?”

A friend of mine tells herself that each day is a chance to start over. Since each day turns over, with no reflection, there are very few lessons to carry forward. 

“But I don’t want each day to start over. I want it to mean something” she said. 

I asked her to write down what she stood for. “Not much” came the reply.  

“Then, write down that you believe that every day is a chance to start over. You believe that. Every day starts over. Only now you carry that knowledge with you.”  

Here is what she wrote.

Every day starts over. I carry what takes me forward and leave behind what I no longer need.

Isn’t that the point of change? Creating something that you could not see until it was created, something that surprises even you, the creator.  

By definition, a paradoxical statement runs contrary to one’s own expectations. And that might just be better than starting over each day. 

“Alexa, how much does a Zebra weigh?”

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When you ask a successful person to look back and offer advice to their younger self. Most will say. “I wish I would have gone faster.”

What if what they meant to say was. “Once, I knew what worked. Then I wished I had committed to it quicker.”

Why add speed to chaos? Starting out with no clue what you are doing. It is hard to believe that going faster is going to help anybody. 

Commit to your idea. Find out it doesn’t work. Continue to try to make it work.

Or.

Validate your idea. Find out what works. Commit to that.

The difference is subtle. The change is significant. Commit if you want to go faster.

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“Monday to Thursday we focus on developing our kids but come the weekend we want to win.” Said every competitive youth coach. 

And that might sound like a reasonable strategy. The best of both worlds.

Buridan’s ass tells the story of an ass that is equally hungry and thirsty. The ass is placed midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. The donkey, unsure of whether to choose the hay or the water, dies of both hunger and thirst.

A reminder to commit fully to one route. When we compromise, we choose neither. 

To paraphrase Mr. Miyagi. The most famous of all youth development coaches. Development Do. Development Don’t. No Development Don’t know.

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Most of us would agree that young kids (at least until the age of 14) should try out lots of different sports and activities. 

Yet the sporting system in the UK is not designed that way.

Sports national governing bodies don’t tell their kids not to come to a tournament because they want them to go climb in the woods. 

A professional tennis coach won’t turn down a lesson so your kid can practise their tumbles.

We are working in a background of fear. How did we arrive at a system that works against us, not for us?

The funding system for sport in this country was until recently biased towards participation. The more people participate in a given sport the more money and power a sport gets. The more people are active in a sport, the more likely it is that the sport will uncover a medal winner.

If it sounds simple it is. A child picks up a squash racket, enjoys the sport, and starts to take part on a regular basis. One notch up on the participation totaliser, and the funding distributors can point to money well spent.  Working for you, not against you, right?

Wrong. Manipulating their behaviours to affect the measure. National governing bodies and many others fall foul of Goodhart’s Law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When you are paid to bark, you bark. The measure and the money bring compliance.

Nothing changes until the system changes. Moving from participation towards measures of inclusion and diversity is not changing the system, it is changing the measure.  Much like moving a deck chair on the Titanic.   

The question remains.

How do we get a system that works for us not against us?

It seems obvious to me that replacing measures with trust would see the need for compliance fall away. And with it, the competition for resources. And it is this competition for resources that keeps us in place.

To change the system. Roles need to reverse. The government and central agencies need to become passive to get out of our way. Telling us how we’re doing, not how to do it.

Passive parents, teachers, and coaches we need you to lead. You don’t need to be told how to do it. Instead, you need to be told how you are doing. 

Needing more is a narrative that is holding us back. Competition for resources makes them seem more precious, in demand. And so compliantly we before more.

But, never have we had so much. Stop asking. How do we do this? And instead, try. How are we doing?

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Nobody has run a 2hr marathon in the morning and deadlifted 1000lb in the afternoon. And it is unlikely that anyone ever will. 

You can’t be a coach who values strength and endurance equally. And the reason is not that you can’t allocate 50% of your client’s time to strength and 50% of the time to endurance pursuits. You can.

But, you can not ignore the impact one has on the other. 

There is always a hierarchy. Something has to go on the top. It doesn’t need to stay stuck to the top, but something has to occupy the top position. Order matters. 

The order in which things are done should also be situation-specific. Here are my coaching principles for Crawl. From the Ground Up. A coaching program that is designed to put fundamental movement skills at the front of the conversation. 

1. The body is sensory, one system. Crap IN, Crap OUT. Since we can control crap IN, that’s our focus.  
2. Order matters: Crawl, Walk, Run is not the same as Run, Walk, Crawl.  
3. Fundamental movements are fundamental. 
4. Creating change is a creative process. Learning to work with constructs is part of the deal, not part of the frustration.  

Here are some great reasons for writing a coaching manifesto. 

1. Transparency. If you are a coach who values development, over a win on a Saturday, then we should know. 

2. Curating new information. Nothing sends a coach off course like new information. The order of your coaching principles will shape how you show up as a coach. Not to mention save you time and money when deciding on what information is going to help you grow as a coach.

3. On the hook. You now have a list of numbered tenants. Concise bold statements of your thinking. That challenge and provoke both you and the reader. And the best bit?  You get to rearrange them when they don’t work. Flippant? No, open and curious is better than inflexible and stuck wouldn’t you say? 

4. Clear standards and expectations. The crowd you run with, the environment you create and the change you seek are on you. Stand by your results. 

5. Problems and context. It is far easier to help a coach see a problem when the tools they are using are in order. A bad tradesman blames their tools, but the client’s problem remains.  

6. Qualifications. They may be part of the deal for some people. But knowledge accumulation is far less valuable than knowledge application. Learning about lego won’t make you an architect.

7. Find the others. Your manifesto is an advert that makes it easier for people to find you. Homophily is a concept in sociology that describes the tendency of people to associate with similar others. Birds of a feather.  

8.  Write a letter to your future self. A document on the leading edge of your thinking. A way of talking yourself into the room. It’s then on you to actively uphold the contents of the manifesto. You can always change the content to stretch you in a different direction, as a new perspective takes hold. 

9. Agent of change. Change is a result of a new perspective and a set of standards that you uphold. The beating heart of that change is a manifesto Wave after wave of change, each revision, a placeholder. A reminder to be consistent, persistent and assertive, until you know better.

10. Collaboration. Closing the distance between people, finding the overlaps. Who better to work with than a coach who is clear on what matters to them?

The order might not be right. And I’m sure there are more than 10 good reasons to write a coaching manifesto. But starting is the only way your manifesto will get better. 

Thanks to Dan John for the marathon and deadlift example (not challenge).

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The best way to see what people really believe is to watch their actions. But since we can’t watch ourselves as coaches. And we don’t often get feedback on our own coaching. The simplest way to put yourself on the hook as a coach is to write a coaching manifesto. 

It begins with the questions. Who am I? What do I fundamentally believe in? What do I stand for? 

Here is mine for coaching my kids u 9/10’s football team. 

Development > Competition. 

I told you it was simple. And here are the 3 directives that bring that statement to life. 

I don’t care who wins.

I do care that my kids compete for and with each other.

I don’t care about the better players getting more game time.

I do care that each kid gets the same amount of playing time.

I don’t care that my best players play out of position.

I do care that all my players play in every position on the pitch.

Provided you can remember that a brilliant idea with no execution is worth nothing. Writing a manifesto can help shape how you show up as a coach. 

And if you can’t? The kids you coach and their parents will soon remind you.

What do you really stand for, coach?

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I’m in the market for a coach to teach me to do a kettlebell swing, a hinge movement. I’m at the start of my journey, with no clue what it takes. What type of coach do I see?

A strength coach would say get stronger. A kettlebell swing would be a lot easier if you are stronger. At the other end of the spectrum, an endurance-biased coach is not interested when you are tired, only when you are done.

If a coach has done their homework they will organised their coaching principles into an order, a hierarchy, strength before endurance, one good kettlebell swing before you do 10. And perhaps even thought past the main ingredients into the recipe itself. 

Since the body is sensory. The information going in needs to be as good as the information going out. Crap in, crap out. 

So what’s the answer?

