There is an old-fashioned saying: “It is better to be in a job and looking for a job than to be out of a job and trying to get a job.” I have always found that saying interesting. It suggests that employment provides a degree of security while you search for what comes next. Yet, with a little more experience, I am not sure employment necessarily provides the security we imagine. Organisations restructure, roles disappear, people are made redundant and priorities change. Sometimes the job you thought you had simply changes underneath you.

I am currently self-employed, working regularly with three main organisations alongside occasional work with another four or five. The variety is stimulating, the autonomy is valuable and, importantly, the work-life balance is good. The bills get paid. I have interesting work. I get to choose much of what I do.

And yet, I still find myself occasionally longing to work within an organisation again.

Perhaps it is belonging. Perhaps it is the opportunity to build something over time. Perhaps it is the sense of being part of a team rather than moving between different teams. Or perhaps, if I am honest, it is the desire to be chosen.

That brings me to the craft and art of interviewing.

I have now had fourteen interviews.

Fourteen.

After a while, you begin to realise that interviewing is a peculiar form of professional performance. It is not that you stop believing in yourself. I still believe I have something to offer. I know my craft, I have experience and I can point to a career of doing meaningful work with good people.

But interviewing can make you tired.

Not necessarily physically tired. Psychologically tired.

Every interview asks you to place your professional identity temporarily in somebody else's hands and wait to see what they make of it.

And the variety of interview experiences is remarkable.

There are thirty-minute conversations with one person. Online interviews. Group interviews. Panel interviews. Interviews lasting an entire day with tasks, presentations and activities. There are applications where you are asked to send a CV and others where you are explicitly told not to. There are anonymous questions where you are encouraged to remove the very context that might help explain your experience.

That last one particularly intrigues me.

I remember wanting to explain where I had worked, who I had worked with and the environment in which I had gained particular experience. The response was that the process needed to be more anonymised.

I understand the intention. Removing unnecessary information can help reduce bias.

But it also raises an interesting question: how do we distinguish between information that creates bias and information that creates meaning?

Experience does not exist in a vacuum.

The context in which somebody has worked matters.

The complexity of the environment matters.

The people they have worked with matter.

The problems they have encountered matter.

Perhaps the challenge for interview design is not simply removing information, but becoming better at discerning which information genuinely helps us understand the candidate.

Ultimately, recruitment is trying to answer three deceptively simple questions:

Can they do the job?

Can they work here?

Do we want to work with them?

The first is relatively straightforward. The second is more complicated. The third is where things become really interesting.

Because the third question is deeply human.

We all bring our preferences, experiences and biases into the room. We can be influenced by confidence, communication style, familiarity, charisma, professional background or simply whether we like somebody.

Sometimes those things are relevant.

Sometimes they aren't.

We might say someone is “a great fit”.

But what does fit actually mean?

Does it mean they share the organisation's values?

Does it mean they understand the environment?

Does it mean they have demonstrated the behaviours required?

Or does it sometimes mean, “I can imagine myself getting on with this person”?

There is a subtle but important difference.

If we recruit people because they look, sound and think like the people already in the organisation, we may create a comfortable environment—but not necessarily a better one.

Difference can be uncomfortable.

Difference can also be enormously valuable.

I have experienced interviews where the process has felt incredibly sophisticated: multiple interviewers, different perspectives, strategic questions, presentations and opportunities to demonstrate how you think.

I have also experienced interviews that consisted of a few questions followed by, “Thank you very much. We will get back to you.”

Both are trying to make the same decision.

Yet the candidate experience can be completely different.

And the investment for the candidate can be significant.

I remember interviewing for roles with UK Sport when I was younger. On one occasion, looking back at the costs, I realised I had spent around £800 on train tickets simply trying to get a job.

At the time, you don't think about it.

You make the journey.

You prepare.

You interview.

You come home.

You wait.

Multiply that experience across fourteen interviews and the investment becomes much more than financial. There is preparation time, travelling, rearranging work, using holidays and, perhaps most significantly, emotional energy.

Then comes the feedback.

Or sometimes the lack of it.

“The other candidate had more experience.”

“They were a better fit.”

“It was a very strong field.”

All of these may be true.

But they don't necessarily help someone learn.

What did I do well?

What could I have done differently?

Was somebody genuinely stronger?

Did I fail to demonstrate something?

Was the decision influenced by an existing candidate?

Did I simply not connect with the panel?

