Just Joshin' #182 (Coaches)
Family Photo:
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Calvin's developing his handwriting.
Now we're routinely greeted by little notes around the house as he explores this form of expression, practicing encoding his thoughts onto paper: "I luv dad"; "I like my hat"; "der [cousin], I wish you cood stae...frum Calvin."
I asked Calvin about the note pictured above—'I cant do backflips'.
He says: "That's because I can't do backflips now, but I'm going to learn how to do backflips. Then, when I learn to do backflips, I'll cross out the T and it will say 'I can do backflips'.
Solid motivational logic.
Backflips happen to be on my own list of things I'd like to be able to do someday—along with really good handstands and learning Chinese.
I get a bit jealous watching Cam Skattebo do his gymnastics routines into the endzone. It makes me wonder if my potential backflipping days are behind me.
Cam Skattebo is also an NFL player who seems to be actively trying to give himself a CTE every play, so... choose your heroes wisely. Or at least consider which qualities you want to emulate in the people you admire.
In his 2017 Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos famously wrote about a friend hiring a handstand coach to be able to do really good handstands. On YouTube, coaches teach backflips in less than a day.
There isn't a light-switch flipped between 'can't do backflip' and 'can do backflip'. There are a lot of incremental, progressive movements between those two points. A coach breaks down complex tasks into the component parts, then guides and encourages the participant through those progressions.
The motivation part is funny. I have a coach for the physical therapy on my knee right now. He's a really good coach. He makes me want to do better. Why didn't I already want that for myself?
A girl from Calvin's class lives down the street. When Calvin and Lawrence were playing at her house, she brought out this mat and started floating in perfect cartwheels across its surface. Calvin and Lawrence followed her by doing these little jiu jitsu rolls over their shoulders. I don't think she's innately more athletic than the boys, they've just been coached through different movements.
Maybe we should hire a backflip coach.
Worth a try.
Dad Jokes:
Horseless Coaches
Source: Twitter
Highlights:
Coaches Who Coach
A Few Little Ideas by Morgan Housel
How to raise a genius by Henrik Karlsson
An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo by Cedric Chin
This means that there is a history of pedagogical development, or at least a body of known training exercises that have been passed down from coach-to-coach or coach-to-student.
- Practice under the guidance of a coach, who will give you feedback and break down your training into atomic drills for specific sub-skills. (Notice the implication here: this assumes that the sub-skills are known, and that exercises to improve them exist.)
- Finally, deliberate practice involves modifying and building on existing mental representations of skill, which in turn emphasises the above two properties — you need a coach to correct mental representations, and you need a body of knowledge around training methods so you don’t spend too much time developing new training methods for sub-skills that aren’t yet fully understood.
(There are more properties of deliberate practice that I won’t get into; you may find them in my summary of K. Anders Ericsson’s Peak. I’m merely listing the subset of properties that make it so difficult to apply.)
The point I’m making is this: as working adults, we don’t naturally work in environments where deliberate practice is possible. Many skill domains that we are interested in don’t come with coaches, nor established training programs.
Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.
...
Elite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short.
They Spent Their Life Savings on Life Coaching by Katie Bishop
...
Business is booming. The International Coaching Federation, the world’s largest nonprofit coaching association, estimated that the industry was worth $4.6 billion in 2022 and that the number of coaches increased 54 percent between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, it’s most likely larger — one of the dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach.
...
After completing the program, Ms. Mullett was certified by the school and hoped to start coaching. But although she had initially been told that her certification would give her “everything I needed to make my first $100,000,” Ms. Mullett found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. The solution that she was offered? To spend more money on being coached.
...
“The boom is being fueled by an appetite for life coaching, but it’s also being fueled by artificial means,” Ms. O Sullivan said. “There is a problem in the industry of coaches who coach coaches to become coaches.”
iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Physical Education Coach
4 Running Lies I Was Told in PE | iamJoshKnox
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