Last night I made chickpea curry and although the first word is chickpea, I didn’t start with it. The more I understand the ingredients, and the order in which they work best, the better I understand the recipe. And that makes me more confident of the result. 

So the answer? It depends. On you.

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Let’s look at how best to perform a posterior horizontal weight shift with minimal knee bend.

Don’t panic. 

Ok, intuitively and emotionally, you might just have panicked a little. “I hope this doesn’t come with a quiz.” Or, moved to power off mode. And switched off. 

In sport as in life, acceptance of weight that takes you backward means that soon you can shift your weight forward, with greater force, and that can be an advantage. 

From picking stuff up to springing into action the hinge pattern is a fundamental movement skill. Piggyback’s make life seem a little better and a little simpler too. A posterior horizontal weight shift with minimal knee bend. 

Weighing somebody down with lots of information is much like coaching the hinge pattern. Weigh them down too heavily and you might not get them back. Lighten the load, dumb it down too far, and you might not go back far enough to learn anything at all.

The flip side of dumbing down information is the necessary work of ensuring we can get back up, to achieve what feels impossible. The work of understanding what is necessary to know, what is possible to achieve, and what can feel impossible when we begin. 

Crawl. From the ground up  Hinge Pattern
Necessary: Crawl	Hinge pattern safely for conditioning purposes
Possible: Walk	Lift own bodyweight using a hinge pattern
Impossible: Run	Game-changing levels of strength1.5 x 2  bodyweight

The ability to curate, organise information should be as fundamental a skill as a hinge or squat pattern. A skill that allows us to see the necessary information we need to move on. And as importantly the gaps in knowledge that hold us back. 

Here is the necessary information to move from a walk to crawl in the hinge pattern. Remember when you are reading this, it may be necessary to feel like you are going backward. But backward is exactly where you may need to go, as it is necessary for forward movement. 

Crawl. What is necessary   Hinge Pattern
Prerequisites	Circumferential breath mechanics Toe Touch: The ability to touch your toes. Active Straight Leg Raise Score of 3 Hinge Patterning

None of the information presented here is complex. It requires nothing more than a remedial understanding of how the body works. A standard of knowledge, necessary for us to move well. 

Moving well should be our expectation, not an enviable standard.

As in life, it is advisable although not mandatory that we earn the right to proceed. Crawl before we walk. The alternative is to dumb ourselves down so far that we risk falling backward, so far in fact, that we can’t get back up again.

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I’ve come to realise that it is easy to put yourself off doing something, anything, by focussing on the endpoint. 

“I would feel silly teaching my child to sprint because they are not going to win the Olympics.”

Yet, few of us would argue the value of being actively involved in the development of our children. The creative process of connection, possibility, and trial and error with your child. Winning the Olympics is a prize, not the point.

Since few of us have an ultra-specific, inspiring, endpoint, like winning the Olympics 100m sprint, driving us relentlessly towards our purpose.  And the risk of creating an endpoint is that you will feel silly.  How do you put yourself on the hook for the physical development of your child?

Work to a question instead. Here is an example:

In our family each week we ask the same question. 

How much fun was it to be in our family this week?

The scores range from 5 – So much fun to 1 – No fun at all.

We ask the question because we want to create an opportunity to sit, talk and listen to each other. Not that we don’t care about the score. But the score is part of the process, not the point. 

We don’t just care about the score, we care about the conversation, connection, and possibility of learning something about each other. 

We trust each other to give a true score.

We trust each other not to judge each other’s score

We trust each other enough to know that our intention is true and shared. 

We don’t create graphs, action plans or bring in a fun expert. 

Although the score, a soft, subjective measure, does not move much from a 3, 4, or 5 each week. What has improved is the quality of our experiences, and our conversations, driven by our purpose, not our measure. 

If you don’t have an endpoint. Don’t overthink it, just load the wagon. And ask a question instead. 
How do I encourage my children to be active, healthy, and curious contributors to society?

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Teaching kids fundamental movement skills is not the hard part. Getting teachers, parents, and coaches out of the way is.

How do I make it happen? 

Will I look silly?

Will I get the blame?

What do I do when I don’t know the answer?

What if I can’t do it?

Here are some alternative questions to help you see what is actually under your control. Because creating an example worth copying takes time and that might just be the problem.

What do I value?

What would change mean to me?

What skills am I missing that would enhance my efforts?

How do I create an example worth copying?

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The one thing that changed all else for you in 2022 was talking yourself into the room.

The Man in the Arena is a well-known passage from the speech Citizenship in a Republic delivered by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. It is a rallying call to all who are trying to make the world a better place to ignore the cynics, real and imaginary, and do it anyway.

Here are 4 of the blogs that helped shape my thinking and direction in 2021:

The economist, society, and the coach

Good Coach Bad Coach

Goals don’t move people do

It’s not a competition

Happy New Year. I look forward to hearing about what matters to you.

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The story of Milo of Croton, who carried an ox on his shoulders and got stronger as the ox grew. Is a story used to explain the Principle of Overload in the field of Strength and Conditioning.

The argument is simple enough. If you want to grow stronger, lift more. 

What if the story of Milo of Croton, was also an urgent reminder, for parents, teachers, and coaches? 

The reminder is this. Do not wait to begin teaching your child to handle their own body weight. As your child develops, so too does the challenge of handing their own body weight. Wait and the task becomes harder. Much harder.

All too often we worry that we know too little, find an excuse about why we don’t and remain passive to the task.

“I personally think children are still developing in school, so they do not require weight training.” 

This is a quote from a youth worker with a background in personal training. The article I had written was about teaching kids fundamental movement skills.

The difficult part is not in understanding that children develop, or even when it is safe to introduce weight training. No, the difficult part is that you may not know much about fundamental movement skills, how to move well.

And if that is the case, and I believe it to be so for most of the population. The opportunity is simple enough. Learn alongside your child.

Had Milo of Croton waited until his ox was fully grown, he would have been unknown to us. History reminds us not to wait but to act accordingly.

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Losing sight of your promise, while chasing your measures is a trap.

The challenge is to create measures that guide you towards fulfilling the promise you make. Once you have defined exactly, specifically and precisely, what your purpose is.

British Cycling has this mission: 

“Our mission in life is to deliver international sporting success, grow and effectively govern cyclesport and inspire and support people to cycle regularly.”

Engagement through participation is not the purpose of a sporting national governing body. Neither is winning gold medals. Or even for that matter governance of their sport. The purpose of a national governing body is to encourage us all to enjoy their sport, and then if you are good enough to win a gold medal, while transparently governing the sport. 

Does anyone else see the issue?

In the hustle to make a profit, companies often conflate their intent with their measure, profit. But even when confused, their job is simple enough. Find a way to give customers what they want at a price that makes a profit for the company. And if the hustle to make a profit is hard, try running a company with purpose in a competitive world.

This brings me to my point. Who knows of a CEO who runs a company on purpose from Monday to Thursday while switching to profit on the weekends? 

We got here by accident, not design. National governing bodies are not fit for purpose. That is clear. 

The question is. What are we going to do about it?

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Let’s imagine that we are in charge of public policy and that we are going to create a new physical education curriculum. One that is aimed at increasing kids’ physical activity levels. What should we focus on?

Well, let’s look through the lens of fundamental movement skills. What does it teach us?  

Table 1 is a non-exhaustive list of motor skills in 3 sports. Table Tennis, Squash and Badminton. 

	Table Tennis	Squash	Badminton
Throwing and Catching
Hopping
Running
Hitting an object	✔	✔	✔
Climbing
JumpingIncluding landing			✔
Changing direction	✔	✔	✔
Static control of body weight	✔	✔	✔
Dynamic control of bodyweight	✔	✔	✔

Although you are ahead of me now. I want to press on. When exposure to a wide range of sports is limited sports participation programs provide a narrow physical development curriculum.

Funding participation is easy enough to understand. Kids are inactive, get them into a sport. If they enjoy a sport just maybe they will increase their activity levels. But when we look at developing fundamental movement skills, we can see the cracks.