We should be careful here. It is very easy, after rejection, to construct a comforting story in which the organisation was wrong and we were right.

Sometimes we simply weren't good enough.

Sometimes somebody else was better.

Sometimes we didn't communicate our experience effectively.

Sometimes we gave poor answers.

Sometimes we failed to understand what the organisation actually needed.

But sometimes there are other factors at play.

We know that human decision-making is rarely perfectly objective.

Interview panels are made up of people, not machines. People form impressions. They remember particular answers. They respond to confidence. They make assumptions. They connect with some candidates more easily than others.

And sometimes, despite everyone's best intentions, someone simply doesn't like you.

What happens then?

If they are on the panel, can they separate “I don't like this person” from “this person cannot do the job”?

That is a much harder professional skill than writing an interview question.

Perhaps this is why interviewing should be regarded as a craft in its own right.

Good interviewing requires more than generating clever questions.

It requires listening.

It requires curiosity.

It requires the ability to test assumptions.

It requires distinguishing evidence from impression.

It requires panel members to challenge one another.

And perhaps most importantly, it requires us to recognise when we have already made up our minds.

There is another uncomfortable question for candidates too:

How much of yourself should you bring into the interview?

A friend once told me that after repeatedly being unsuccessful, he changed his approach. Instead of simply being himself, he became more strategic. He emphasised particular skills, shaped his answers more deliberately and did not bring his whole personality into the room.

He got the job.

That stayed with me.

We often tell candidates, “Just be yourself.”

I'm not sure that is enough.

Perhaps better advice is:

Be yourself, but understand the room.

Know what problem the organisation is trying to solve. Understand the role. Prepare your evidence. Think about the questions behind the questions. Use examples that demonstrate impact rather than simply describing activity.

Frameworks such as STAR—Situation, Task, Action, Result—can help provide structure. But the best answers don't sound like frameworks.

They sound like people.

They bring experience to life.

That, perhaps, is the art.

My most recent interview left me feeling positive. I thought I represented myself well. I was clear. I was engaging. I used strong examples. I tried to connect my experience to the organisation's needs. I even developed a strategic idea to demonstrate how I might approach the role.

I came away thinking:

I did a good interview.

That distinction matters.

Because the quality of your interview and the outcome of your interview are not necessarily the same thing.

You can do an excellent interview and not get the job.

You can do an average interview and get the job.

You can be capable of doing the work and still not be selected.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest things to accept.

For those of us looking for work, the invitation is to remain reflective without allowing rejection to become a judgement on our worth.

For those making appointments, the invitation is perhaps even greater.

Because behind every application is a person who has invested something in the process.

Their time.

Their preparation.

Their hope.

Their experience.

Sometimes even a small part of their identity.

So perhaps the real craft of interviewing is not simply finding the “right person”.

It is creating a process that gives people a fair opportunity to demonstrate who they are, what they can do and what they might become.

And perhaps the art is recognising that the best candidate isn't always the person who gives the best interview.

The best candidate might be the person who can do the work, contribute to the environment, challenge the organisation when necessary and grow with the role.

Which brings us back to those three questions:

Can they do the job?

Can they work here?

Can we work with them?

Maybe the final question should be slightly different:

Can we create the conditions in which this person—and our organisation—can do their best work together?

That changes the interview.

It moves it away from judgement and towards possibility.

And perhaps, after fourteen interviews, that is what I am increasingly interested in—not simply how we get better at interviewing, but how we get better at choosing people.

Or am I just xxxx!!!

There is something strangely enduring about old sayings. They seem to survive generations because, hidden beneath their simplicity, there is often a small piece of truth about human behaviour. They are short enough to remember, familiar enough to recognise and, occasionally, uncomfortable enough to make us stop and think. One of my favourites is, “A good deed seldom goes unpunished.” It is hardly the motivational mantra we would put on the wall of a high-performance centre. We are much more comfortable with the idea that good deeds should be rewarded, that helping people should feel good and that doing the right thing will ultimately lead to a positive outcome. Yet spend enough time working in performance sport and you begin to realise that doing the right thing does not always make life easier. Sometimes it makes it considerably harder.

