“How do you do life without a coach?”
Thoughts as of 6/12/24
This question comes from a recent conversation with a friend contemplating life post athletics.
For people not involved in athletics past a certain level, this may not resonate. However, I think that the longer one stays within a sport, and the more of one’s time that sport takes up (highly correlated I’d imagine), this will likely strike a chord.
Further, I think it is more of a commentary on the schooling system writ large rather than something narrowly confined to athletics. The lesson should ring true to anyone finding themselves in the midst of uncertainty, but an example will be helpful in illustrating the point.
Speaking from my own experience, I had always been involved in competitive sports. I started at probably 5 years old and continued until I was 22. The myriad benefits of athletics have been widely touted my whole life, such as increased discipline, teamwork, leadership, etc. but I think that there is a somewhat hidden downside.
For my entire life through the end of my football career, things were more or less laid out for me in a relatively cookie-cutter fashion.
The path was to get to high school, then get good grades and play sports to get into college, and then get good grades and play sports to get a job.
For a lot of folks in certain fields like law or medicine, this may not apply since there is a standard path to get from A to B. The specific route that one takes can vary widely and this is not to diminish the importance or difficulty inherent in those decisions, but compared to the universe of everything out there, your opportunity set is far narrower.
For me, I never really knew what I wanted to do long-term. In fact, I am still not sure.
I have some ideas based on my interests and relative skillsets, but by and large, I am still figuring it out day by day, or more accurately - year by year.
Once you leave the safe havens of institutions and are out in the world, it is scary. There are no guidelines for what to do next or how to get to where you’re going. This primarily stems from the fact that you do not know where you’re going.
Or at least I didn’t.
If you do have a goal in mind that is concrete, it is far easier to reverse engineer the steps needed to get from where you are to where you want to be, and then at that point, there are almost too many guides to figure out the intermediate steps.
From my experience and that of my friends who have competed in athletics, moving past that mindset into the real world where you can do anything and nobody is telling you what to do or how to do it, is an underrated challenge.
I have been fortunate in this respect because I have a pretty strong internal compass.
My primary opponent each day is the man in the mirror. I am constantly trying to best the man I was yesterday.
I have developed a rough framework of guiding principles within which to live my life, and although I do not have a firm idea of what the end goal will be, I know that if I stay within this framework, I will end up all right.
I am by no means perfect.
There is a reason that the industries of coaching, consulting, and therapy are so successful. It often takes someone outside of our situation to evaluate how things are going and see where improvements can be made.
My shortcut for this process has been my journaling and honest reflection.
I certainly have benefitted from bouncing ideas off of friends and mentor figures, but largely my growth and development stem from thinking - probably over-thinking, to be frank.
The opening question still remains.
Whether you are able to embody the coaching role for yourself, develop a personal board of directors, a metaphorical tribe of mentors, or hire a professional expert, the simple truth is that we need to step outside of our daily operating system in order to set longer-term goals and make incremental progress.
I suppose this is not an answer to the question, but I wanted to develop the kernel of the idea and see where it took me.
Further thoughts are sure to come.