What about encouraging kids to take on multiple sports? Since a reasonable test of a youth (under 14 years of age) fundamental movement skills program would be that a student could go across to any other program and excel. 

That’s an easy win, right? 

Maybe. If we can find a way for coaches and sports not to feel threatened by others when we fund sports and programs through participation numbers. And if we can help teachers and parents see what a well-rounded fundamentals program looks like. 

And if that’s what it takes then the question becomes. How do we encourage active, healthy, and curious contributors to society?

A twist on an old theme, but it might just be enough.

Enough to encourage an age-grade rugby coach to teach athletics in the summer for example.

Enough to see that acquiring fundamental movement skills will only happen by design.

And it might just help us see that to be successfully active across multiple sports, activities, and pastimes we need a wide range of fundamental movement skills, not just a few. 

The system we have now is a hand-me-down. But what are we handing down?  It’s time to look through a different lens and ask a different question.

How do we encourage active, healthy, and curious contributors to society?

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There is a teachable moment that exists for a child that you won’t find on a Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD) plan. But that’s ok, it’s only a plan. You still need to be paying attention. 

My 12-year-old nephew can’t do a press-up and he’s curious. 

Tall, awkward, and often sitting around playing computer games. He was told to speak to his uncle. Since pushing yourself up in a straight line from the floor requires strength.

But strength is in the tail. Strength masks mobility, stability, and coordination issues until it doesn’t. Then it’s too late. Pushing yourself up in a straight line from the floor first requires mobility, stability, coordination. And only then strength. 

Focus on strength and you miss an opportunity to play with reflex stabilisation, diaphragm position during inhale and exhale, and hip mobility. Active, healthy, and curious kids require us to meet their needs of stability, connection, esteem, and only then their purpose. 

Why fixate on grabbing the tail when we know nothing about the dog?

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“Where your fear is, there is the task.” Carl Jung

No car means we walk and cycle everywhere. My fear last night was in walking an 8-mile round trip, late at night with my youngest.

It’s too cold. It’s too far. I’m putting too much on my kids.

Our challenge is to raise active, healthy, and curious kids.

My youngest skipped, talked, and chased her shadow. And every fourth lamppost, I gave her piggyback. I felt strong, present, enjoying the moment. It was incredible.

Separating out the task and the fear is time well spent.

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And it might just be your best option. Let me explain. New Year, New You. Set a goal, get after it. Simple

Split a goal up into bite-size chunks, find a way to get it done. Simple.

If it works. Good! But, what if it doesn’t work? 

Here are some of the options available to you: 

1. Decide the wind was not in your favour and wait for a change in the conditions.
2. Try again. Although this may be insanity.
3. Change the goal.
4. Change the person/people who have the goal. 

If you are considering taking Options 1 or 2. Here are the questions you should consider. Taken from Seth Godin’s blog Questions for the underinformed.

“Has this ever worked before?”

“How is this different (or the same) from those times?”

“What will you do when it doesn’t work the way you hoped?”

For those who are thinking about Option 3. Changing the goal. Quitting might just be the smartest thing you do. 

Hiring and firing are always options. But, that’s cold and inflexible, and it’s Christmas. Option 4 is really about developing skills, taking on a new perspective, and creating experiences that inform us. 

I say this because every 90 days I plan what I am going to do for the next 90 days. And for the last 3 years, the same goal keeps coming up. Write a book.

I have circled around it, dabbled, scribbled, sniveled, and dragged my attention towards it, every 90 days. And then in the last 90 days (Sept-Dec 2021), I sped up and committed to doing it.

But, I don’t think commitment was the breakthrough. I think the breakthrough was in continuing to talk to people who had done it, other writers and editors, asking questions, and being asked questions. Taking on new information and changing my perspective. 

Until I believed that I could do it. To a standard, I would be proud of. I know I’m not going to be the best writer in the world. I doubt my own mother will read my work. But, I have found value in my creative endeavours.  

I changed, my goal stayed the same. And that starts with a different question. 

“Are you open to change?”

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I’ve invented a game called “Coach”. There are a few rules but no manual.  

Players start by answering the following question:

Do you want to grow or win as a coach?

The answer decides how a player shows up in the game.

When a player chooses Win they are given two weapons: Dominance and Prestige.

When a player chooses Growth. Dominance and Prestige are given as gifts, not weapons. Any player giving away Dominance or Prestige to another player who is not ready to accept the gift must restart the game.

A Win player picks up gains extra points along the route in either Dominance or Prestige by completing certain tasks. Think Mario Cart. 

Tasks include: 

Battling on Twitter

Appeasing high ranking coaches

Trademarking your work

Picking up famous clients

A player can win Coach by being dominant in either Dominance or Prestige.

Think Roy Kent.

Although this can be a be risky strategy because you may come across a coach that is dominant across both.  

Think Jose Mourinho “ The Special one”. 

A player with the highest status wins Coach. And a Win player can sell out to gain status points, especially if it means they win. The reverse is true for a Growth player. Their status rating falls if they sell out. It is their quickest way to lose the game.

In fact, so bad, that any Growth player caught selling out has to wear the eternal badge of shame. For a Growth player, selling out is damnation. The bottom of the fire pit, one below failing. Examples include appeasing high-ranked coaches.

To thrive, Growth players must take on high-scoring tasks with a high risk of failure. They are rewarded if they share their failure. Making it entirely possible that a Growth player can win just by failing forward. 

Of course, a Growth player can stay in the game by taking up tasks that are low-scoring. Tasks that largely go unnoticed. Like giving Dominance or Prestige a gift to lower-ranked players than themselves.

But to have the biggest chance to win Coach. A Growth player has to find a way to collaborate with the other players. Additional points are awarded if their coaching principles or values collide with other players’ commercial interests. But, they share them anyway.  Earning maximum points when their coaching values and principles are in writing.

Since playing Coach is a great way to boost your status in the much bigger Game of Life (definitely trademarked). I hope it catches on.

All you need to do is decide is how you want to show up.

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I yelled at my kid’s football team during training.

Only it was.

I clearly didn’t want competition but I had one on my hands.

It wasn’t my fault. If you had asked me what was important. What was I committed to achieving? I would have told you. I had asked them to slow down and work on the quality of their movement.

I knew my outcome.

As a coach I value kids moving well. Fundamental movement skills and a framework for the kids to understand what is required of them.

So, I don’t have to yell each week.

I had told them to remain tall while skipping driving their right knees across to their left shoulder and vice versa. Done well the drill improves coordination, balance, and single-leg landing skills.

Have these kids no idea how good I am as a coach?

So, it’s not my fault, Bloody kids! They don’t listen.

Only I had lined them up. I had asked them to go from point A to point B in a straight line. I’d made it into a competition without realising it.

It was my fault.

It is on us, as parents, teachers, and volunteer coaches to create an environment in which kids are encouraged to explore and play. We lead by providing examples. Kids learn by copying. And we are all the product of the environment we create.

I’ve written about how to create an entrepreneurial sports coaching practise. But as a parent coach the design of the game I am playing is very different. The same rules do not apply.

To change how I show up as a coach. Crawl. Walk. Run is an idea to help volunteers, teachers, and parent coaches create coaching environments in which we say less and do more.

The commitment cost for the Crawl phase is ownership. It is all your fault. It is on you.

Crawl. Walk. Run

Develop the person. Develop the athlete 

Crawl	Walk	Run
Innate ability to move	Retain innate ability to move	Subject to sport specialisation retain innate ability to move
Can YOU help me to control my own body weight?	Can I control an external load (to body weight)?	Can We create a high-performance environment?
Product of the environment Copy  Monkey See Monkey Do	Shapeshifting Earn the right to lift external loads	It’s on ME When do I do my best work?
Directive bases fitness. Application of defined constraints.	Application of directives until they don’t work.	Development of directives through the creative process of trial and error.
You/We fall to the level of our systems	I apply/reject what I think I know	Creation of meaning through the work that we do
Propositional KnowledgeProcedural Knowledge	Perspective Knowledge	Participatory Knowledge

Games need rules. Directives provide guardrails that keep us on track towards how we want to show up as a coach. Here is an example of one I created off the back of “It’s not a competition!”.

