Here’s an article I recently posted on LinkedIn under the heading ‘What we rarely talk about in coaching’
How do you think of beauty in coaching? And what part, if any, does it play in all you do?
From the outset I wonder how this will sit with my intended audience for this post:
hard pressed coaches working in high performance environments where everything is pretty much judged by end results, not what looks nice or aesthetically pleasing
Sports Psychologists who too often still have to argue for the space for their science- based practice and risk losing credibility if thought to stray into anything woolly and hard to define
and many more similarly at the frontier of supporting others in their daunting, raw and seemingly far from beautiful challenges.
Certainly beauty is rarely spoken of, let alone features in any courses or workshops I’ve come across, nor in podcasts or social media sound bites of high level coaches and commentators. Yet I want to suggest that beauty has a powerful place at the very heart of the most energising, creative and rewarding coaching – and, as I set out in my book Beyond Belief: the art of confidence-centred coaching, for all levels, abilities and ambitions.
We’ll see this in some highly challenging sports environments, ask ourselves how to find such moments and then, at the end, share an example of beauty born in a run. But first...
What do we mean by beauty and where can we find it?
Here's how I think of beauty, as set out in Beyond Belief:
“Beauty as in those magical, surprising moments when we find ourselves captured by what we see or hear, aware it somehow affects us yet unsure how or why. Time briefly stands still. There’s a calming, possibly humbling moment of quietness as we take in what is before us; maybe feel a deep connection, touching something inside us – all in the realm of feelings and sensations without words. We will see these themes running through book: connections to deeper feelings, a sense of wonder in the stillness and an openness to the magic of the moment.”
So I think of beauty as something richer, deeper and more personally engaging than simply being an admiring, detached on looker who happens by chance to come across something pleasing. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about beauty not just as admiration but as “a door to meaning as well as pleasure.”
Some recent examples from my coaching and coach mentoring include:
a woman preparing for a 10km swim who came for a 1:1 swim session, struggling with an undermining feeling of not being able to do it, something not “right” in her stroke and worried about the distance, and quickly found a natural fluency and joy that left us both moved at how good she felt in the water (she went on to do brilliantly!)
a coach I mentor who over many years has patiently supported a hesitant, serial DNFer, recounted seeing him “holding himself” steady and composed before going on to win a hard fought race, she and I both marvelling at his newfound self-belief and resolve
and, as in the example at the end of this post, a runner connecting to a sensations-rich memory that left her energised and moved me.
Beauty as meaningful connections that leave me feeling privileged to witness and be a part of.
Living Masterpieces in Action
What of the nervous athlete facing their big, unnerving challenge: not sure if they can do it, the noise and clamour all around and weight of expectations put on by others and themselves. Where’s the beauty in that?
With the athletes I coach, typically for daunting long distance swims, arduous ultra runs or full on Ironman triathlons, we first think about how they want to feel at the start line. I encourage them to make time to take in the extraordinary accomplishment of being there: all that training done, as ready as they could possibly be, a thrilled anticipation of what lies ahead (without any guaranteed results) and a sense of being a part – of truly belonging – to what is about to unfold.
From there we think of the space between start and finish lines as a blank canvas in which they will create their own living masterpiece, to use a wonderful phrase from the legendary Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and Performance Psychologist Michael Gervais. Completely absorbed in the moment, mind and body as one and revelling in a fluency of movement without our heads being cluttered with instructions or harshly berating ourselves. In Beyond Belief I called this “the most vibrant, living self- expression of all they have worked on and brought to the moment.” It’s not a stretch to think of both such moments as having a stilling beauty all of their own, is it?
And results have a way of taking care of themselves – athletes surprised, sometimes stunned, by what they can do. Again, here lies the magic and beauty of beyond belief coaching.
How to get there?
I think of two essential steps to develop an ability to home in on such moments, making them a nourishing, rewarding part of all we do. The first is about a skilful, purposive openness to what is before us. The second about attunement.
I like to think that the way the word wonder has evolved in the English language to have two meanings tells us something significant. There’s the ‘wondering’ as a momentary reflection and inquisitiveness to what is before us. “I wonder...” This in turn somehow enables us to experience a moment of quiet, stilling wonder or even awe. A sensation of sublime surprise that comes before the words. If we busily rush on, caught up in the ‘doing’ of coaching or whatever else is absorbing us, the moment is lost.
