There isn’t a way. In the end, all good athletes will find out it was only ever about what was inside them. So, I want you to discover something about yourself that you didn’t know.
If I am a good coach, I am going to encourage you to find out for yourself. I’m not even going to show you what I would do, because that would simply infect your experience with mine and that’s not coaching. That’s preaching!
Sure, we set up the work. But that is such a narrow aspect of the energy transfer.
We don’t want followers, we want innovators.
I don’t want you to follow my program. I want you to explore your experience in it and discover yourself.
The issue is, we think of innovation as an objective. But even objective innovation has to come through someone’s unique way of looking at things based on their own observations, experiences and subsequent discoveries.
So, I’m going to point you in the direction that I think is going to bring you closest to yourself and then I am going to remove my own bias and allow you to find out how to do it for yourself.
With encouragement, with mentorship and with belief in you. When you struggle, when you are challenged, I am grateful, because I know that is where the true gold is lurking.
When we look at what is really going on and the avoident traits and coping mechanisms we use as athletes, we bring our own unconscious resistance into our awareness. Nothing is more transformative than that.
In the end, though, I know through listening to my own internal whispers that strength and resilience rise through deep listening in the moment that you are in direct contact with what you like least.
Ugly truth, hey?
Impulse and reaction. Can we stay in the space in between the two and not lose ourselves in it?
Promoting that, to me, is the definition of good coaching.
Here’s what you won’t often hear:
The pathway that you are on as an athlete is about listening to spirit in the same way you would listen to the wind.
That wind holds all your self-belief, trust and your true innovative uniqueness and the power of discovery within it.
Expose yourself to that. Now, at the risk of sounding judgmental, you could teach a monkey to hold power and pace in a repetitive structure. AI can punch it out for you any day of the week.
We are not robots, racing instincts come from the heart that rises in that instinctual whisper, and the more you practise listening to it, the clearer the instinctual narrative becomes.
That narrative transforms the worrier into a warrior.
If you don’t or won’t listen, you are tone deaf to your own music!
I want you to come back from that session and tell me what you found out, tell me what you felt, tell me what you discovered.
Everyone thinks the coach is only there to analyse the data, but that’s like looking at a poo and predicting what was eaten the night before.
Oh, yep, you are getting plenty of fibre there. Good job.
See, you are the laboratory that studies itself. Don’t be so quick to farm it out.
When you discover something in a session, you are not really discovering something about the session, the structure or the coaches' plan, you are discovering something about yourself.
My analysis is external. I’m not inside you. I can point, but it’s still your journey.
It’s not about the coach.
In my opinion, a good coach will always point out that responsibility to you.
Tune in, not out.
For the love of coaching.
Gilesy