Coaching directive (Crawl Phase): Disrupt order to remove all competitive (verbal, nonverbal) cues to provide focus on the quality and control of movement.

Questions that helped me to develop this coaching directive:

Who are you? What do you value? Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS)

What is important to you? Quality over quantity.

What do you want to focus on? Execution of the movement.

How do you want to show up? Chaos > Control. I need to disrupt the kids thinking.

Here is what I should have done:

Disrupt any hierarchical organisation within the group by having the group come into a huddle. Explain the drill. Ask them to do it from the place they are standing in any direction. Then get them to teach each other.

We associate order with rank. Rank brings competition. When my football kids compete on match day. There is only one rule. Enjoy competing with and for each other. If you don’t, quit. I’ll see you Wednesday in training.

The only score I keep is how much we all enjoy what we do.

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After a 2-year coaching hiatus, I was back. Back with a coaching sprint based on connection, interaction, and growth.

Based on an assumption that a bad plan done is better than a good plan left on a shelf. The hypothesis was simple enough. Would a peer-to-peer learning environment, that encourages trial and error, learning by doing, improve people’s adherence to a training plan?

It bombed. Lots of complimentary comments. No cigarillos.

I could have taken it as a threat to my existence as a coach. Jumped on the hustle bus and doubled down on the rhetoric. And cut prices to get bums on seats.

Instead, I decided to let it go, flip my thinking and take a look at the opportunity. I had not got a hit. But, I had learned something (I wonder how many of us don’t learn much at all and instead prop up what is really not working with tactics, promises, and brute force).

This is what I learned:

Don’t feel threatened. Or get the fear. Allow yourself to see the opportunity to be better. After all, I could ask those who clicked the link. or offered a compliment, a few questions that might help me better understand where to go next.

We can plan, prepare and gauge interest as much as we like. Real insight comes only with real-life decisions. We learn by doing.

If it is not a hit, then switch. Let go of what is not working. There is no point in taking the same shot twice. Think battleships.

Low-fidelity trials help you test your idea, not your tactics.

Accepting your outcome is empowering. Trust yourself and your process.

And if that is not enriching enough for you. You can always quit, jump on the hustle bus, and go find your wealth.

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In the UK at the height of the petrol crisis of 2021, a cyclist smirks as a motorist panic buys petrol. Later on that day, our motorist laughs as an ex SAS soldier mocks a recruit for failing to overcome their fear on reality TV. 

We see other people’s fear. Rarely our own. Welcome to the absurdity of the panic room. 

In my world as a physical coach, one panic is very quickly replaced by another. People rarely stick things out. Instead, they pick up and drop off ideas quicker than Uber Eats.  

Just like my clients, I take on challenges, overcome difficult situations and I don’t always see my fear. So here is a 2 x 2 grid I use to coach people (and myself) out of the panic room and into rational long term decision making:

Stuck in the panic room using short-term emotional thinking. The simple advice would be to cut down your tasks to free up your time. And then use that time to manage what you measure. 

In Greek mythology, Procrustes attacked people by cutting off their legs or stretching them to fit an iron bed. 

To avoid cutting and measuring what feels urgent or important now. Each quarter of the 2 x 2 grid has a different lens. A different set of questions. Providing us with new perspectives.

To have control over how you show up. To slow down long enough to make considered decisions that reflect who you are, and what is important to you. The work is in showing up, sharing what matters to you, and not panicking, as it collides with your environment.

Athletic development is for the long term (LTAD). The Olympic cycle is 4 years. A planning cycle is typically 90 days. 16 cycles to get it right. Plenty of time to create, through trial and error, a performance environment that works for you. 

The pitfall comes when a good intention doesn’t work out. As it inevitably won’t, at least not yet. The default is the panic room and its short-term emotional cycle. The active choice is the work of the long haul. 

The panic room is where your personal transparency becomes murky. You let go of creating and shaping the environment in which you do your best work, and you do what’s necessary. Repeated decisions based on panic take you out of alignment with your environment. Threatened and no longer trusting your own instincts. 

Rather than feel threatened the whole time. What if we could flip the thinking. To find overlaps where new possibilities exist. Turning a threat into an opportunity? Cyclists and motorists constantly clash about the use of our roads. Yet they share the same intention. Movement from A to B.

The Ministry for Transport would become the Ministry for Movement. The intention. To move people based on what they value and what they feel is important to them. Not on what feels urgent, and pressing now.

The issue right now for the Health and Fitness industry is that it serves not one, but two clear client intentions. Feel better and do better.  

Feeling better is not doing better. A company built on purpose is very different from a company built on profit. Of course, a company built on purpose can still turn a profit, but the starting point is very different. 

And we can’t wait for our clients, or our industry to go first. It is on you as a coach to get your starting point crystal clear. Your intention, what you value, and what is important to you. The moment you panic, feel threatened because clients won’t stick. Get perspective, share your challenges. Do. As you would ask of your clients. 

Coaching is a mirror. Engage through entertainment if you want your clients to feel better. Lead through alignment if your clients want to do better. But don’t confuse entertainment with the work of personal leadership.

P.S While we are on the subject of aligning what we say with what we do. The health of our nation is deteriorating which makes me think the health and fitness industry is wearing the wrong label. The physical arts and entertainment industry would be a more inspiring and accurate fit, don’t you think? So too Personal Leadership and Sports Performance each requiring their own schools of mastery.

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The directives provided below are based on my understanding of the book Kettlebell Simple and Sinister by Pavel. 

Click here for my book notes.

Provided as concise statements. Directives tell you what and what not to do. It is then up to you to work with them or reject them.

1. Train fast and slow.

Fast.  Kettlebell swing

Slow. Turkish Get Up (TGU)

2. Focus on simplicity

Stability of technique trumps progress of training load

Once a load is mastered then introduce a progressive step load

8kg Kettlebell load increases every 4 weeks or 4kg Kettlebell increases every 2 weeks. 

3. Focus on quality

Use the talking test and only resume training when you have breath control. 

4. Focus on consistency 

Leave each session undercooked to train again tomorrow

Only occasionally train hard and fast. For example a timed 5k run. 

5. Work to standards 

For example, Timeless Simple and Sinister

32kg for men

24kg for women

100 Kettlebell swings

5 TGU on each side

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Be, Do, Say is a personal leadership model which links your standards to what you do and ultimately what you talk about. 

Who I am. Be. Is not the same as what I Do. Linked in ownership of course, but not to be conflated.

Very few people ask me who I am.

Plenty ask me what I do. I reply with a simple one-liner. I write, teach and coach.

Worrying about what I do my family have confused a verb with a noun. A flaneur is a french noun referring to a person. A stroller, lounger, or loafer. 

While loafing about a little while ago I pondered a question. If you only had two hours a day to work. What would you do?

A prompt that cuts to the chase. What do you love to do? What activity do you think would create the most impact? What could you make? What could you sell? 

For me, it was to write. 

As a physical coach, I found myself saying the same thing over and over. However insane, that may be. People like redundancy and you can make it pay. 

When I started writing I was selling my training methodology. But that made the writing experience not much fun and it was a distraction to me becoming a better writer. Now I accept that my blogs are memos. Passive Information. The better I become as a writer the greater the chance I have of producing content that engages. 

My teaching comes about when I answer the question. Can I turn this information into a learning outcome? If not then the information is passive and becomes a memo, a blog. Maybe the idea is not fully formed or perhaps it is only worth mentioning in passing. A point of interest that could be useful to someone else. 

In my teaching, I am looking for a value shift. Can I inspire and engage people to look for insight and turn it into change? 

Coaching on the other hand is about finding people who are already engaged with an idea and helping them contextualise where they are and what they need to do next. And so the flow of information from passive to active is complete. 

What will you do with the information you have? Guard it with a ™, share it even if it feels incomplete, or repeat it in the hope of change or a better fee? 

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Two of my coaching friends are starting again. They have recently moved to new places to live. And after listening to them I got the feeling that they are having a hard time committing to what they are doing. 