Such wonder-filled wondering is a skill we can practise day to day, in and outside of sporting arenas. I was recently asked to open a session for the Supervision Group that I belong to and decided to test out what beauty might mean for others in the Group. I asked everyone to think about the qualities of beauty that came to mind. What was it that captured them and made it memorable – not so much the context of all that was going on but what was special that caught their attention and made it memorable? And then I asked everyone to think of the impact: how did it leave them feeling?
One shared an unforgettable epic “best moment of my life”, on top of a mountain sharing the stunning view with their partner. Another relayed more recent attentive moments of quiet joy in close company. One person shared being on the receiving end of a spontaneous, assertive self-expression by a child. Interestingly for another various visual images came to mind while I recalled more active moments of easy fluency, such as a collective flowing movement in a recent Qi Gong class.
Now, I believe that if we practice such inquisitive openness and attentiveness, we begin to see and feel it in all sorts of unexpected places, including even the most pressured coaching moments. And it all starts from stilling ourselves, pausing to take in, maybe to ask ourselves “what is it?” and “what do I feel?” Then a “what else?” This is a skilful practice we can develop that will add a richness, colour and depth to all we do.
A second step is all about attunement: being wholly present and having a “relaxed alertness” to ourselves and those in front of us (to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm). And going back to the living masterpiece, for an athlete there’s that sense of being lost and found in the space between the start and finish line and of surprising themselves with what they can do. I think we can coach people to be attuned to what is happening for them, body and mind in sync. This is a big part of confidence-centred coaching, going to what the athlete feels rather than what they look like to a watching expert or what a device on their wrist dictates.
Round the Lake
Here’s that example I mentioned earlier. One of the athletes I’m working with, an ultra- runner, has been recovering from surgery. We’ve been very gradually building up her level of training to a point where now she feels ready to reconnect – or find anew – some speed. Rather than going to intervals, where the session’s format is dictated by prescribed times and distances, we thought about a fartlek run (essentially a continuous run with a variety of harder and lighter efforts over different distances, shaped by the athlete’s response in the moment to the terrain and their energy). I love such runs, also known as speed-play (the literal translation from the original Swedish), to help athletes become attuned to the effort they can sustain, adept at reading their bodies without the aid of a fancy gadget telling them what to do. They bring an energising playfulness to even the hardest of sessions.
In our weekly call, she happened to tell me that she first got into track and field, particularly 800ms, as a young teenager. She recalled how supportive and encouraging her mum had been. I felt touched by her readiness to share her story. In this way an idea came for her speed-play session. Finding a trail – she ended up opting for round a lake - after a preliminary and very loose warmup I asked her to take herself back to competing in an 800ms, her lovely mum watching in the stands. The session ‘plan’ (a generous term) consisted of imagining herself at different stages of an 800m, such as settling into a strong pace round the first bend and down the home straight; then jogging a short section (as if round the next bend); strong down the home straight and past the bell and so on, in effect striding out for more or less 200ms and easy for about half the distance. A lap of honour at the end and then repeated if time and energy allowed.
Did the session work as intended? In terms of measurable training benefits, her recorded data showed a nicely composed step up from all the easier runs she has been doing and a reasonable start to introducing more speed. No ill effects the next day either. That said, the session ended up shorter than planned, squeezed in between other commitments and she said she lost track of the supposed distances (not that we were after any precision!). Yet look at an extract of the comments she left on our online training log (and graciously shared here with her permission). A connection reawakened to the awesome sensations of running at speed and of being cared for and held.
“There was a moment where I remembered the effortlessness with which I was able to calibrate the distance between my spikes and the inside track. And the noise the spikes made when you stepped on the track border, clack clack. My mum being a single mum and buying me a pair of gorgeous spikes with her nursing salary. The sacrifices we make. And the feeling that the bends were just a bit longer than you thought they’d be.” M-J
Now, ask yourself: does your coaching allow for and take you and those you coach to meaning-filled, rich in connection moments of beauty? Isn’t that something you would both find deeply rewarding? And think about the connections and bonds of trust that might be created when we seek out and cherish such “doors to meaning.”
Imagine too if coaching education included the space to cultivate an inquisitive openness and a purposeful, attentive attunement to what is felt – by us and those we coach. Or if you are involved in coach development, imagine conversations or forums opening with sharing moments of beauty. It would be more insightful than simply listing what we have been doing, wouldn’t it? And think about where to look for models to learn from to develop and enhance such skills?
I’d love to know of any moments of beauty that you recall as enriching your coaching or coach development – feel free to use the Comment box below or email me. Would be great to hear from you and share experiences.
