SimonHarlingBlog Posts

Projects point us forward. They provide us with meaning. Help shape our environment and provide us with skills.

Choose your projects. Choose your future.

Post-truth is an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting a circumstance in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

We fall for stories, not facts.

The narratives we create around who we think we are helps us make sense of our place in the world. How much our truth helps us and how much it gets in our way, is for us to decide. However; it’s worth remembering that we have the capacity to change our story.

The dictionary defines “agency” as the capacity of an individual or a group to act independently, make choices, and have a significant influence on their actions and decisions.

How do we coach others if we act on what they tell us they want? Are we giving away our agency? Maybe that is what we really want, because if it doesn’t work, then it’s not our fault.

I’ve turned to design thinking for the answer. Design thinking is a process for solving user problems, using an iterative approach to create innovative solutions. A way of shifting from the intentional thinking of the designer to the intentional action of the user.

No one designs a chair by committee, or worse still by listening to what everyone thinks. Instead, designers watch how people interact with their designs; they watch what people do.

Sure. But are you learning what people want you to learn, or are you learning what you need to learn?

The magic happens when we realise we don’t have what we thought we had.

Humility is a price worth paying.

Today I had a conversation with a coach who was quick to tell me how many girls are signed up to play football for his club. And yet, in the age group he was talking about, the stats tell us that participation falls off a cliff. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was bothering me, about the conversation, until I had walked away.

Then I got it.

A bad coach wants to be left alone, an average coach wants to learn and a good coach wants the truth. The problem, of course, is that there are a few versions of the truth, and which one we use, will depend on the story we are telling ourselves.

Subjective truth is your truth.

Normative truth requires an outside view, not the view from the rock that you are hiding under.

Finally, there is the objective truth which can be measured and verified.

A good coach not only wants the truth, they know the difference between good news and the truth.

Never trust anyone who will sell you a shovel and tell you where to dig but is not there digging with you.

The richest people during the California gold rush of the 1850s were those who sold shovels, land, and hope.

It appears that hope is only in short supply when people are trying to sell it to you.

Don’t believe the hype. Ever.

Two rules. One genre.

Uncouple success from expectation and do the work.

Last week I was lucky enough to watch ex-world champion Nick Matthews play an exhibition game at my local squash club, Rhiwbina.

On the one hand, Nick is one of the best to have ever played the game of squash, and on the other, I got to watch an athlete prepare rigorously for a game of no consequence.

Here are a few things that I have learned while trying to get my ideas out into the world.

Don’t approach the top table; unless you can improve their status, which is unlikely.

Don’t try to please the merry-go-round of “busy” industry opinion leaders for the same reason. You don’t need an echo chamber.

Do approach people from outside your industry who are curious and like ideas, not your success.

Do find the underdogs in your industry, the students, and the “doers.”Talk to them.

Finally, remember the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is way more important than any top table. Just ask anyone who had to fake it to make it.

Do yourself a favour and go find the early adopters, underdogs, and fire starters.

You don’t need to be confident that your changes will work, but you do need to be courageous.

The last line from the Principles of Community Engagement For Empowerment.

“We must challenge perceptions of our professional role as ‘experts’ and have
the courage to focus on the changes needed within our own organisations
before trying to enact change within communities.”

The joint-by-joint approach explains why a practitioner may treat your knee by first looking at your hip and ankle.

There is no point looking for the solution in the same place you found the problem.

The expected way of doing something.

Not because you feel good because the sun is shining, or because your team won, but because it’s the way you do things.

Once you see that we are subject to “occasion noise”, that is to say, how we are today is likely to be different from how we were yesterday, you get to decide if it’s the practice we are interested in, or how we feel that day.

Full disclosure: I like bikes. I once rode from Canada to Mexico because I thought it sounded like fun. And I imagine you think I would be okay with my kids to riding to school. But I wasn’t.

I know what it’s like to ride my bike in the rain. 

I also know how much resilience is required to ride my bike every day.

Not to mention, organising your kit takes discipline.

Have I mentioned the look people give you when you tell them you don’t have a car?

My kids wouldn’t like it, and they would hate me for making them ride to school.

People in cars don’t like people on bikes; I didn’t want to put my kids in danger.