Both are working with what feels like a reasonable narrative. New start, new skills, new experiences. Moving some of their resources away from what they know works and dabbling in a new way of working. 

Very few of us will ever go all in on a new venture. A new start for a new you. Rip it up to start again.

If you have ever created space in your house or garden you will know the vacuous space that you have created will be very quickly filled with unwanted crap. It is a strategy that seldom works. 

Many of us prefer the no plan but plenty of gusto approach. Like a novice gardener who started somewhere near the back of the garden. Only to find that when they turned their back to start something else which had caught their eye. The garden quickly filled with weeds. The world has its own way of messing with us.

Of course, we could try to make a good impression on the new neighbours. The work which creates impact will certainly get you noticed. But what about the gaps in the house where the wind blows through? Nobody else will ever know, but when winter comes, you will. 

Starting over is upheaval. It may feel like the right time to start again, go with no plan, impress a new group of contacts, or dabble in a new way of working but is now that time? 

In permaculture, there is no time for dabbling and distractions. Your survival depends on you to create a sustainable life. And it all begins at Zone 0. The place you go back to, the platform from which you will go forward and create. Once your house is in order, then you build outwards. 

The first principle of First Aid is to square yourself away. Then go look after the others. Checking in on sleep, nutrition, exercise and mental wellness for yourself and then extending that same line of enquiry to your inner circle of dependencies is good practise. 

Fertile ground then for reflection. Prompts include. What are our standards for taking care of our physiological needs? What standards do we need to set to feel secure? Are we living with them? Are they clear and concise? Have we set upper and lower limits for what is enough?  Do they have the desired effect?

Far too often we are in a rush to fit in especially when we start over in a new project, move or relationship. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reminds us to take care of our physiological and safety needs before we satisfy our need to belong.

This brings me to the prompts I have curated for my coaching friends. To help them bring awareness to the skills they already possess as coaches. To help them build on the fabulous foundations they both possess. 

So here it is: 

First, draw a line. 

Now above the line write out answers to the following prompts. 

What comes easily to you?

What have you been successful at?

What have you created that energises you?

What are you most proud of?

What inspires you?

Then below the line write out the answers to the following prompts.

What hasn’t worked for you?

What holds you back?

What don’t you enjoy doing?

What distracts you from doing what you want to do?

There is nothing special about these prompts. Feel free to create your own. Just know that the lens required for Zone 0 is one which helps you to answer the question. Who are you?

Far better to be the stranger in town than to be a stranger to yourself. 

You also don’t need to be in a mad rush to do anything with the answers. Let them sit with you, in reflection for a while. Perhaps, your awareness will be enough to change how you see yourself and how you show up for the people who already support you. 

To wrap this up. We rarely need to rip it up and start again. As coaches, we need to see the whole picture, not just the bit that feels stuck, broken or malfunctioning. Coaches that are interested in people, not the distractions.

Because context matters. The order in which we do things matters. Crawl, walk, run is not the same as run, walk, crawl. 

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A friend of mine is getting into coaching. He wanted to know who I work with. 

“I work with people who want to be coached.” I replied.

Towards the end of our catch up he began telling me about a meeting he had recently set up. A leadership group from within his company were to receive a keynote speech from a famous sports coach.

I wanted to know how the group had been formed. Selection. Which is not extraordinary in sport or work.

Would I like to meet the speaker?

“No, thanks. I know enough sheep dogs.” Came the reply. 

When people work in exchange for a monthly wage. Compliance is on the table. Workplace (including sport) coaches are sheep dogs.

Sheep dogs become cat herders when they treat people as volunteers. And it is within that space the extraordinary can happen.

The world has plenty of sheep dogs. We could do with a few more cat herders.

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The Labour party, in the UK, came up with a label that stuck. Mondeo man.

Mondeo man came from aspiring working-class families. And the promise of better-paid jobs, greater opportunities and change landed easily in this group. Labour won a landslide victory in the 1997 election. New Labour was born.

New Labour leant into market economics. Mondeo man was more interested in miles per gallon, top speed, and the interior specifications of his family car. 

My friend, on the other hand, has an old classic Jaguar XJS convertible. And whenever he is asked if he finds his car reliable.

He always replies. “Yes! It never fails to get me a compliment.” 

What are you optimised for? 

Purpose

Profit 

Quantity

Quality

Speed  

Time

Client

Comfort

Self

Others

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The quantity, diversity, and quality of the food we consume, together with our individual responses to our nutritional intake, makes the field of nutritional science a very deep rabbit hole down which to go.

Here’s where I am with it. 

Diversity of my food choices 

My breakfast is constant. One less decision to make.

Currently, I’m using Hemp protein with almond, cashew, or oat milk to achieve 35-40g of protein after a morning workout. Without a high protein breakfast, I find it hard to hit my protein target for the day of 135 g (calculated using 1.5 g per kg of body mass), which I find helps retain my muscle mass. 

My other constant ingredients include. 

5 g Baobab powder

10 g Maca powder

10 g Flaxseed powder 

We have a fixed shopping list with a simple rotation of recipes. Nothing elaborate and someone else chooses the vegetables we eat.

Quantity of food

I see a choice between chaos and control. 

Chaos for me is to overeat. When I was a kid. I had no control. I eat what I liked. 

My choices were chaotic. I trained relentlessly. I didn’t care much for nutritional planning. 

When I began to work on breath control, one of the changes that helped me to become an asymptomatic drug-free asthmatic, got me thinking about where else I could apply the thinking, chaos vs control in my life.  

It seemed an obvious extension to explore fasting. I found I enjoyed the training, particularly running, on an empty stomach, feeling lighter and counterintuitively more energetic. The Zero app was really helpful in reinforcing a habit of holding off eating until I had trained in the mornings.

One thing that has really struck home with me throughout writing this is how I use applications, like Zero, or processes like protein content monitoring, to dial in a routine that works for me, establish that it does work, and then trust it. I did a similar thing with heart rate years ago. I’m now happy with my pacing and I no longer use a heart rate monitor. There is something to be said for not obsessing over detail once you know it works for you on the whole. 

Quality of food

Food is an extension of my thinking on the quality-quantity continuum. Moving the dial towards quality, I enjoy taking the time to create connections with local producers of high-quality food, people who care about what they do.  

As a family, we have chosen a simplistic rotation of food which we adjust seasonally, reviewing our decisions quarterly with the intention of moving us closer to eating locally sourced, organic, simple food more of the time.

What I do to help my Asthma

Asthma is an inflammation of the airways. Here are the supplements I take in my efforts to shift my nutrition towards an anti-inflammatory bias.  

Omega 3 Vegan Oil 1200mg capsule

4 x 1000mg MSM capsules

Zinc 50mg capsule

Magnesium Citrate 500mg capsule

We are what we eat 

To wrap this up. Nutritional science is complex and so are we. In the face of complexity, we could make everything very simple. 

Simple can be the billion-pound industry that tells us what to eat. Of course, they don’t know who you are, but if you are happy to comply, they are happy to supply. 

Simple, but not easy can be to accept that not all our choices are reflective of who we want to be. YET. 

Not easy because the truth is not for everyone, and neither is owning our choices.

If you do choose to embrace the idea that what we eat is indeed a reflection of who we are then slowly and with good judgement we can change what we eat to better reflect who we are NOW.

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Control: Professional athletes who are breathless strive for breath control. 

Chaos: Athletes who don’t get paid use breathlessness as a sign of success.

We are always somewhere between breathlessness and breath control. 

Those who feel they can’t control their breathlessness know they need breath control.

The rest of us assume we have breath control because we can choose breathlessness.

Rather than assume. Let me help you take a look at your choices.

I had no idea breath control would change my life until I developed breathing awareness. In life, I thought I wanted chaos. I thought I operated at my best, on the edge, taking risks, with very little control. 

Get fitter, get stronger, lessening the impact of asthma was the story I was going with. The more you do the better it is. The truth, it got me only so far. 

