Views from 23: What on earth do I have to say? - Part 1
Hi, my name’s Lachy, and Meer Awny, the patrón, big boss, almighty great leader of Ethos Performance hasn’t got off my ass about writing a blog for the past month (maybe a bit harsh). Not only that, at 24 years old, he wrote an interesting blog on how to be taken seriously as a young coach. So, as a grateful intern and coach working in the years that have come after Meer’s blog, I thought it might be interesting to put finger to keyboard (pen to paper is dead, get over it) and speak on some things.
As a cricketer coming to the realisation that I didn’t have the skill (or sufficient passion) to take sport professionally, I realised that the strength & conditioning training I’d been doing to help my performance had been helping my performance despite my diminishing optimism in my ability. Not only that, but the training was really rewarding and extremely interesting. So I quit cricket and swan-dived into strength & conditioning and the world of high performance. I’m lucky, my career has been built on the backs of the seasoned coaches who started when S&C wasn’t even a career option, so I had a variety of opportunities to learn, and I took them all, potentially even too many. I won’t blow my own horn and make a list of the internships I did, suffice it to say that I barely slept, learned a lot, made mistakes, worked my ass off and enjoyed every second of it. So what’re my main lessons from all this? Here are four that come to mind:
Thought 1: What does money have to do with coaching development?
I started a book recently, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ by Robert Kiyosaki. I’m not gonna talk to you about money, but in this book they introduce the terms, ‘asset’ and ‘liability’. Assets are things that put money in your pocket, and liabilities take money out of your pocket. As I mentioned earlier I worked my ass off trying to learn, without a single thought in mind as to what else was important, and inevitably the quality of other parts of my life diminished:
Social Life: you don’t realise how many friends you have until you haven’t spoken to 90% of them in a year.
Relationships: one of my most important learning moments was when I fell asleep right in front of my girlfriend’s uncle, in front of his face, as he was telling me a story. I was seated on a tall stool, and not only did I risk a face plant but bless his soul for not punching me right there and giving me a real reason to fall asleep… I wouldn’t have blamed him.
Family Life: my family home became a pit-stop to eat and sleep. Assuming you don’t hate your family, they deserve your time and you deserve theirs.
Hobbies: I didn’t play guitar and drums, which I love to do, for 1-2 years straight. This sucked.
So what is there to gain from my mindless grind? Invest in assets, not liabilities. As you grow and learn as a coach there will be a million and one opportunities for you to learn, it’s your responsibility to put high quality time and effort into the experiences that genuinely add value to your life and career. A coach named Keir Wenham-Flatt speaks about the four P’s:
Passion: does the job/internship fulfill a passion?
Progression: is there opportunity for career progression?
Pay: are you getting paid sufficiently for the work you’re doing?
Personal: do you enjoy the people you’re around and do they add to your social life?
Sometimes it gets to a point where there’s little more to learn from a workplace unless you were to become employed. As an intern you not only sacrifice money to be at a workplace, but social time, hobby time, family time, sleep, travel etc. The sacrifice isn’t insignificant, if you sense that your workplace is becoming a liability instead of an asset, you know what to do. To reference Keir again, he says that the goal at a job is to get all four P’s, if you have 0 punch yourself in the face and leave, if you have 1-2 be actively looking for a new role, if you have 3 keep your eye out but don’t be actively trying to leave and if you have all 4 don’t leave unless you’re fired or you die. As an intern, the four P’s are slighly different as you’re likely unpaid, but the idea stands. Invest in assets, not liabilities.
Thought 2: There’s more to coaching than the program
I’m not complaining when I say this, but many athletes trust coaches with much more information than you’d think. I’ve had conversations about break-ups, relationship annoyances, minor to major mental health struggles, new puppies, kids starting school, the list goes on. You aren’t required to have all of these conversations as a coach, but if you’re going to become a coach, be aware that these emotional plava birds are swooping in all seasons. Even as an intern, some athletes confided in my open ears more than the actual strength & conditioning coach, because I had no potential sway over their selection on the weekend.
Sometimes I meet some interns and I feel like giving them a plane ticket to a country in Europe and $50. Some people are as dry as the wood section at Bunnings Warehouse and just need to get out into the world. I’ve met many an intern, and I mean it when I say that the smartest coach in the southern hemisphere will struggle to get a job if they can’t share a belly laugh with the people around them. I don’t care how you feel about it, it just matters.
There’s nothing weirder than having a good conversation with an athlete, relating to them on a couple of things, then watching their diligence improve, but the program never changed. What changed was them realising that you were interested in more than just climbing your own career ladder, but were actually interested in the things that built them into the human they are. When you’re part of a team you can feel like a pawn, hanging on to your spot off the back of your ability to climb the social hierarchy and perform on the weekend. People don’t care about you, they care about performance, so when you take two seconds to just chat about them, their life, the flood gates open.