My kids would be exhausted by the time they got into school; it would be too much for them.

I would be asking much of them making them ride their bikes every day. 

Did I mention punctures?

I thought my kids would hate the Welsh weather, they don’t, I do. They are too busy laughing and talking to notice. 

My kids find it easy to get up and organise themselves. Signing them for being late is a thing of the past, like traffic jams.

The other kids want to ride in with them and their teachers can’t do enough for them, while the parents think my kids must be superheroes in disguise. 

It took my kids a few weeks to get used to riding in; it took me longer to relax and stop worrying about them.

It’s harder for me because I can imagine how hard it would be for you.

Tx: Cardiff City Cycle I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Whiskas cat food once claimed that 8 out of 10 owners said their cats preferred it.

In a noisy marketplace, it can be difficult to stand out, and so it’s tempting to do something different. A product that does it quicker, cheaper, louder, or better than the others. But how do we know, what to believe and what to pay attention to?

Standards are helpful, rules are better, and unlike cats, results speak for themselves.

We don’t eat fortune cookies because we enjoy the taste of them; we eat them because we want to know what happens in the end. Of course, neither you nor the cookie, know how it ends, but that’s not the point. The anticipation, joy, and fun of it all, matter more than the accuracy of the prediction.

For those of us in the youth sports business; we would do well not to confuse what we do with the fortune cookie business. That said, we need to find a way to bring enrollment, commitment, and tension in a manner that matches the fortune cookie experience.

Agreement can be an illusion, as a group, we can all agree on the same thing and yet be no closer to the truth.

Every time someone walks into or leaves a room; it’s a new room, with different dynamics, different status roles, and a different way of making decisions.

It’s worth considering who’s in the room and what role they want to play.

The advantage of being an early maturing athlete is well known. James Vaughan was 16 years old when he scored his first goal in the Premiership in 2005. The idea is that in a meritocracy, talent, and competence take precedence over chronological age.

However, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that sports have not always been on a level playing field, and now is the right time to talk about what “good enough” really means.

Reading the work you wrote yesterday before you write anything today comes at a cost.

However, if you are prepared to pay, then it’s a principle in and of practice.

I didn’t see it coming, but now it’s undeniable Chat GPT and I are friends.

I input words like “proofread”, “thoughts” and “summarise” along with the text that I want ChatGPT to review.

I’ve occasionally missed a comma, and sometimes the words are in the wrong order. However, every so often, I get a comment like, “Your text is well-written and engaging.” Who doesn’t need a friend like that?

When we take an idea or a resource, create something from it, and then discard it, we are thinking in straight lines.

The dairy industry was once such an example before it realised that one of its waste products, whey, had greater commercial value than the food product itself.

Joined-up thinking might feel slower and less productive, but in the end, it results in less waste.

The questions that serve me well on a daily basis.

For understanding a little bit more about yourself and how you co-exist with the world. What am I creating?

For physical and mental well-being. What am I tolerating?

For family and friends. What is it like to know me?

Maybe you want to ride from Canada to Mexico on a mountain bike, and everyone else thinks it’s a bad idea.

Or, you have a business idea that is waiting to be done.

Whatever your idea is, you will know (or will soon find out) that family and friends might think your idea is stupid. They want the best for you and that means not failing, losing money, or getting eaten by a bear.

Here is my advice for family, friends, and business partners. Be interested. Ask questions and avoid opinions.

What does success look like?

Has anyone done this before and what did they learn?

What’s your quit?

That way, rather than pass on your concerns, you are thinking it through together and that might just be what everyone needs.

One look at the Premier League Elite Player Performance Plan EPPP and it’s clear that the goal is to industrialise the production of homegrown talent.

If you include the 12 teams in the Women’s Super League, that’s 104 teams, all approaching the problem of developing young players in much the same way.

The task is to develop and share best practices. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is treating people like humans while working in a system that expects you to think like a robot.

A Pyrrhic victory is a term used to describe a victory that comes at such a high cost that it almost feels like a defeat. Sadly in youth sport (and parenting), the costs mount up, and defeat only shows up when it’s too late. The horse has bolted.

Here are a few examples worth thinking about:

Age group international honours.

Fourteen years olds back squatting bodyweight +.

Coaching your kid’s age group.