What’s your story? Maybe you too think the idea is to push hard in each training session, as an escape, a platform to show yourself, or others, how far, fast, or how much you can do. A marker, of your endeavour and effort. Chaotic and adrenaline-fueled. You choose chaos. Life in the red zone. No, breathe control, no off switch.

Insights that change how you view the world and the story you tell others can come from the unlikeliest of sources. I had taken a Postural Restoration Institute course and when I was asked to blow up a balloon with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I knew something was not right. I could outrun everyone else in the class I was taking, yet I could not blow up a balloon. 

Three months and a lot of hard work later, I had made breathing through my nose the default option. Blowing up balloons was no longer an issue and neither was my asthma. Having dug deeper into breathing techniques I had become an asymptomatic asthmatic. I was sold on my new perspective.

Having a breakthrough moment, an insight into a new world, a new perspective, is never enough.  If the change we seek to create means that much and we want to be constant and consistent in our choices, we need to issue ourselves a daily challenge. A mechanism by which we can keep the standards we set ourselves intact for today at least. 

I write and think each day on the prompt. Chaos or control? 

Am I bringing chaos because that is what the situation needs or am I bringing chaos because that is what I think is expected of me?

Over time by working with the challenge. Do I bring chaos or control? I have successfully edited the design of my life to walk, train, run, paddle, and ride with breath control > 80% of the time. 

An asthmatic endurance athlete does not need to continually prove to himself that he is resilient, productive, and determined. You don’t get to be an asthmatic endurance athlete if you are not. I didn’t think of myself as stuck, busy compounding a virtue that was already in abundance, reinforcing patterns that once served me well. But I was. 

I have learned to slow down in all aspects of my life. To challenge my thinking to take on new perspectives and skills. To become curious enough to learn breath control gave me the flexibility of choice. If you were less busy doing what you have always done. What else could you learn? What skills could you develop, and apply with the time you have?

My journey towards the flexibility of choice started with developing breathing awareness. Here’s how you can do it too.

STEP 1: Breathing rate at rest

Control: 16 diaphragmatic breaths through your nose in a minute.

Chaos: Anything else

Do you bring chaos or control to your breathing?

If at this point you fail, because you are a mouth breather, don’t worry. I spent 3 months learning to breathe through a broken, seemingly dysfunctional nose. 

If you can breathe through your nose but can’t diaphragmatically breathe. Consider your breathing as uncontrolled.

Finally, if you breathe through your nose and diaphragmatically breathe but you take in excess of 16 breaths per minute, sitting quietly. You too must consider your breathing as uncontrolled.

Take note and continue. 

Now you know if your breath control is either controlled or uncontrolled. Are you frustrated or curious? 

An interested observer is open and curious. Think, growth mindset. 

The alternative is a harsh critic who will (possibly unintentionally) shut down options with criticism and of course bemoan the inevitable problems that occur when making a course correction.

Developing breath control is a creative process. There will always be problems, progress is not tracked with a straight line and success is not with every footstep. Prescription drugs and pharmacies are popular for a reason. 

Are you willing to commit?

IF you choose curiosity, you need to know where you are currently and that begins with building awareness of how you breathe. The very first step to taking ownership of your breathing patterns. 

To remain curious is a choice that will serve you well. 

STEP 2: Breathing rate during the day

Over the next 3 weeks (21 days for a habit) each morning try writing out a table (see Table 1). No right or wrong. You are simply interested. 

At the end of each day or the beginning of the next. Estimate how much of your day is spent with uncontrolled breathing. 

For example, 80% of my time controlled and 20% uncontrolled. 

Annotate the table with the activities that either help you bring control or chaos. 

For example:  

• Going for a walk
• Training
• In conflict 
• Working
• Resting
• When worried

Stressed, talking a lot, training relentlessly hard? Was that reflected in the %-age proportion of time you spent with uncontrolled breathing during the day? 

If you spend too much time thinking, with total control, never choosing chaos, could you rip it up occasionally and let go of your emotions. 

Have you chosen to do more when choosing to do less would bring control?

Table 1. Breath awareness

STEP 3: Control or chaos

Here is a challenging question you can work with daily in your journaling process. 

Today, did I bring chaos or control into my life?

If you repeatedly ask yourself to look for red buses, you will increasingly see more of them. Not because there are more red buses on the road each day, but because daily you have built up your awareness to a task in hand. 

Building breathing awareness is no different. There is no magic formula to copy. In our efforts to be a little wiser about the choices that we live with, we get to choose the things that we pay attention to. 

What are you paying attention to?

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The argument for reading hundreds of books is that knowledge accumulates, building up like compound interest. 

As a kid, I remember writing revision notes in an attempt to push the required knowledge into my head. Now, I compress down insights and thoughts into concise statements or directives. An idea that I picked up from Derek Sivers. 

If reading books is about banking the knowledge for some time in the future, then writing book notes and creating directives feels like having cash in your pocket. It’s useful now.

A process that has challenged me to slow down and consider what I’ve read. To embrace, reject, or accept another viewpoint. 

Once I’ve decided that I want to engage with an idea. Directives bring constraints. Do this. Don’t do that. A way to practice commitment to a decision. 

Nobody has to listen. There is no pressure to impress or perform. It’s on you to develop the idea and your belief in the usefulness of the knowledge you have acquired. 

The first draft helpfully named the vomit draft, gets me started with no expectation. After that, each edit and rewrite builds commitment to an idea. The challenge is to become clear and concise in my communication. Leaving no doubt in my words. 

In coaching, we ask students to learn a concept and then teach it. Poor student coaches collect knowledge in the hope it will someday be useful. Which is like collecting lego in the hope it will someday make you a good architect.

Good student coaches know they need to constantly work with the knowledge they have now.

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Goodhart’s Law has been generalised to state.  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Although the background to Goodhart’s law is within economics. What can it teach us in the field of health and fitness? In this article, I look at how we have come to confuse measures with targets. What impact that has on our outcomes and why we so often fall into the trap.  

I know a cyclist whose trackable measure of progress is the number of watts he produces on a bike. It began with an intention. Healthy, happy, and slim enough to fit back into clothes he likes. The narrative that goes with the measure is simple enough. Get on a bike more often, get fitter, lose weight, feel happy.  

Only nowhere does it say you need to hit 300 watts to qualify as a happy healthy cyclist. The narrative and the measure do not fit. So we make them fit. We do that by conflating the measure and the target. Mixing our hard, objective measures with our subjective reality.

Fast forward 6 months. What would be the consequence of my cyclist friend throwing out 300 watts on a bike? It seems implausible that health, clothes sizes, and happiness would all be aligned for evermore provided the reading on the power meter says 300 watts. 

To work with the story we tell ourselves and align it with the measures that we use to track our progress. We would do well to introduce soft measures that are as easy to track as money, weight, or miles per hour. Soft measures give us a chance to positively reinforce the actions that we would like to take towards our intent. Helping us to shape who we are and how we show up. Our intent, the experience we would like to create for ourselves then becomes as good as the question that we are trying to answer and the measures we use to help us answer it. The alternative is to hope that happiness is at the end of a rainbow. 

Clouds and rain come with hope and rainbows. And when progress falters on our hard, objective measures, as it inevitably will. We get to decide what it means and for some, that will be a chance to negatively reinforce undesirable behaviour patterns. The martyrdom narrative, no pain, no gain, is as unhelpful as going easy on ourselves and choosing denial as a strategy. Despite telling yourself that you are useless because you keep quitting, quitting is the smart move, as all are avoidable behvaiour patterns. 

It is hard to imagine that you will show up and do your best work if your intent and measure are not aligned. Hard objective measures are easy to fall for as they are simple, accessible, and relatable. But what if they don’t speak to you? The entrepreneur once distracted by profit who no longer recognises the business they built. A runner who started with the intent of feeling good is now wondering why they keep frantically checking their watch for progress on Strava. Feeling unmotivated? I doubt you’re apathetic, you just choose the wrong measure.   