People seem to know that those who care about people care about the program too, so if the athlete knows that you’re ready to accept them as they are, not as they act, they know that you’re also ready to put time and effort into the program. This isn’t a 100% rule, many athletes couldn’t give a rats ass if you spoke with them or gave them a middle-finger before the session, they’ll just do it. It’s on you to push and pull when you need to, because if you know an athlete well enough, you know what they need to get going, and if an athlete senses this knowledge in you, they’ll reciprocate and get the most out of your program.
Thought 3: What mastery really means
One of the craziest things, for someone as young as myself, is how crazy it is to be exposed to some of the best athletes in the world so regularly. Some of the most well known athletes in the world have trained right in front of my eyes and I’ve even been their coaches. What I am so extremely grateful for, is being able to learn from them. It can be easy to think that as coaches that we need to be the fountain of all knowledge. Please don’t believe this, we’re smart, well read and highly experienced, but we don’t AND CAN’T know everything. This isn’t a negative, it’s a blessing, now that you know, you’ve opened your front door to all the lessons of the world.
So what does it seem to take to be great (apart from being coached by me lol)? The quote below says it better than I ever could.
I’ve learned that mastery is a destination most athletes aren’t actually trying to get to, it’s a day to day process and also an identity. Those who achieve mastery got there by training and investing masterfully. This means that they train with purpose, consistency and diligence and allocate their money, effort and time only to genuinely impactful and trustable sources.
I’ll say it again, mastery is not just training a lot, it’s training with purpose, consistency and diligence to their regime. So if you’re training 7 days a week, consider whether or not the training is intentional enough to genuinely develop your skills.
One thing I mentioned here as well is investment. I mentioned the concept of liabilities and assets. Those who achieve mastery, just like investors, invest in services and training inclusions that will have high return to their performance and wellbeing. Not only this, but they seek out information from these trusted sources, create behaviours from this trusted information, and create habits. For example:
Athlete asks about recovery protocols
Coach mentions getting 8 hours of sleep, eating sufficient healthy food and managing their schedule more effectively
Masterful athlete does these things and asks what else they can do, the average person does these things every now and then and still asks why their problem resurfaced
You might think this is a little harsh, but it’s an unfortunate reality.
“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence”
point 4: they want to do math and you’re their optometrist
I like to view the best athletes as the best problem solvers. There’s a goal, rules, methods of task completion and the athletes who are able to pick the most effective methods, most often, quicker and within the rules of the game become the best. It’s as simple as that.
Your goal as a strength & conditioning coach should be to solve the problems that they cannot. When someone is focused on solving problems within their sport, it becomes increasingly difficult to put attention towards the things that might build up in the background. For example, if all you’re focused on is skill development, the nagging shoulder pain that’s been building up for a year might just become a season ending injury. If you have someone in your circle who veered you away from worsening it before it became a major issue you retain yourself a season. This is harder than it might seem, the issue is never the issue and the program is 5% of the problem.
Using the same example, someone playing through shoulder discomfort could mean trying to retain one of the few comforts in their life, training and playing. They don’t view sport as a game, it represents so many things that are completely external to game. If they quit, they might feel like a dissapointment to their family and friends because they’ve been dubbed as the rising star of the family. Imagine feeling like quitting your current job made you feel like a failure in the eyes of the people you love most. You might just do whatever you can to keep that job, even if it means working through major discomfort. This is why I believe that programming it’s very beneficial to view yourself as an optometrist for someone trying to do math. All you’re doing is fixing their eyesight and guiding them on best practice with a bit of stern love and care.
I remember an athlete having a meeting with myself and our director with a previous injury, being let go from an International squad due to inability to play, and playing through a whole season with significant deficits in the limb. If any one of us had the mobility and strength levels they had, we’d have sidelined ourselves quicker than you can say “sub”. This might make you say “that’s dumb” or “poor thing” or “yikes”. I think the second is most applicable. Imagine how significant sport must be in your life in order to play despite the pain and discomfort of something like that. So when you’re selling the program, you aren’t selling a program, you’re facilitating their access to their life’s passion, sport. I know many people that would read that short story and rule them as dumb or stupid, I view that person as someone who is struggling to solve a problem they were never taught how to solve. They want to do maths, and you’re fixing their eyesight, simple as that.
Soft skills aren’t all that soft, because hard conversations are at the root of them, and it’s important that coaches are able to navigate this with a high level of empathy and stern love and care. It’s not my way or the highway, it’s let’s drive together on a dark road, I’ll hold the light while you steer the car and I’ll make sure you don’t hit too many potholes.
Parting thoughts…
Being a coach is quite demanding. But when our athlete’s are being difficult, annoying, lazy, or stubborn, don’t think “screw you”, think “it must be difficult carrying the load you’re carrying”. Imagine, after a 3 hour sleep, a 15 hour day and a multitude of daily annoyances, your partner says “suck it up you asked for it”. You might be perfectly justified in throwing the dinner table out the front door in your fit of rage (don’t do that). You need to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of others in order to help them run with them on.
Never forget your why, but never forget your home. Always practice empathy, but never forget to empathise with yourself. Forget the hard-nosed mental toughness you were always taught and remember that few are having a hard-work problem, more like 105 others that are heavier than the barbells you’re asking them to lift.