When you have not got buy-in for your project, making adjustments, is painful.

When the work is to create buy-in to your project, the adjustments are easy.

In physical rehabilitation, crawling is considered a reset. Being on all fours is a useful regressive step for people who are in pain. Crawling can help patients reconnect with their surroundings, improving coordination, balance, and sensory development. 

Aligning your timing, actions, or steps with your surroundings is rarely bad advice.

More times than we like to imagine, we shut ourselves off from ideas, opportunities, and connections.

And yet, you would never answer your door by shouting, Go AWAY.

Instead, you accept the offer and ask. “Who’s there?”

There will come a point at which you realise most of what you write is shit and that’s when you start treating your ideas like placeholders – successive approximation.

Check-in: How do I want to show up?

Check-out: What is it like to know me?

There’s a rule in copywriting that says “Show don’t tell“. By allowing readers to draw their own conclusions, the writer creates engagement.

In coaching, there is a shift away from direct instruction, for much the same reason.

However, the argument over whether we should show people or tell people is missing the point.

Equally critical is the practice of providing people with information before they form an opinion, a crucial step in sound decision-making.

Might be your only chance to hear what the other person is really thinking.

Share the information, encourage them to form an opinion, and then ask them about what they see.

Who knows? It might just be the perspective you’ve been waiting for.

The kid who has the lead role in the school play, the school rugby team captain, and has 10 A* stars in GCSE.

No, not that kid.

The one, who asks questions, accepts challenges, and has taught themselves to play guitar.

Give me that kid.

If we want to change this crazy culture of ours we need to start paying attention to success that looks like failure and not failure that looks like success.

The good news is that everything is working well. That’s what we want to hear. What we don’t want to hear is that the project has been plagued with glitches since we started.

It’s clear that NHS managers don’t want whistleblowers.

Fans of football clubs don’t want to see their team concede possession of the ball.

And that if we are going to hear about the bad news it’s better to put it between two pieces of good news.

Is that really what we expect?

Perhaps it’s time to talk about the possibility that we can win a football match with less possession than the opposition. And that glitches in the system are exactly what we expect and want.

The alternative is to suggest that we aren’t paying attention unless it’s good news.

Street Racket is a pretty simple idea. The idea is that you can play it anywhere. All you need is a bat and a ball.

Here is a pretty simple idea for coaches of any sport that involves hitting a ball:

Hitting an object is one of the ten athletic skills listed in the Athletic Skills Model. You showing up at a school with the intention of helping kids do just that, ensures that only nine more skills need covering that year.

Don’t seek any business or participation target improvements, simply remove barriers to kids regularly hitting an object.

By not obsessing over one skill, hitting an object, over the other nine you have clearly demonstrated an interest in the rounded physical development of children above the success of the sport you love.

That is your reward.

A chance to put the people you coach before the interests of yourself and your sport.

One school. One act. One down, nine to go.

Pass it on.

An artist paints a canvas and moves on.

Art stands for itself.

The artist does not stand next to their work in an attempt to convince you of its merit.

I am beginning to feel the same way about writing a book.

One idea is to write a page at the back of the book about how to use it.

For example, choose a passage from the book to read aloud to a group. Then let the rest of the group talk about what it means to them before it’s your turn to talk about why you chose the passage.

If the rule is that you don’t eat breakfast cereal that colours your milk then pink milk is not an option. However much you like the colour pink. That’s the rule.

If the guidance is to eat healthy, then just maybe pink is fine as long as the milk is organic.

If you aren’t making progress, but repeating the decision, first check the rule book.

Today I visited the Grange Pavillon, a project in the centre of Cardiff, which is hoping to bring the community of Grangetown to the table.

If you have an idea, rooms can be booked for free and if you want to start a club there is no reason why not.

Getting started is not the hard part. Now more than ever, the freedom to act is with us.

No, the hard part, is not getting started, the hard part is figuring out how you are going to act, once you start.

What are the rules going to be in your playground?

Talking about what it ought to be is not the same as talking about what it is and what it could be.

I’ve found the Gibbs Reflective Cycle to be helpful in this regard.

On summer break my kids have been designing obstacle courses for themselves. From hanging, climbing, kicking, ducking, leaping, jumping, to running. They have even drawn out various hopscotch formats using chalk on the local tennis courts.