When we begin with a hard measure and conflate it with the outcome we seek, we begin in the middle. If we start with the experience we would like to create it gives us a chance to examine the narrative that we are working with and the outcome we seek. Measures can come and go, as we work with the question that we are trying to answer. Our intent, the experience that we seek to create, should drive the creative process until it makes sense to us, not the measure. If we allow a measure to drive how we experience the world we create questions like the one we started with. Will producing 300 watts on a bike make me happy?

Of course, the inflexibility of the measure may just be a tactic to ensure we remain closed off to possibility, a reflection of our thinking. When we are truly committed to change we show up, open and curious. The change we seek overrides the need to look assured. Besides what are we assured about? Our narrative, the data, decisions, and experiences we have created for ourselves? If hard measures are hard to take then soft measures can be hard to create. Begin and work with them, let the experiences that you want to create for yourself drive your iterations.

Here is an example of a soft measure I created.  

On a scale of 1-5. Rate your experience of today’s activity as a positive reinforcement of your intent.

0: Not related

1: Couldn’t relate to the session. I can’t see how this will help.

2: Could somewhat relate. I’m not sure how this will help

3: Could relate. This could help.

4: Definitely relate. This does help

5: Loved it. This will definitely help

This particular scale was designed to encourage self-selected sessions that become increasingly affirmational over time. Building on what was working, iterating that which was not. 

The world we experience is created, so go create. Make soft measures out of emojis, find out how you make your customers feel or kick off a weekly conversation with your kids by asking them. On a scale of 1-5, how much fun was it to be in our family this week? 

I don’t mean to bring this conversation down but a bit of tough love can also be helpful. So, keep your hard measure, your objective reality in the background, and work with it, just don’t beat yourself up with it, or confuse it with the experience that you want to create for yourself.

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The type of innovation that changes a marketplace, how people think, and how things are done requires us to start with why, after all, a movement is only as good as the reasons for starting it. So here it is. Public healthcare provision in the UK is on the defensive. 

Currently, 60% of our healthcare spend is on cure and rehabilitation, our NHS is overwhelmed and under committed. Other centrally funded agencies deliver predictable programs in the hope of predictable results. In the private sector, the health and fitness marketplace is in a race for the bottom, and innovation is borne out of the need to survive. In this article, we will take a look at how we got here, what the future may hold and why putting purpose before profit is in all our interests.

We all know at our own costs that when we are busy and chaotic we fail to look at innovative long-term solutions, instead, we look towards the surety of the tried and the trusted, a short-term fix. Talk is of control, deliverables, KPI’s and broad brush stroke policies in lieu of creativity. Embracing the possibility of innovation requires the type of trust and commitment that doesn’t come with a pension plan, 25 days holiday, and a company car. 

There is, however, a rapidly growing group that we have not yet mentioned, that if given the support and direction required can challenge how we shape the future of healthcare provision in the UK. Helping us move from defensive to the offensive in our thinking, a group of people with very little to lose and everything to gain. 

Sports-based entrepreneurs. Coaches who are attracted to creating a lifestyle business with the intent of inspiring change in others only to find themselves making short-term decisions, focused on the quick fix and attention-grabbing headlines. Who better to begin a conversation about putting long-term offensive thinking into practice than the people who would be learning the lesson themselves? Building businesses that put purpose before profit, design of life before the rigors of life, and the values of their community before the value of their services 

If we are to place our trust in a group of people with nothing to lose and everything to gain. We should at least do some background checks. Let’s begin by looking at the environment in which they currently operate. A marketplace is said to be in a race for the bottom, when heightened competition between parties, results in a sacrifice of product quality in order to gain a competitive advantage. Busy and noisy marketplaces can be good news for the consumer if we are talking about making transport or water supplies more affordable, but when it comes to people’s health, then it is a problem for the Government, society, and sport-based entrepreneurial coaches. 

Who wins when a consumer wants to change and a coach needs long-term thinking? The conflict a coach faces is between trying to deliver near-term results, profit while paving the way for long-term thinking and investment, purpose. The same defensive thinking that sees us spend 60% of our healthcare budget on patching up the preventable diseases of our time. Quick fixes and client appeasement are the harsh realities of the current marketplace. Society is getting what it wants, not what it needs. 

To break the cycle of short-term thinking of value before values, somebody needs to go first. The agile and the quick, sports-based entrepreneurs, or the slow and the old, the Government and its agencies? In the next section of this article, I will outline how a growing group of disenfranchised coaches can be mobilised to challenge our thinking, contribute to new standards of treatment in preventable diseases and change how we do things.

Perhaps then a more accurate term to describe sports-based entrepreneurs who choose to enroll in the idea of purpose before profit would be “social entrepreneurs”, no overwhelming desire to create or own fixed assets, but a strong desire to make a positive contribution in their community.  Enrolled in their purpose, sports-based social entrepreneurs would require the trust of central agencies to own their methods without impediment. 

Trust until now has been in short supply and to decentralise control would require a shift in thinking from the Government and central agencies. Projects are driven by their measures, not their purpose. The same is true of most businesses and research. Research is plentiful in the world of measures that are accessible and easily understood, the link between physical activity and the benefits to the participants is one such example. What is less well understood is the link between the economy, society, and our well-being, where measures are more difficult to come by. 

If we are to develop links between the economy, society, and our well-being it is hard to imagine that a project designed and driven by measures will in the long term outperform a project reverse-engineered from its purpose. Unburdened by defensive thinking, flexible in their design, a social entrepreneur sees value in the process, lessons in the failures, and measures as tools that inform the project. 

Valued for the generosity of their thinking, acting as catalysts for increasing social capital within their communities, sports-based social entrepreneurs can facilitate personal leadership through a simple Be. Do. Say, model. Professor Richard Dawkins, famously coined the term “memes” associating the word with learned behaviours that are imitated and passed on. Sports-based social entrepreneurs know that their success begins with enrollment and is built on engagement. In search of an R number >1, a tipping point at which the narrative changes, ideas spread, and how things are done brings quantifiable change for the community.

When R < 1 and the idea is rough and its assets intangible will you lean into the idea and support it?  Few will, and that is ok. For it is only a few that are needed, more will come, when the idea becomes polished and the signs of success are difficult to ignore. The alternative is to go big and watch people lose their nerve at the slightest sign of a wobble.  Physical literacy was a heavily backed concept that was like a bad run at the theatre, people quickly did not want to be associated with a flop. The idea failed to gather enough momentum to see it through the difficult phase of multiple iterations that are required to turn a good idea into a great concept.  

Why then ask for the strength of leadership from the many, when you can focus on the few? Why ask for big budgets when the stakes are high and the environment in which you operate is chaotic and unstable? Instead, utilise the unstable nature of a marketplace and turn it to your advantage. Create stability where there is none. Sports-based social entrepreneurs strive for the stability and financial freedom that would allow them to do the work that initially attracted them to the marketplace. A strong desire to make a positive contribution to their community.

Stability and creativity on purpose are at the heart of this change. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we do our best thinking when we are stable and secure in the knowledge that our needs are being met. So meet their needs, train them, support them and allow them to become a value-based social entrepreneurial coach. A catalyst of change. Who better to lead an empathetic conversation about change than the person learning to innovate in order to thrive?

To facilitate the change in thinking outlined in this article would require the Government and its centrally funded agencies to incentivise sports-based social entrepreneurs. Reallocation of a small proportion of the healthcare spend towards a reorganisation of the health and fitness marketplace would see social capital thrive where once it was crowded out. 

Sport-based social entrepreneurship for the benefit of others is not something you believe in, it is something you do. Purposeful practice is the difference-maker. Measured by their contributions to our communities, the change they bring, and the impact they have on others. Sports-based social entrepreneurs can and will build their practices with purpose in mind. It is now up to society to provide that purpose.

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For the rapidly growing number of entrepreneurial sports coaches. 

Good coaches own their training philosophy, values, and principles not their methods. A good coach leaves no doubt in their words. Committed to providing distinction and definition, a good coach uses written manifestos, standards, and expectations to challenge and provoke. To build a sense of urgency that action is required, now, on the values that lay within. 

