I was reading an interesting blog post by Seth about ‘coachability’. Now, most of you out there will never take that step and take formal advice from a climbing coach (bummer eh!) so you may think that this might not apply to you. But almost all of you are self –coaches of varying degrees of commitment (and hey you are reading this blog so you are coaching yourself right now). So it’s good to be aware of how coachable you are.
Seth: “A friend is wrestling with his ability to be coached. For the coachable, "Turn right at the light" is seen as a helpful suggestion for someone lost in a strange town... the advice goes in, is considered and then acted upon. For someone wrestling with coaching, though, it's like surgery. It's painful, it has side effects and it might lead to a bad reaction…”
I’ve met a lot of climbers who are very resistant to their own coaching. As Seth points out, the symptoms of un-coachability include challenging the credentials of the coach, reminding yourself of previous errors or flaws in the coach (substitute “coaching information” if you like), inventing reasons why the coaching does not apply to you or that you are being hard done by and even resisting the information just because of the source it came from.
It’s really hard to steer a course through the sea of crap advice out there by yourself. But the answer is not to put up walls to shut out questionable or unusual information. Unfortunately if you choose to be a self coach, you have to swallow whatever coaching comes your way and try your best to digest and analyse wherever possible. It’s a rocky road of constantly changing realities, practices and perspectives.
Such is life.
Hey,
ReplyDeleteOnly getting around to reading this now.
It's funny, but coming from Ireland, we're pretty dependent on self-coaching as there's no qualified coaches out there. The only time I know of was Neil Gresham making a foray across and going a training weekend, but only as he was due to give a slide show also. Steve McClure made it over once but for similar reasons.
It's a catch-22 for the moment, either stay ignorant of training methods (correlated by fact no-one in Ireland climbing above 8a - bar Si Moore who moved to Sheffield) or put up with the 'crap advice' out there. We can only hope..
Neal :)
Dublin, Ireland (but currently abroad)
Theres no qualified coaches in the UK either - we don't have a qualification for climbing coaches here, so we just have ordinary climbers who really went for it and learned a lot in order to push their own climbing, and then realised they had something to offer others too.
ReplyDeleteThere is good information out there among the poor quality stuff. If you want to be a good self coach it just means doing some hard work to educate yourself to a level to be able to differeniate and appraise bits of advice yourself.
BTW I've written improvement programs for a few irish based climbers!
very well explained the post.
ReplyDeleteI am thankful to you ..........
Very well said it, coaching is not just about yelling and do that and that, it requires personality and been able of handle pressure.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for this post, pretty worthwhile material.
ReplyDelete