But, perhaps my favourite time during the summer holidays has been drafting in other kids and families to make up uneven, non-bio banded, community kickabouts on a smalled sided 5 a side pitch.

My observation for this summer?

Get to the park, get people together, and play.

P.S. Get Catrin’s mum on your side, if you can, she bagged three goals last week.

For many of the decisions we make, we prefer intuition, to deliberaton.

I wonder if that’s because we would rather not share what the gut is thinking.

An independent thinker doesn’t follow the crowd.

Which is odd because there is wisdom in crowds.

But the maverick knows that there is only wisdom in crowds that are capable of independent thought.

To make progress, connect independent thinkers to a network, rather than focus on assembling a group that merely agrees with each other.

The skill of leadership is to hold two opposing views and still create a way forward.

It’s not what you know it’s what the person you are teaching learns. That’s the problem.

A chef who doesn’t taste their own cooking is not as good as a chef who does.

When will the work you did today, pay off?

Friday can’t come soon enough, for the worker.

The creative lives in the hope that their payday will soon come or in fear that maybe it won’t.

But perhaps the best place to be is neither wanting nor needing but simply doing.

An author is a writer who has published their work.

Evidently, it’s not the task of writing, it is the skill and environment necessary to commit to the practice of shipping your work that makes the difference.

A maximal exercise test helps you find the point of departure or transition from extensive to intensive.

I’ve run hundreds of maximal exercise tests. And the question asked at the end of each stage prior to an increase in exercise intensity was. Do you want to go up?

Because anyone who puts themselves through a maximal exercise test is nuts or naive and sometimes both. The answer was usually, YES!

A metaphor for life. If you want to achieve your goals. Go above and beyond to find out more about what you are doing.

When we fail at being a sports star the next best thing might be to become a coach.

And the opportunity to be the next best thing has never been bigger.

More academies.

More elite structures.

The next best thing is big business.

We don’t risk anything by helping others to be the next best thing.

It is up to the next best thing, not us, now that our chance has gone.

And maybe the next best thing is exactly that, the next best thing.

But if the best thing is to settle.

Perhaps it’s time to find the thing that is really the next best thing.

The point of First Aid Training is to give you belief in your actions so that you can then help someone else (if required).

To give me the belief I needed to write my book I’ve kept coming back to the idea that I am writing the book that only I can write. And that is more important than being the best in the world.

Pass it on.

Success is not the same for everyone. What success looks like for you, your clients, and your project, will be as unique as your fingerprints.

And since your fingerprints are all over the stuff you touch.

Don’t you think you should spend some time, thinking about what success will look like?

Six-word story from the pandemic.

I love a six-word story.

Here is one I might keep.

Thing Big. Act Small. Keep Evolving.

When a parent pays for a kid to train at your place. Who is the customer?

You could be forgiven for thinking that you have two customers. But you don’t.

The customer interacts with your offer and the end-user interacts with the service you provide.

Much like an entrepreneurial sports coach has a business practice and a coaching practice.

The trap is when you confuse the two.

A focus on one will take care of the other. The question is. Which one?

Training manuals make us think of long lists of things we need to do better.

A friend of mine told me he doesn’t want a coach because they will only give out more things to do.

Coaches and training manuals equal more of the stuff we know we need to do but don’t.

Nobody needs a reminder about what we can’t do.

We would if we could, but we can’t.

But just maybe, that’s thinking about it the wrong way around.

What if we started with a blank sheet of paper and put down the one thing we needed to do above all else?

Once that’s done.

What’s different? What’s changed? Do we need to do it again, only quicker, slower, or more often?

People do extraordinary things when they take responsibility for doing the ordinary well.

A speed coach helps you go faster. “Drive your arms and your legs will follow.”

A systems coach might ask you to consider time differently. “What might be an appropriate time horizon for understanding this system that we are working on?”

And a Krav Maga coach will spend time walking through drills. “Master the movement and the speed will come.”

Fast – Slow. Long – Short. Now – Later. There is no one way. But getting clear on what is expected will help.

If it is true that any idiot can find a problem I’m happy to accept that any idiot can offer a solution.