A good coach wants to be told the truth, an average coach wants to learn, a bad coach wants to be left alone. A good coach creates opportunities to hold their clients and themselves up to the standards they have set. Bad coaches resist challenges to their thinking, hide from failure, and defend what is not working. Providing roadmaps and shortcuts to replace a lack of curiosity, yet complain when their clients are inflexible.

Coaching is not something you just believe in, it is something you do, an active choice, a creative process. While methods sometimes fail. Purpose, commitment, and consistency of action is an investment a good coach is willing to make, measuring their endeavour by the value it brings. A good coach trusts the process, keeps perspective, and learns to live with the choices they make. They share their unfettered progress, create assets, look for leverage and embrace their incompetencies. Bad coaches live in the land of excuses, preferring shortsightedness to the uncertainty of possibility.

Valuing curiosity over professional pride, a good coach cuts options providing a focus on what can be done, not on what should be done or can’t be done. Stable enough to be creative, strong enough to provide leadership through uncertainty, and comfortable enough to accept a lack of progress as a phase, not a label.  A good coach goes first, demonstrating personal leadership, working on their inner game, accepting that it is far easier to recognise faults in others than in themselves. Coaching is an uncomfortable conversation about how clients experience failure.

A bad coach knows it is far easier to convince a stranger of their market value than it is to navigate through their own values and beliefs. A bad coach relies on tactics, non-binding word of mouth agreements, and a large, non-specific marketplace, in which to operate. Providing detailed and specific answers to non-specific questions. A good coach spends their time helping their clients develop specific questions that only the client can answer.  

A good coach will carefully create and define a measure for their success. Embracing their constraints to build a business that aligns its values to its purpose, not its profit. Busy with the how, bad coaches obsess over tactics, prices of their products, and delivery of their services. A bad coach confuses market value with personal value, a good coach knows we are what we value, a product of the environment we create.  

The distinction between the teaching and coaching marketplaces is ownership of knowledge. Good teachers push knowledge and work off a curriculum, asking questions of themselves and their clients, to find better ways to get to a fixed end-point. Bad coaches confuse teaching with coaching. Good coaches pull their client’s through fear towards hope. For fixed endpoints see endless possibility. 

A good coach chooses enrollment to create clients, treating them as volunteers. Client’s explore the real motivation behind their questions, build awareness of what their situation is telling them, and are inspired to take ownership of their own problems. A bad coach is busy accepting all comers, and all problems to create dependency in return for money. They waste time defending what is not working and miss the opportunity to create a collaborative space in which to work with their clients.

Using the simplest of business models, so as not to choose between coaching and business, a good coach scales only when necessary, preferring to iterate in pursuit of excellence, growing only as fast as they can keep their promise. Simplifying or outsourcing areas in which they are good enough, a good coach creates space to invest in those areas in which they are best in class. Best in class, could be best in your street, that does not matter, what matters is a good coach, leaves no room for doubt. 

A bad coach loses patience, nerve, or focus and blurs the lines between business and coaching which is a choice to be good at neither.

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What can you tolerate?

“It is ok for you, you’re fit!” is an unhelpful comparison we make when we are frustrated. A bad coach will quickly label it as an excuse. A good coach will help you see it as a phase you are in. In this article, I’ll tell you how I initially missed an opportunity to help myself while rehabilitating from a COVID -19 infection, what changed my mind, and why it changed how I approach my coaching and training. 

Labeling a frustrated rant as an excuse keeps us stuck tolerating the situation we are in. Those around us learn to accept, ignore or quit the scene. Quitting is hard unless you have defined the conditions under which you are willing to quit. Acceptance is no picnic either since you choose to stick around to do the work. Which leaves us with ignoring a situation. Finding a way to wear it, often for far longer than we should and always in the hope that something will change. 

When it’s your health and you are tolerating a situation, hoping that someone else will take responsibility, a doctor, therapist, or even a coach. Then your money is on quitting, a way to feel better without any more work. After all the situation you are in, isn’t that hard enough? No matter how hard a situation is, how tough you have it, good doctors and therapists are like good coaches, they don’t own your problems. They can care, treat and even cajole you into making better decisions but they don’t own your outcome. 

When COVID-19 kicked my butt in March 2020, I was well aware I had a problem, I just didn’t want to accept it. If consciously incompetent is the technical term for the phase I was in, the feeling could be better described as overwhelmed and under committed. Overwhelmed by the uncertainty and doubt. Under committed because what I was doing about it was not good enough. And I had nobody to call me on it. 

The overwhelmed and under-committed want answers, NOW. The emotional mind has us frantically looking for signs of progress as we hurry through the steps required to truly frame and understand the situation we face. And I was no different, my definition of success was loose, scruffy, and obvious. My story was I just wanted to return to a level of fitness I had enjoyed prior to COVID-19.

The difficult work of accepting where you are now is not for everyone and it is not difficult to see why. It feels messy, uncertain, and unlikely to make a difference. I had been hit by breathlessness, fatigue, stressed-out dysfunctional sleep patterns, headaches, sore throats, and the type of doubt that gets to your core. Lunging back and forth and doing press-ups on my landing, I tracked my efforts using scribbles that would not have looked out of place on the walls of a prison cell.

Figure 1. The early days. Months 2 and 3 (April and May 2020)

In the film Rocky Balboa, Rocky is frustrated, he still has stuff in the basement, a calling that will not go away. So what are you going to do about it? How strong is that rumble, how bad do you want it? Change and the speed at which you change depends on the strength of the stimulus.

I know the strength of the stimuli, the intent, is what separates out my clients. My successful clients build on the stuff in the basement, however faint the rumble is. They work on their definition of success, obsess about the change they seek, build belief in what they do. Until the rumble becomes a roar. 

The difference-maker arrived for me in the form of a question. A new route to go down, a reason to keep going. I switched my focus. How much work can I get done across a day if I split the workouts up into small sessions?  To a specific question. Does my training kick off my symptoms? Although I didn’t get any clearer on the answer, it was too unstable to see any trends,  I did get my change of perspective. A mantra that guided my mindset throughout my rehabilitation. 

I value the stability of my symptoms over the progress of my workload

Figure 2.  Months 5+ (Aug 2020)

If a challenge to your thinking is the equivalent of the tough love of a coach. Then setting standards below which you do not drop is like the consistency of a training camp. You work to uphold them each day. I had developed a question that challenged my perspective and created new training standards, including rules by which I would quit my training. In over 9 months of training, I quit twice due to unmanageable headaches missing fewer training sessions than I had when I was well. 

Training camps are designed to use the pressure of an upcoming performance to create a successful environment. Good training camps apply pressure positively to challenge your thinking, standards, and how you do things. Badly designed training camps pointlessly build pressure on the outcome of the performance. I had pointlessly put pressure on myself. My definition of success was to return to pre-COVID -19 fitness levels, a drug-free asthmatic, training for a world-class multi-sport event. 

In unstable and unpredictable situations taking pressure off the outcome is a smart move. The overwhelmed and under-committed don’t need to build pressure. They need to build meaning and find value in the process they have invested in. To find a way. And keep going.

Changing from making a comparison, historical vs actual performance. To an open-ended question that allowed me to provide answers with no limits. Took the pressure off the outcome and put the focus on the quality of my actions. 

What can I tolerate? 

It was on me to find a way to come up with a better answer each day. I still work with the same question. No unrealistic targets, no emotional comeback pledge, or pointless comparisons. Instead, the question meets me where I am now. Providing me with a  motivational, inspiring, and guiding challenge to live by. As I write this some 15 months on I have quit all my asthma inhalers for a second time. Become more disciplined in my training and I have learned to own my story, my definition of success. 

Just Do It. Is a call to action. An inspiring brand story that helps Nike sell trainers. Turning the stuff in your basement from a rumble to a roar is more than getting started. It is about ownership, owning YOUR definition of success. Crafting the story you are telling yourself until you care so much, you get up, again and again, just like Rocky. 

If you would like more resources on COVID-19 rehabilitation click this link.

For access to the tracker, I used click here.

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