Working alongside coaches, athletes, performance practitioners and leaders has taught me that the relationship between intention and outcome is rarely straightforward. You can ask the difficult question and be perceived as difficult. You can challenge an accepted idea and be seen as negative. You can tell a coach something they need to hear rather than something they want to hear. You can encourage an athlete to take greater responsibility rather than stepping in to solve the problem for them. You can suggest that a programme needs to change after months of investment in doing it a particular way. You can raise an issue because you care deeply about the people and the environment, only to discover that the person who raises the issue becomes the issue. None of this necessarily means the challenge was wrong. Sometimes it simply means that doing the right thing has a cost.

Perhaps that is why some of the old-fashioned sayings still have relevance in modern performance sport. “You can't please all of the people all of the time.” “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” “Measure twice, cut once.” “Still waters run deep.” “Many hands make light work.” “Pride comes before a fall.” They are clichés, of course, but perhaps clichés become clichés because they contain something that generations of people have repeatedly discovered to be true. They are little pieces of compressed wisdom, passed down because human behaviour hasn't changed quite as much as we sometimes imagine.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” feels particularly relevant to anyone involved in coaching or coach development. Most people in performance sport genuinely want to help. Coaches want athletes to improve. Practitioners want to make a difference. Leaders want programmes to succeed. Coach developers want coaches to become better. But good intentions are not enough. A coach can care deeply about an athlete and still create dependency. A practitioner can provide excellent information and still overwhelm the person receiving it. A coach developer can offer endless support and, without intending to, remove the very struggle through which learning might have taken place. There is an important distinction between supporting someone and solving something for them. Sometimes the most developmental thing we can do is resist the temptation to be useful.

That can be difficult in performance environments because expertise is valued. We are often rewarded for having answers. Someone brings us a problem and we want to demonstrate that we can help solve it. We have seen this before. We know what might work. We have experience. Yet development does not always come from the person with the answer. Sometimes it comes from the person who asks the question that enables somebody else to discover their own answer. For a coach developer, that can require considerable restraint. Being useful and being developmental are not always the same thing.

“Measure twice, cut once” offers another useful reminder. High-performance sport moves quickly. Something happens and there is an expectation to respond. An athlete struggles, so we intervene. A session doesn't go well, so we change something. A coach encounters a problem, so somebody offers a solution. But sometimes the most sophisticated response is to pause. To watch again. To listen for longer. To understand the context before deciding what the problem actually is. Observation and interpretation are not the same thing. A coach who appears resistant might actually be uncertain. An athlete who appears disengaged might actually be overwhelmed. A team that appears disconnected might simply lack clarity. A practitioner who appears quiet might be processing something deeply. If we rush to interpretation, we can easily intervene in the wrong problem.

That links closely to another old phrase: “Still waters run deep.” Performance sport can sometimes reward the loudest voice, the strongest opinion and the person who speaks first with confidence. Yet some of the most insightful coaches and practitioners I have encountered are not necessarily the people who occupy the most space. They watch. They listen. They notice patterns. They think. And when they eventually speak, there is something worth hearing. Perhaps we need to become better at recognising quiet expertise. Confidence and competence are not the same thing, just as uncertainty does not automatically mean weakness. Someone saying, “I'm not sure,” may actually be demonstrating intellectual honesty. The ability to remain curious when you don't have the answer may be a much more sophisticated form of expertise than pretending you do.

Another old saying, “Many hands make light work,” feels equally relevant. High-performance sport can sometimes become remarkably individualistic. My athlete. My programme. My department. My data. My expertise. My decision. Yet performance is rarely delivered by one person. The coach sees something the analyst doesn't. The athlete experiences something the coach hasn't recognised. The scientist brings another perspective. The practitioner notices something different. The leader connects things across the environment. The coach developer sometimes sits between these perspectives, trying to understand what is happening not simply within individuals but between them. The strength of a performance environment does not necessarily come from everyone agreeing. It comes from creating enough trust for different people to contribute, challenge and think together.

That requires humility, which perhaps explains why “Pride comes before a fall” has survived for so long. Performance sport creates people who become exceptionally good at what they do. That is part of its brilliance. But expertise can quietly become identity, and once expertise becomes identity, challenge can feel personal. A question becomes criticism. A different perspective becomes a threat. A suggestion becomes a judgement. The more experienced we become, the more important humility becomes. A good coach does not need to know everything. A good coach developer certainly doesn't. Perhaps the real marker of expertise is not simply knowing more, but being increasingly comfortable with what you don't know. “What am I missing?” “Tell me more.” “I hadn't thought about it like that.” These can be powerful statements, particularly when they come from people with considerable experience.