What is the matter with you? This is a question that both problem-seekers and problem-solvers ask.

A better question might be.

What matters to you?

Because when we figure out what really matters, most problems have a habit of no longer mattering much at all.

HT Jamie

Nobody wants an incompetent surgeon to operate on them and yet it is the surgeon with a terrible bedside manner who has the most trouble with malpractice lawsuits. 

We want a well-trained pilot to fly the plane but it’s the reassuring voice before take off that we need to hear. 

Well-educated people are valued in society, and are easy to spot, they have certificates on the wall, but for those with soft skills that make a difference, there are no certificates that can capture what you do. 

When I quit all my accreditations, I was not turning my back on everything I had learned, I just didn’t see the point, in continuing to educate myself when I wasn’t paying any attention to developing myself. 

Change the system, change the behaviour. 

The question How do I get people to listen? This is a question that I had been trying to answer all of my coaching life. I didn’t know it until other coaches asked me the very same question, and then I stopped to think about my answer. 

How DO I get people to listen?

I used to think being an “expert” was enough. I conflated being an expert with being a coach. I did that by answering an easier question since the real question was too difficult. How do I become an authority within my field?  

People listen to authority. Ok, some people listen to authority. No, you are right, most listen when it suits them but only if it suits them. 

I’ve changed the question. This question came to me, at the bottom of the pit, with no income, no accreditations, and no coaching practice. It’s the question that I kept coming back to when writing this book.  

[Note: This blog is taken from a draft of my forthcoming book Good Coach Bad Coach.]

Why would anyone want to listen to me?

Maybe it’s a question that comes from a place of self-doubt but it is also from a place where status and certificates don’t mean very much at all. And that’s the place I want to come from as a coach. Not a place of authority or expertise but a place of enrollment, empathy, and service.   

I need to earn the right to coach from scratch each and every time. 

If you could start again, knowing what you know now. Why would anyone want to listen to you? 

Change the question. Change the system. Change the behaviour.

Then we’ll begin.

The opening line from Listen with Mother, a BBCRadio program for kids.

Before anyone is ready to listen to your story it might be worth listening to theirs first.

Found at the centre of a storm, the eye of the storm is a region of calmer weather.

And while all about you lose their heads, you keep yours because you know the storm will pass.

You got this.

Science looks to change the answer from “We don’t know” to “This is what we do know.”

Thinking, questioning, and challenging what we expect to see is part of the deal.

If you know you know but more often than we imagine we know only once we know, despite what we tell ourselves.

A simple maxim from the brilliant book Noise.

If you can’t accurately predict what happens next, you don’t know.

This brings me to youth sports.

If it’s not true that we can predict how successful a kid will be in a sport then we should stop doing it.

Instead, we can focus on things that we can predictably influence, like decision-making.

Fear is misplaced attention.

Be mindful of what you are paying attention to.

HT Once again to Patricia Ryan Madison.

I’ve just come across a new term, for me at least, “the ugly zone”.

Alongside the term “imposter syndrome” it reminds me that I shouldn’t be entering into this world where I don’t belong.

The caretaker in the haunted house in Scobby Doo tried a similar thing with a scary mask and ill-fitting costume.

Let’s have it right.

We all know you don’t learn to swim with your feet still touching the bottom of the pool.

Time to get out from behind the sofa and throw open the curtains.

Power is the amount of work that can be done over time.

Some say work less and enjoy your time more.

Others tell you to do more work in less time.

Perhaps the real power is deciding what to do with the time that you have got.

All starting points are equally valid.

Thx Patricia Ryan Madison

Showing up is a good start.

Showing up with intent is better.

And if you are going to show up with reluctance I’d rather you quit.

But, if you can’t get out of it, get into it.

Why not ask the question.

What is it like to know me?

That way you can make the buyer aware instead.

Want for nothing and you have everything you need.

Have everything you want and you have nothing you need.

River Phoneix wrote, “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.”

Leading with intent asks us to pick something and then lead with it. The question is. What follows?

Recently, I’ve been having an internal struggle with Play Their Way. Not because I don’t think The Rights of Children are not important, they are. But, what follows?

