Aim to be a coach and not a teacher: three key goals to remember

Podcast transcription 

John Campbell 0:01
Welcome to the inspired and active podcast. 

This is where we offer hints and tips and advice on being more active and connected to the outdoors. This is where we interview inspirational guests to share their their focus and their ideas. And this is where we really want to try and work with you and give you help to be more confident as a parent and as and as a coach, to your children, and others to help develop them to be the best they can be. My name is John Campbell. I’m a coach and a parent of four. And I want to show and share and discuss ideas with you. To help us all make a small difference in this world today. We want to kind of encourage the appreciation of what’s around us. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. And let’s get into the conversation. Welcome back to the inspired on actor podcast, John Campbell, here and today, I want to discuss with you just a topic that I find is really important when we’re trying to motivate and inspire other people. And it’s all about being a coach, or a teacher, though, we understand teaching is giving out information. That’s absolutely but there’s different ways to do it. And and as parents, and as a coach as well, it’s it’s important to distinguish between the two and just spend just a few minutes discussing why we’d want to do one or the other. And really, I’d like to leave with three key goals as a coach that we want to aim for. 

As I mentioned before, on the podcast, I’m a dad to four children, two older, who have now left, left home and making their own way and two younger boys. And I’m also a coach in athletics and rugby and mental eating and have been for 25 years. And I’ve seen many, many changes. And it’s really important this this teaching coaching differential, because as a teacher, you’re telling them what to do. You’re basically giving them an instruction book and guiding them through that instruction book, but you’re telling them the left’s and rights, the ups and downs and we’re where to go when when coaching, coaching is different coaching is really questioning, it’s getting them to understand the correct approach. And it’s a bit like, done a few photoderm that they kind of Socratic Aden guidance. Socratic teaching is all about questioning, teach with questions, never give the answers. That’s their philosophy. So you get the student to basically work out themselves, how to solve the problem, a good question, they believe and I also believe inspires great learning. So it’s about a coach will always try and bring out the best in their students in their athletes. And in our children. It is very, it’s very similar in terms of we’re always trying to bring out the best in our children. And it’s about coaching them to find that. And that comes on to really the first point that I want to bring, I mentioned the beginning, there’s three main goals I want to leave when when we finish the discussion on teaching and coaching. And the first one is we have to encourage our children, our groups that we’re we’re coaching to very much alone, by doing an unimportant part of learning by doing when when our children and our students are going through a disease, you must let them fail, you must let them understand that they’re not going to succeed all the time, you’ve got to let them try and learn when they don’t succeed. But each time they will definitely be developing improving. And this learning by doing not being afraid of failing is a critical critical element in our coaching, coaching approach. It’s it’s we’ve got to get to see, see the potential, we’ve got to guide people to that potential. But we’ve got to let them understand that the the will be much stronger. If they learn and try it themselves, they will definitely build a better knowledge of the subject or the activity they’re doing. It’s it’s the alternative. 

As you see, this is what you have to do. And a good example of this is in my mind and leading and if you do navigational work, and we asked any of our people on the hill, for example, to do some navigational exercises and we just tell them the way to go we just see well you want to go up to that left track you take a right for you go over that hillock and you’re there where you want to be rather than let them work it out themselves. They understand the principles because that’s what They’ve been kind of learning but they haven’t really put in practice properly. And if you get lost in the hills, at that, that’s how the honing. So if you if you take the wrong turning and find it’s taken you half an hour longer not get me wrong, you don’t want the last four days and the hills never find them. But basically, if they make a small error, and you’ll learn from it, and next time, they’ll say, Well, okay, I did that last time, I’m going to do a different way, this time and navigation on the hill is all about learning by doing, you can’t just teach it, they’ve got to go out and experience it. And that experiencing is the critical part of learning by doing and not being afraid to feel. So I encourage everybody who is coaching, to just really focus on learning by doing. 

