Exciting day today! Off to the Deloitte Open in Amsterdam with top Swedish golfer Anjelika Hammar. We have worked together for 18 months, and now it is her debut on the European Tour. If any of you are there please come up and have a chat with us both.
Another surprise this month was that one of my motivational tips was included in GLAMOUR magazine. No rude comments please.
Writing continues to keep me busy, and I was honoured to be invited to submit an article about golf coaching in the prestigious academic International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching.
I am a great fan of The Talent Code, and these are a few interesting observations from Coyle’s blog that I didn’t use. However they are well worth your deep consideration. If it is difficult to identify the best coaching techniques, it is even more difficult to identify a great coach. Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code, discusses this conundrum in his blog One Quick Way to Spot a Good Coach,
‘Here’s a simple truth: if you want to develop your talent, nothing will help you faster than finding a great coach.
Trouble is, great coaches are tough to find. They’re rare as diamonds. Their skills are subtle. They don’t tend to stand out at first glance.
So how do you spot one?
…. To find a good coach, look for someone who is comfortable not doing anything.
Not talking or yelling or waving their arms. Not making speeches or issuing praise or pacing the sidelines. Not doing anything except the most important thing: sitting back and letting the performance happen.
…. A good coach spends a lot of time — especially during games — sitting calmly with their arms folded and their eyes on the action. They are comfortable in their stillness, at peace. Because they know their job is not to direct the action like an orchestra conductor, but rather to create learners, to equip players to encounter problems and solve them. That means leaving them alone.’
How many frogs have to be kissed to find a prince – one of these master coaches? Probably thousands, because as Coyle writes in another blog titled The Best Kind of Coach these illusive individuals wear heavy camouflage.
‘A mysterious type who often go overlooked, because what they do doesn’t look like coaching. It looks more like magic. Because these people have the ability to alter someone’s destiny in the time it takes to eat lunch. They aren’t about the how or the why — they’re completely, utterly about the who. Their core skill is to see someone in a way that they don’t yet see themselves; to give their lives a larger narrative, sense of belief, a higher purpose.
You might call them a Soul Coach.’
Indeed you might. An exquisite balance of mind, body, and soul is required for peak performance. Send me an email if you are ready to unleash your peak performance.