McDonald’s doesn’t start a healthy eating campaign because they care about healthy eating, they do it because they hope it will ease the guilt of parents ordering happy meals. It’s just a campaign. And if it doesn’t work, the chopped-up apples in bags disappear and they go back to just selling burgers and fries.

And now realise what my issue is.

Play their way is a campaign and campaigns come and go.

The opportunity is not to tell more coaches to give kids a voice that’s what campaigns do.

Rather the hard part is to show that by changing what we do we change what we get.

Do you think McDonald’s would still be selling burgers if they found out they could make more money selling apples?

Success comes from showing it works not spreading the word.

The washout effect in clinical studies is the time it takes for a drug to pass through a patient’s system.

Or, the time it takes for the status quo of the system you are working in to crush your ideas, concepts, and way of working.

People like us don’t do things like that.

Ship out or wash out the choice is yours.

You might have seen something but what have you noticed.

Paying attention is active, it involves all your senses and sensibility, not just eyes to the front.

Ten rules, most of them not mine, that I’m playing with.

1. Two steps forward and one back. Improve what you wrote yesterday then write today’s text but not before you read what you wrote yesterday aloud.
2. Write to pass on ideas.
3. Write for change
4. If you can’t summarise your idea in less than a minute you don’t understand it
5. Know the narrative arc. It starts with want and ends with need.
6. Write until you have something that surprises you.
7. Offer a fork in the road. Ask your readers to choose to go with you.
8. Take a cliche turn it around and have fun with it.
9. Combine two things and show your readers something new.
10. Say what you mean

What keeps a writer coming back to the text if they are full of self-doubt about the validity of their work?

What can we expect to enjoy if we are impatiently waiting for the end result?

In the end, our craft breaks us and then makes us.

Enjoy the process.

Last night we celebrated the end of another school year.

Not once were my kids late for school.

And yet, as parents when we were responsible for driving them in, occasionally we would be late.

I guess it must be pedal power.

Noble words are not the same as noble deeds.

Building a zoo because you are concerned about climate change and biodiversity is a bit like buying insurance on the Titanic from someone on the Titanic.

If you are a PE teacher, researcher, or coach it won’t be long before you come across the word “affordance”.

Based on a person’s physical capabilities, affordance refers to all the things you can do with an object.

For example, a skipping rope turns into a game of tug of war, high jump, and limbo.

And yet most kids I meet can’t skip.

Before we replace naive simple ideas with complicated ones backed by experts it pays to find out if we understand the simple ones first.

Sports are individually funded to drive up participation numbers.

Of course, the hope is that the whole, an active nation, is greater than the sum of its parts.

But, when I see rugby coaches practicing set moves with children in the middle of summer, I can’t help but imagine that competition rather than mutualism is the interaction of choice.

It is clear that your “good” might not be the same as mine or anyone else’s for that matter.

Being good at golf might just mean that you are the best of a bad bunch, maybe even the best at your club but not as good as Rory McIlroy. Or maybe it does. And that’s the point, we can’t be sure what “good” means to you.

How was your day? Good!

Defining what “good” means to you and what makes it so, helps. That way we can help you have another “good” day tomorrow.

It’s good to talk.

Yesterday I was out on the trails at the back of Castel Coch in Cardiff and I bumped into a guy called Leon. I don’t normally stop and talk to people who carry spades with them into the woods. But I made an exception for Leon.

Leon, was building ramps, berms, and jumps.

I told him about my lack of faith in making gap jumps and that I felt I was probably too heavy to make it across the really big gaps.

Leon gave me a physics lesson. I think it was his way of telling me to pedal faster and commit. He explained that he measures the distance between take-off and landing and that by keeping my heels down and compressing on take off I would create an arc in the air rather than my usual straight-up, straight-down trajectory.

And that point of all of this?

Be more Leon. You don’t need to have “coach” in your title to invite people to be curious about what you do. The student chooses the teacher.

There is little point arguing with people about whether the sun is likely to come up today.

But if you do find yourself in a tussle about anything else.

It pays to get clear on what you can agree on.

Before you give into the temptation of figuring out what you disagree on.

If you know the story of the emperor’s clothes you know that what keeps the story going is groupthink. The fear of not seeing what everyone else can see. And so to fit in, we see it too.

The spell is broken by a child unaware of group think dynamics.

