22,896 days
until I turn 90 years old (if I get there)
I have spent a bit of time curating my digital space recently. One of the biggest changes I made is the apps I have on the homescreen of my phone. I have a series of little dials and numbers that matter to me available at first glance: how long until the sun sets, the progress of the year 2024 as a percentage (it’s already 8%!?!) and a little countdown app that I use to track how many days I have left until I’m 90 years old.
As confronting as it is, these days are disappearing quickly. Even more confronting is the fact that I am absolutely not guaranteed to make it this long, so potentially, there are even less days. For me, this is the reminder I needed to spend my time more intentionally, to find the things I enjoy doing, and keep challenging myself to grow.
I got the idea from Clark Kegley and his approach to journalling, something I’ve done on and off every since watching his videos. I am very proud of my little 5 year journal, where I write a few lines each day to characterise the story and can read my entries from the same date of previous years. In May, it’ll be the start of my third year with this book, and there’s a special satisfaction of owning something for that long, and seeing how far I’ve come in that time.
Physically and philosophically, I have moved to the other side of Australia, travelled back to the UK - a place I’ve seen more of than Australia - and made global friends that don’t feel as far as their cities really are. I’ve also shifted the way I interact with work, research, sport, and coaching. My ideas feel softly assembled into coordinative structures that don’t just survive earthquakes, but welcome them to test if they can withstand the challenge.
That being said, I am still learning to be gentle in my approach, and bouncing between reminders that “this moment is not about me” and “you have more power than you think”. I did not expect that these would be the moments I need to reconcile, but finding myself fluctuating between them has been an interesting excursion of self-reflection.
I’d like to think that this has improved my approach to science and sport and coaching, especially as I am more humble in my approach to conversations, correspondence and rapport building. Somewhere along the way, I shifted from knowing that rapport building is good practice, to genuinely just wanting to take the time to really connect with people. It was no longer a tick box exercise that exercise scientists are taught to have more effective client relationships, or psych students are forced to rehearse for their communications classes.
I realised that nothing really ever gets done without a genuine belief that the person in front of you values what you have to say. There is no denying that I am still headstrong, a symptom of being privileged enough to find a view of the world that resonated in my bones at a young age. But I would like to think that I do not wield it as a weapon as much as I used to.
To come full circle on the idea of limited time to make an impact, I’ve recently been exploring alternative ways to bring learning back to coaching. I was reminded of the legendary Sir Ken Robinson and his talk about ‘escaping education’s death valley’, where this stunning line has been lodged in my mind since watching it:
you can be engaged in the task of something without actually achieving it… if you are teaching but they're not learning, you're engaged in the task not the achievement.
In this season alone, I think we have hosted multiple learning opportunities for coaches that were more task than achievement. I call our accreditation courses ‘learning opportunities’ intentionally here, but I believe that’s what they should be. In just a few months, I have had the fortune of shifting and evolving, iterating and reflecting on the way we engage people with coaching knowledge and learning, all with the core belief that our role is to help coaches directly experience their own coaching context in new/different ways.
But we don’t host these courses in their contexts. We do our best to recreate them, but even the easiest details, like the participants, are nowhere near real as dads run in and pretend to be a 10 year old bowling a plastic cricket ball once every 3 minutes. This is partially because it’s our role to bring coaches together and help them learn, to connect and grow. But as they arrive, they are sometimes surprised when someone says they’re from the same cricket club, just coaching a different grade, because they’ve never crossed paths.
Needless to say, I don’t think it’s working. All the direct experience in the world is not useful if it is only to explore knowledge about coaching, rather than knowledge of it. So what if our responsibility shifted from providing learning opportunities, to actually making learning sticky?
And what better way to do that than going to the coaches themselves, and helping to lead them out into their worlds, with that extra support of someone there to walk alongside them on the path. Someone once described my approach to coach development as standing on the edge of a cliff, while I stand beside them whispering to “jump” - knowing full well I have strapped a parachute to their backs and a safe landing awaits.
Sometimes change can really feel that daunting, and I often underestimate that. To me, changing what I do and how I do it is fundamental to my existence. What an absolute waste of precious time it is to remain the same, knowing that (upon reflection) there could be a better way to do things. I’m not saying you have to change, but I think we avoid it because we have to hold up a mirror and admit that we are not spending our time wisely.
In the wise words of a quintessential meme, and as my daily countdown reminds me: ain’t nobody got time for that.
But you do have time for a quick 10-minute youtube video! I spent waaay too much time editing this, but I am so excited to share my latest project with you: Complex, Not Complicated.
This series aims to take the complications out of the way we talk about sport, learning, coaching and sport science while keeping the important parts: the complexity. In Episode 1, I walk you through one the best papers I’ve read on complexity science in PE, and how we can keep the complexity without needing to carry a dictionary.