My Coaching

I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that I really like doing. Lots of those things I do less of when I’m feeling low. Maybe caused by the lowness, or as a result of it. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it’s easy to drift into areas you don’t love when you don’t choose what you’re doing.

When I left high school, I was lost. I didn’t have a direction I wanted to go. I wasn’t super passionate about anything to study or a trade to learn. So I drifted along for a couple of years. Played a lot of Water Polo, did a few papers at university. Anything that required not too much effort, but made it seem like I was doing something.

Given I had lots of spare time and was working pretty minimal hours, I volunteered to coach Water Polo. I started with one team, then added more and more. School teams and teams for my club. I was often coaching multiple teams at once. I loved it, and people seemed to think I was good at it. It felt like the one thing in my life, at that time, that I was actually good at.

I enjoyed teaching the skills of the game for sure. But what I loved about it was the building up of confidence and camaraderie amongst the kids. I think they picked up on how enthusiastic I was about it and how I wanted it to be a fun experience for them. Like I said, for someone who was pretty lost for what I wanted to do with my life, this was an oasis of purpose for me. It was the one thing in my life I threw myself into completely.

Soon enough though, I stopped playing. I graduated university and got ‘a real job’. I stopped coaching. I missed it. But I told myself this was part of growing up. I didn’t have time for that sort of thing anymore. I needed to be earning money and doing important things like that. Not spending time volunteering to coach a bunch of kids.

It left a big hole. One that I didn’t acknowledge or do anything to replace. I don’t know if this resonates with others. But without spending my time building others' up, my own confidence and head-space suffered. That sense of purpose was not there, and neither was the sense that I had something I was good at. I found that my own happiness was linked to what I was doing to empower and encourage others. Jay Shetty would call it ‘living a life of service’.

It was some years until I got to lead people in a work environment. But when the opportunity came up, I knew I wanted to do it. The ‘soft’ skills and leadership came naturally to me. But the more formal aspects of management were (and still are) a challenge. I loved creating a space for people that was fun to be and they felt like they belonged.

I've settled on a dynamic that works for me in my current job. I’m lucky now that I get all the great aspects of people leadership without the overhead of ‘management’. That’s the balance that best suits me, for right now anyway.

I’ve said this to people who I have worked with before. If you want to learn about leadership and people, coach a kids sports team. Before kids are hardened and scared to ask ‘silly questions’ they are themselves. They are open to learning, and don’t hide emotion when frustrated or disappointed. When they lose a game they are open with their feelings. I learnt more about motivating people and how to lead them. As well as what makes people tick. By coaching 14 year olds than I ever have in a course.

I recently found a quote from the late great Robin Williams and it landed with me. It goes “I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy. Because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.” That sums up my feelings towards coaching. I was sad, lost and felt worthless and I found it so easy to throw myself into building up other people. I was doing and saying all the things that I needed to tell myself, but couldn’t.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m trying to make positive choices. Intentionally doing things that ‘fill your cup’. I mean that in the sense of refilling your mental, emotional and physical energy. Things that make you feel good, in the purest sense. For me, that is building other people up. I’m sure I’m not the only one like that. For other people it might be something different. I’m sharing this because all of our challenge is to identify what that is and choose to do more of it.

Lots of what I’ve been working on myself is trying to be that coach version of me, to myself. I’ve mentioned negative self-talk and finding it hard to like myself. I have made strides on that front over the past year. Learning to treat myself with the same patience and enthusiasm I would someone else, is one of the biggest changes I’ve had to make. I think that’s probably something we could all be better at.