Four *Free* Things That Made Me a Better Coach

I get asked a version of the same question pretty regularly: What book, course, or thing did you read/take/buy that got you to where you are? 

As if I could point to the moment I said fuck it, signed up for the Weapon X program, and went from zero to hero. And then I could share that one thing with you, and you could do it too with guaranteed results or your money back!

Events that change your behavior that drastically and that quickly are usually called 🌸trauma🌸. 

As much as I'd love a regenerative healing factor, impeccable comedic timing, and a cool skin-tight red suit, my career didn't change because of a single thing. It's been a handful of free things that I’ve done repeatedly over the years that have made the biggest difference. 

The thing I've realized as I wrote this post is that, while I didn't pick up any of these hobbies with the express purpose of becoming a better coach, all four of them make me better at my actual job, and they do it in the same way: by slowing my perception down far enough to see things my brain might otherwise zoom right past. More on that a little later. 

You'll probably also notice that these habits/hobbies/skills/whatever you want to call them are slow builds. None of 'em can be completed over two days, and all of 'em have unsexy parts and boring bits. But I wouldn’t have dedicated decades to each of these four things if they were a waste of time.

So here are four free things that have drastically improved me as a coach (and probably, definitely, as a person). 

Photography

It started with a cheap wallet-sized point-and-shoot camera while vagabonding across Europe at twenty-two. I upgraded from that to a big fancy camera and eventually to a bigger, fancier one. By then, I had developed a photography practice. I’d regularly spend an hour or more composing a single photo, staring at the same thing long enough to see something I hadn't seen before. Over time, I started seeing these details more quickly and in other parts of my life, like my work.

That’s how I learned to notice small things like skin blanching or wrinkling as indicators of movement, or how people organize their bones in space, or where they're not loading and why. Photography is an art of noticing, and you can definitely just use your iPhone, or just stare for long periods of time to develop that ability. It’s the noticing that matters, not the camera. Attentiveness takes practice, and it's real easy to spot the coaches who train that skill—and even easier to spot the coaches who don't.  

Meditation

In coaching, you have to be attuned to the person(s) in front of you: how they move, what they say, and what they conspicuously don't say. You also must be self-aware enough to recognize your own nonsensical biases and unhelpful thoughts before they run the session for you. 

The following questions focus your attention, right fucking now, and when you’re with a client:

What is happening? 

What else is happening? 

What’s going on inside and outside of you? 

Is your attention wandering? 

Why Willy Wonka?

Is your focus broad or narrow? 

What do you notice if you zoom in, and if you zoom out? 

Did you catch the Willy Wonka? If you didn't, I rest my case.

The more present I am, the better I listen, the better my questions, the shorter my evaluations, and the more efficient I am with my time and my client's time. Presence is a fucking power tool, I'm telling you. I get better results in less time when I'm actually here.

And it transfers to learning, too, not just sessions. Let’s say you go to an awesome weekend course in Boulder, learn fantastic things, and come back genuinely changed. But your brain is a little autocomplete gremlin! If you're not present when you return to work, you'll default to autopilot so fucking fast, repeating what you always do. Your brain clicks back to familiar patterns with frightening ease, so you need to actively choose to do new things in micromoments. Presence is how you do that.

Do I still have your attention? Are you here now? 

How about now?

Meditation is just this—re-focusing over and over and over again. I don’t care what form it takes for you, just that you do it. 

I’m currently working on counting twenty-five breaths without a single intervening thought. My record is ten. When I am inconsistent with my practice, I see my presence degrade by the number of breaths I can count. It reminds me how swiftly an unpracticed mind returns to its standard scattered settings.

Meditation is one of the few things you can do that helps every facet of your life. I’m doubling down on my meditation practice because I’ve recently hurt my partner by being unpresent. 

I’ve never finished a session and thought, Well, that was a waste of time. Usually, I think, I really should do this more. [Takes note to self.] 

There’s one specific dimension to meditation that I want to highlight: noticing what’s missing—what’s not there, what’s ended. Start with noticing the breath that just ended, like the one you just exhaled. That one. Yup. Then expand the noticing to something else in your life. 

Then there's noticing what’s not there, which is a skill that'll improve your coaching more than almost anything else. What's missing is just as diagnostic as what's there. You can quickly clock what’s missing from a client’s programming, or when they’ve stopped mentioning a prior complaint, or when they’re not moving somewhere they should. All of that is information! Most coaches can read what's present; the rarer skill is reading what disappeared.

Reading

Books are the best bargain in the world. Good authors put years between those pages. Years! How much would you charge a client for years of your time? And yet you can buy a book for ten to twenty bucks? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s a screamin’ deal, and yet most people opt out of it.