All of this brings us back to the original saying: “A good deed seldom goes unpunished.” Perhaps it isn't really cynical at all. Perhaps it is simply realistic. The coach developer challenges a coach because something matters. The performance practitioner questions the programme because they believe it can be better. The leader raises an uncomfortable issue because ignoring it would be easier in the short term but potentially more damaging in the long term. The coach gives an athlete greater responsibility rather than solving the problem for them. The athlete speaks honestly when remaining silent would be easier. None of these actions guarantees appreciation. Sometimes they guarantee the opposite.

Working in performance sport carries a particular responsibility because we are dealing with people, not simply programmes, data or performance outputs. We are entrusted with ambitions, careers, confidence and, sometimes, people's sense of identity. That requires more than technical competence. It requires judgement. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Knowing when to challenge and when to leave something alone. Knowing when to intervene and when to step back. Knowing when somebody genuinely needs support and when what they really need is the opportunity to work something out for themselves.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly interested in old sayings. They don't necessarily tell us what to do. They remind us of the tensions we have to navigate. “You can't please all of the people all of the time” reminds us that leadership isn't popularity. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” reminds us that wanting to help doesn't guarantee that we will. “Measure twice, cut once” reminds us to resist the rush to intervene. “Still waters run deep” reminds us not to mistake quietness for a lack of insight. “Many hands make light work” reminds us that performance is collective. “Pride comes before a fall” reminds us to remain humble. And “a good deed seldom goes unpunished” reminds us that doing the right thing isn't always going to feel like the right thing.

Maybe that is the deeper lesson. We shouldn't expect every good deed to be rewarded. We shouldn't assume that every difficult conversation will be appreciated. We shouldn't judge the quality of a decision simply by how comfortable it makes people feel in the moment. Sometimes the developmental decision is the uncomfortable one. Sometimes the helpful intervention is the one that initially feels unhelpful. Sometimes making things better requires us to make things temporarily worse.

A difficult conversation. A challenge. A pause. A question. A boundary. A change. A step back.

These aren't necessarily failures of performance support. They can be the work.

Because working with people isn't about making everyone comfortable. It is about creating the conditions in which people can learn, perform and grow. Sometimes that means making the road easier. Sometimes it means helping someone become better equipped to walk a difficult road themselves.

So perhaps we should keep the old sayings close. Not because they have all the answers, but because they occasionally help us ask better questions. And when the good deed goes unpunished, perhaps the question isn't simply, “Was it worth it?” Perhaps it is, “Was I trying to be helpful, or was I trying to be needed?”

There is a difference.

And perhaps recognising that difference is part of the craft.

There is something about supervision that I have increasingly come to value, and it is probably not the thing I would have said a few years ago. I used to think of supervision as somewhere to improve my practice, to talk through difficult situations, perhaps to make sense of a conversation that had not gone quite as I had hoped. I now think it is also somewhere to decompress. Being a coach developer can feel a little like deep-sea diving. You spend time beneath the surface with people. You explore things that are not always visible from the outside. You listen, observe, question, challenge, support and sometimes simply sit with somebody while they try to make sense of themselves. Then, eventually, you come back up to the surface. Someone asks, “How are you?” and you say, “Yeah, pretty tough really. Good. Challenging. Enjoying it. But I think I probably need some supervision.”

I have started to wonder what we actually take to supervision. What is the equivalent of the training load, the repetitions, the physiological adaptation or the technical improvement that another practitioner can point towards? A strength and conditioning coach can tell you they have worked with somebody fifteen times. Fifteen sessions. Fifteen opportunities to create an adaptation. They can look for evidence that the athlete has become stronger, faster, more robust or more capable. A technical coach can point towards something that has changed. A physiologist can show you a number. A nutritionist might be able to demonstrate changes in behaviour. There is something wonderfully tangible about that. I did this, and therefore this happened. But as a coach developer, what do I have to latch onto?

I have spoken to this coach fifteen times. Is there a developmental equivalent of fifteen reps? Can I say that we have now created some muscle memory? I have worked with another coach around how they think, interpret situations, make decisions and respond to uncertainty. They seem more cognitively aligned, more adaptable and perhaps more effective. I have sat with another coach and explored their technical approach, and over the last few weeks something has genuinely shifted in the way they coach. But where is the adaptation? What do I get to point at?

