Drinking From The Firehose

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

When it comes to being a professional, knowing enough is not enough. Maybe you read one of Horst's books. Maybe you listened to a ton of podcasts on training. Maybe you went from V6 to V9 in one winter on the Tension Board. Maybe you're the best climber in your friend group. Or town. Or state. Or country.

So what?

There is nothing about a little knowledge and a lot of ability that makes you qualified to coach. What makes a great coach is a lot of understanding of how training works, sure, but also understanding how to listen, how to persuade, and what happens to athletes as they age.

I frequently recommend a reading habit of 30 pages a day, but this is just to stay sharp. There are hundreds of useful books being written each year, and there are thousands you haven't even read yet. 30 pages should be considered your minimal dose of input.

A coach should be taking courses, attending clinics, and meeting with professionals peripheral to her craft. You might not learn anything directly applicable right this minute from attending, say, a pilates workshop, but I promise you'll learn.

The gold-standard in learning once you're out of college is a focused seminar or conference. In today's world of unlimited distraction, these events provide the opposite—traction. When you're plopped down in a room full of focused students and you listen to speaker after speaker talk about training or performance or movement, you are drinking from the firehose.

So many times, I have gone to these events, listened, taken notes, asked questions, and then finished the day half-dazed. For weeks after the event, I had to unpack ideas. Build out notebooks. Write out training program ideas.

This is where most of my article ideas started. Where book projects were first imagined. Where business ideas, and dreams became manifest.

I can't overstate the usefulness of getting in over your head and desperately working to understand. Conferences are the easy answer. You could also take night courses from a college. Sign up for a mentorship. Read Supertraining.

The point is that you need to be all-in. If you're confident in your ability and feel like you know it all, you're probably a long way from your potential. There are certainly jobs you can do well without continuing to learn, but coaching athletes is not one of them.