Perhaps then it’s fitting (apologies) that we turn to the Rights of Children as the answer to a toxic coaching culture in youth sports.

But, I see us falling into the same trap.

The opportunity is to bring about change in behaviour, not by telling us what to do, but by engaging in meaningful conversations. We must resist the urge to demonise those who don’t agree. After all, coaching is about understanding, empathy, and compassion.

How to guides, expert opinion, control, and compliance is how we got into this mess in the first place.

We need coaches who are not afraid to stand up and tell us what they believe in and it doesn’t have to be the same as you.

In life and on a bike.

Treating muscle weakness as a lack of strength is first-order thinking.

The problem seems to have a clear and obvious solution.

Strength is the answer to weakness.

But the problem is rarely that simple unless, of course, we are so short-sighted we can’t see the full horizon of truth.

Three questions to assess the past, gauge the present and look forward to the future.

How did we get here?

What do we need to know?

What does success look like?

The word “teacher” exists because the word “student” also exists.

No need for the word “teacher” if there are no students.

Of course, traditional education rounds up students and puts them in front of a teacher.

And yet, we know that the best results happen when the student picks the teacher.

Thx Chick Corea, from a student of yours.

If the point of writing is to communicate your thoughts and ideas then worrying about who likes them is pointless.

Much like juggling.

If the point of juggling is to get good at throwing a ball then not counting how many times you drop it makes no sense at all.

Of course, if you are juggling your writing to impress others then the opposite is true.

It is tempting to imagine that it all rides on this one thing that takes all our attention.

The book I am writing has three chapters.

Chapter One took all my effort. Then Chapter Two arrived like a noisy neighbour. Put them together and you begin to question the perfection of Chapter One.

Surprised?

We shouldn’t be. But often we are.

A better question to ask (in advance).

What are the chances of me getting it right?

Everything comes at a cost.

Being honest about what the cost might be is a good place to start.

Using a bike instead of a car to commute can be slower, perhaps harder, and may be at times inconvenient.

But the upside could make the cost of all that effort worth it after all.

An assumption often made within groups is that unless an objection is raised silence signifies assent.

Of course, silence is much more likely to mean that no one wants to put their hand up, stick their neck out, or be perceived as a troublemaker.

Perhaps, it’s time to review the groups we are in and apply the rule of two feet.

It’s time to stop lurking and start working.

Yesterday The Guardian published an article about youth sports, titled Here is a radical new philosophy; making sport fun again.

The danger is asking kids what they want and then having a wish list that can’t be fulfilled.

I think it’s a fear worth exploring but you could begin with a different question.

How could we do this differently?

Take your own advice.

Do what is necessary.

Hug the cactus.

If you are not sure where to start, start at home, the world can wait.

The trick is not to focus on how but to focus on what you intended and why.

It is easy to confuse leadership with issuing demands and commands.

Maybe that’s what leaders do? They tell you what to do.

But, perhaps a leader shows you what to do?

Beneficial behaviours in the situation you find yourself in.

Now that is an example worth copying.

For those practicing conscious incompetence.

Mistakes might be part of the deal, but so is avoiding them.

A note for bootstrappers, freelancers, and the indy producers.

Eat it only as fast as you can grow it.

Football, Netball, and rugby were for when it was grey, wet, and muddy.

Tennis, athletics, and cricket for when the sun and the strawberries came out.

Not now. Preparation for the new season begins before the old season has finished. There is no old and new, just constant.

Like a fix. A morning without coffee, a day without a phone.

Professional sport is dependent on money. It can’t live without it.

But, you, the grassroots coach, what’s behind your fix?

We don’t need a system that tells us where we should be.

Ask instead.

What do we want to be?

In the 90s Ronseal captured the idea of the brand promise with the slogan “It does exactly what it says on the tin”.

If you liked what it said on the tin, and that’s what you got. Why go anywhere else?

Of course, the world has changed and what we see is not all there is. There is always more to see. But the promise still remains.

Do what it says on the tin.

What’s the alternative?

Two ears, one mouth.

Set to receive rather than broadcast.

And most of all, without fear.

I recently invited 50 coaches within a group to give a 5-minute talk about what they are working on. Not one of them took the offer up.

It takes guts and empathy to have a meaningful conversation.