The second point in the three three step goal I’m looking to deliver is really enabling your your children, you’re the person you’re coaching, to grow their own identity, and become the best that they can be. And this, along with what we’ve just talked about learning by doing is so essential to their development as a whole. So what I’m suggesting here is we’ve got to basically enable them to become their best. And they have to understand what their best looks like. And this is quite hard. And this is where we really got to guide them work with and coach them about what is their best, what are their goals? What is their vision, if, if anybody doesn’t have a goal or a vision? How can you coach them to achieve it? How do you know if you’ve actually got to the success and the end, you’ve got to build the success path. And that’s all about really helping them grow their identity becoming their best, but really understanding what best is what we’re really trying to do is hold up a mirror, we’re trying to show them what they can be. We’re trying to guide them to what they can be, and really trying to bring that out. Now coaching is really unlocking people’s potential. That’s what coaching is, it’s looking at you to maximize all the aspects of performance and what the abilities are. But you’re trying to unlock their potential, but we’ve got to identify what their potential is, and growing our children’s are teenagers and potential. And their identity to get to that potential is, is a very key fact that we often overlooked. What is the what is it we’re trying to unlock in, in our teenagers, and once we’ve got that, then we can create this vision, we can create the pathway to help them get there. And that’s part of coaching. A key part of coaching is goal setting and understanding where you’re trying to take them. And we will look at the kind of the traits of a good coach in a minute. But basically, let’s unlock that potential, let’s really get them to understand and then we put some goals in place to grow that identity. And the final point on this is really a quote from john Whitmore, who’s a coach. And he’s written several books and as someone who I’ve followed for many years and and he has a quote that you must see people in terms of future potential, not past performance. Now, that’s quite important because people, people will change and move on. If you’re trying to be the best you can, if you’re trying to learn by doing, don’t always fall back on looking at what you’ve done, look at what you’re doing and what you’re trying to get to. Too many people I see actually look at past performances, past behaviors, past experiences. And although that does frame, what’s ahead of you, it should not direct your coaching. Basically, you’ve got to look at people’s potential going forward, what is their goals, what are their visions, and they’ll take different paths to get there. And definitely with our teenagers, they will take different paths. So always be looking forward always be looking at their potential, not their past performance. Just before we move on to the third and final point I want to bring out in this discussion is let’s spend a minute just looking at a couple of traits of a good, what makes up a good coach, because we will maybe come back to this in a future podcast, but just wanted to give a couple of key things that when you’re coaching that you have to be respectful of. And the first of these is you have to basically be a really good active listener, and be good at looking and observing this listening and looking at our key traits. So we’ve got to listen, actively listen to our children actively listen to our student or our athletes and basically just understand from them, what are they seeing how they’re seeing it? And look at them. What’s the what are the body languages, what’s the body language, how are they acting, that that point, these are all important triggers to allow you to develop this and it’s all about empathy. That’s the second point is you need to have be empathy. To the issue or the challenges or the difficulties that your teenagers having. So really just understand where they’re coming from. And empathy is really about looking and listening. It’s really about helping them tune in, and you tuning into their emotions. And it’s things like just relate to them. And you could say to them, well, I feel you’re getting really frustrated with this position over this, maybe they’re playing tennis or with a short and just feel the frustration and just start asking them, are you feeling that frustration, or you draw out to them how they’re feeling, be empathetic to their position, don’t just always say that they’re going a goal and then be pushing to the goal, try and have the empathy. And then the last couple in terms of being a good coach that want to bring out in this time, is being active and, and a really clear questioner. So you’ve got to be able to question and draw out. what people are saying now is, it was a great example, we’ve been doing some golf over the weekend. And the golf professional who was teaching my 14 year old son wasn’t telling him how to do things he was bringing out and bringing the awareness out. He was questioning through the coaching, he was asking, how did you feel about that short, why did you think it went to the left? How do you think you could fix it? How did that feel was, and he was just drawing out really the answers without telling told my son, what it was. And and the difference was, he really worked out why he was actually pushing the short to the left and, and then he started looking at how to fix it. So you need to be empathetic, you need to listen, and you need to be good at questioning. And the final one about being a good coach is setting down the goals. There’s no point in in coaching if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to. So goal setting is really important that applies very much to our kids in our teen years, just sit down to them and say, Well, what we’re going to do, whether it’s it’s a sport, or a hobby, or it’s school, or it’s just a difficulty in life, what are what are the goals, and set them and then work in that. And that’s all about coaching. That’s all about understanding. And we might come back to that in a future podcast. But the final of the three aspects I wanted to bring out as part of coaching, the first one is learn by doing and don’t be afraid of feeling really important. The second one is growing the identity, this is all about becoming becoming your best, and really understanding what best looks like and and working with them on that. The third and final one really brings those three things together. And it’s really to instill self belief in your in your son or daughter or athlete or whoever it is you’re you’re coaching, it’s this self belief that will make a difference. You a lot of people I see have goals, but they don’t believe they can get their thing. Well, I’m not good enough, I’m not able, I don’t know enough. And it’s this lack of self belief that holds so many people back. So I would really encourage you to make sure that you build this self belief into them. And the understand that they don’t have limiting concerns that they can’t do this because they’re not good enough. They can’t do this because they don’t have enough time. They can’t do this because they don’t know these things. Whatever it is self belief, understand where you’re trying to get to understand your goals, understand your pathway, and believe you can do it. And it’s our coach’s job, really just to help that happen. That self belief to bring that out and themselves have this vision of where they want to go and then belief that they can get there is a key practical element of coaching. And we’ll we’ll come back to this I think with limiting talking about limiting beliefs at a later Later podcast because it all comes into a mindset discussion, which we’re not going to do here. But we will do in a later podcast. But three goals as a good coach, really, that we need to look at encouraging and helping our teenagers to learn by doing and not to be afraid to feel number to grow their identity to become the best they can be. And really to understand what does that look like What does best look like for them and build that vision and finally, really have self belief in themselves. Because if you’ve got a vision, you’ve got to believe you can get there. And that is a difficult path. And that’s where us as coaches to help them, guide them. Just support them watching, listening, being empathetic to them, questioning about how they’re going to get there and how the achieving it have the actually Forward, putting goals in place, because it might be quite hard to actually get to this endpoint and self belief. So you just put the goals in place and have triggers to say you’re progressing. Don’t make it so big, that you just can’t get there to have small steps, show them progression, show them that they’re actually making great progress towards that vision. So that’s what it’s all about. Coaching is all about coaching and helping, it’s not about teaching. So I hope you found this helpful. And it’s and put some of these in practice. And please don’t be afraid to reach out to me, this is an area that is really important, and I’m very kind of keen just to help you understand and take you into some exercises we can do. But just think of those three aspects. Think about teaching and coaching. And thank you for listening.

Please reach out to us on Instagram or Facebook. If you want to connect just DM me. Watch out we’re going to be launching our new web and mobile app shortly to Get Everybody Moving. It’s called myGEOscatter watch out for that it’s a really interesting and creative way to get people out and about. So have a good week and I look forward to coming back and speaking to you again on the next podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai