High school had coaches. What do you have now?

After too many years comparing my current abilities in the gym against my high school athletic glory days, I’ve finally figured out why I’m having such a hard time improving to even a fraction of the endurance levels I once had.

It’s not because I’m older (there are lots of people older than I am doing amazing things.)

It’s not because I have less time (I’m in the gym 6 days a week.)

It’s not because it’s not important to me since I don’t race (I’d love to be race-worthy, actually.)

I’m pretty sure it’s because there’s something missing from my current training that I mostly took for granted back in the day: coaches.  There were people whose actual job (during practice, at least) was to make me better, faster, stronger, and all that.  This went beyond accountability (i.e. if you don’t show up you’re cut from the team) and covered specific exercises to improve areas where I was weak, which I think is key.

In athletics, I’d say there’s a difference between personal trainers and coaches, at least at the general level, but I think that’s due to the mindset of the person hiring them.  If you know where you want to go, you can find someone who has either done it herself already and can guide you, or better still someone who has a track record guiding people to that point already (the ability to do vs the ability to teach and all that.) If you’ve got that, your trainer is a coach, at least from your perspective, and not just an accountability partner.

That goes for business, finances, relationships, and other areas of life too.  This year I hired a few business coaches, and it was well worth it, though in hindsight I could have gotten more value if I had a clearer vision of where I wanted to go – in school, the goal was to win the race, and the coaching reflected that, but in business, I had too many areas I wanted to explore and so many areas that need improvement (and I still do, but at least they’re different ones,) that it was hard to design a program to get me to a specific point.

The funny part? You can get coaching for goal definition too.  More later.