My reading philosophy mirrors my philosophy on movement: it doesn't so much matter HOW you're doing it as long as you're doing it. I watch random people run around Boulder with technique that makes me wince—and I used to cringe and critique, and now I just think, I’m just so glad they’re out moving. It’s far more important to have the habit than to have optimal technique. Same goes for reading.

And that holds doubly true if you don't already love to read! Those who know me are surprised to learn that I used to haaaaaate reading. "How could that be?" they ask, "you devour books faster than Loki snarfs his supper!" And while that's true now, I spent more than half my life thinking reading was a boring-ass waste of time. I think it's because the 'classics' assigned at school sucked out loud. (You will never convince me that The Old Man and the Sea is not an irredeemable snoozefest.) It wasn't until I graduated from school and nestled my butt into a hammock in Thailand that I enjoyed reading for the first time. (And yes, the context helped.) At 22 years old, I finished The Power of Habit in two days, closed the back cover, and said to my girlfriend, my eyes wide with revelation, "Books can be good??" From there, I snapped up books and stories that sounded interesting to me, regardless of whether they were considered 'good.' Turns out that reading is way more enjoyable when you read stuff you like.

So when people ask me, “What should I read?”, I say whatever you like. Fiction, nonfiction, fantasies, true crime, mysteries, manga, self-development, sci-fi, smut—I don’t care what you read, just that you do. Consume books because reading is that important.

Being able to understand what someone else is going through, being able to listen for a sustained period of time without trying to construct your reply—those are skills that are essential to coaching and what reading does for you. Especially the listening part, you read dialogue and life events without the expectation of talking back. And when seeing too many clients in too short of time, the ability to listen to critical details of their story is essential. Reading has helped me with alllllll of that.

I called these practices free, and I know: books aren't free when you buy them. But, there’s a mythical place—increasingly rare and scarcely populated—called the public library. My partner recently told me that it even loans out Kindle books! Which means I can start and abandon as many books as I like without cost! There are far too many good books to bother finishing the bad ones. My Kindle is a graveyard, and I have no regrets about that.

Reading feeds every other practice on my list. The best questions I've asked in sessions come from books. The best frameworks I've used to understand movement, behavior, communication—yep, books. More than that, reading goes way beyond the accumulation of good information and better stories. You're training yourself to focus, to follow a sustained argument, to sit with complexity, to keep moving forward when you don't know what's happening yet, and to resist the pull toward the next thing. All of those require cognitive muscle, and it atrophies fast if you don't use it.

(**If I’ve piqued your interest in this alien practice called ‘reading’, I dare you to read this long and phenomenal article: The End of Reading Is Here.)

Reading is one side of the communication coin; writing is the other.

Writing

I’m convinced that you know more than you realize; you just haven't laid it out in a clear way… yet. Humans are not working with great default software. Our brains are meaning-making machines, not logic-making. Writing is how you fight against your factory settings, because putting words on pages is the act of making sense. As I like to say to anyone/everyone who'll listen: good writing is good thinking.

Inevitably, you’ll expose your ignorance in your writing, too. You’ll find what you don’t know, if you're honest with yourself. Then you return to reading because somewhere, someone has written the answer. Go look for it. On and on, this cycle goes: write, unearth your ignorance, go read and learn. Repeat.

Hands down, my writing practice is the most impactful discipline in my entire life, and especially in my career. When you write regularly, you physically work with your thoughts. You re-read them over and over, rearrange them, edit them, polish them, and most of all, make sense of them. Editing is when you discover what’s missing from your education and understanding. Once you discover what you don’t know, that should stoke your curiosity and send you searching for answers. This is how I’ve learned a great many things!

When I read something I don’t understand, I write about it until I understand it. Then I teach it to learn it again, ensuring I can explain it and that others understand it. 

If you want to start a writing practice, I wrote dis for you.

So, we have reading, writing, meditating, and photography. 

In other words, focusing, communicating, awareness-ing, and seeing.

There’s nearly a guaranteed transfer from these practices to your life and work. We can’t even promise that kind of ROI within our movement coaching, and we charge for it!

I wish these practices counted for CEUs given their importance, but they don’t. I’d much rather work with a coach who was present with me than one who had a laundry list of letters after her name but kept her mind somewhere other than our moments together. Wouldn’t you?

The content of these practices is less important than the practices themselves. I don’t care what you focus your lens or peepers upon, just that you stare at something long enough to notice stuff. I don’t care what you focus your attention on, just that you’re paying attention, on purpose, to what’s happening right now, and now, and now. I don’t care what you write about, just that you write and, ideally, edit your words. I don’t care what you read, just that you read. Practice.