SimonHarlingBlog Posts

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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