Perhaps that is one of the reasons coach development is so fascinating. The thing we are trying to influence is largely invisible. We are not simply trying to put more information into somebody's head. We are trying to influence interpretation, judgement, awareness, behaviour, relationships and ultimately action. We are working in the space between what somebody knows and what they actually do with what they know. That makes the work incredibly rewarding, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to measure.

And it has made me think differently about the first conversation I have with a coach.

Rather than immediately asking, “What do you want to work on?”, I am increasingly interested in asking something much more fundamental:

“What is your interpretation of what a coach developer is?”

And perhaps the second question is even more important:

“What has your experience been so far?”

Because we never meet a coach who is brand new.

Every coach arrives carrying a history of development.

Someone's previous coach developer might have helped them through a qualification. Another might have delivered workshops. Someone might have simply walked around the boundary with them, had a coffee and talked about coaching. Another might have put a microphone on them, recorded their session and sat down afterwards to explore the transcript. Someone else might have used a competency-based model to assess their coaching behaviours. Another might have sat quietly at the back and barely said anything.

There are so many versions of the coach developer.

And every one of those experiences leaves something behind.

That matters because when we meet a coach, we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper. We are walking into a relationship that has already been shaped by other people, other systems and other experiences. A coach might trust coach developers immediately. They might be deeply sceptical. They might see us as assessors. They might see us as mentors. They might think we are there to fix them. They might think we are there to catch them doing something wrong. They might see us as another hoop to jump through.

Or they might simply have no idea what we are there for.

That feels particularly important when you encounter the coach who is extremely contained, self-reliant and apparently uninterested in engaging. My first instinct might be to think, How do I get them to open up? But perhaps the more useful question is, What happened before I arrived?

Maybe their lack of trust is not resistance.

Maybe it is experience.

Sometimes the work feels almost like hostage negotiation. “Hello, my name is Chris.” “Go away.” “Hello, my name is Chris.” “Go away.” And you keep going. Not by forcing the relationship, but by slowly creating enough evidence that you are safe, useful and genuinely interested in helping them. It reminds me of the behavioural staircase we have talked about before: you cannot simply leap from no relationship to deep reflection. You have to climb the steps.

Perhaps that is what connection actually looks like in coach development.

Not a warm introduction.

Not getting on well with somebody.

Not simply having a good conversation.

Connection is the accumulation of evidence that says, I can trust this person enough to think out loud.

And that brings me back to supervision.

Because if our work is about helping other people think, we need somewhere to think about how we are doing that ourselves. We need somewhere to ask why a conversation affected us. Why we couldn't get through. Why we felt frustrated. Why we became overly invested in helping somebody. Whether we were actually listening or simply waiting for the next opportunity to demonstrate our expertise.

That last question is an uncomfortable one.

Was I trying to develop the coach, or was I trying to prove that I could develop the coach?

I think there is a significant difference.

The more experience I have, the more convinced I am that credibility in coach development is not simply about what we know. Of course knowledge matters. A coach may want somebody who understands their sport. They may value someone with sports science knowledge, psychology, physiology or technical expertise. They may want someone who has “been there and done it”. Qualifications matter. Experience matters. Context matters.

But these are only some of the credibility dials a coach is turning when they meet us.

There is another one:

Can I trust this person to help me become better?

That is a different kind of credibility.

It is not necessarily about being the smartest person in the room. It might be about being curious enough to ask the question nobody else has asked. It might be about having the confidence to say, “I don't know.” It might be about knowing when to speak and when to shut up. It might be about being able to connect an idea from somewhere completely different to the problem sitting in front of the coach.

And sometimes it means recognising the limits of our own understanding.

We only have the resources and experiences that we bring with us. At some point, every coach developer reaches the threshold of their own knowledge. What happens then?

We learn.

From other coach developers. From other disciplines. From the coach. From the situation itself.

Perhaps this is one of the most important responsibilities of being a coach developer: remaining a learner.

It is difficult to encourage curiosity in other people if we have stopped being curious ourselves.

Yet high-performance environments can make that surprisingly difficult. There is often a very narrow layer of expertise. People become incredibly knowledgeable about their particular domain, and that knowledge can become a kind of protective wall. You know your sport. You know your science. You know your terminology. You have been around the environment for years.

But what happens when you step outside that narrow layer?

How welcoming is the space?

How comfortable are we when somebody says, “I don't understand that”?

How do we respond when somebody wants to learn rather than demonstrate that they already know?

I think these questions matter because learning environments are shaped by the behaviour of the people already inside them. If we want coaches to become more adaptable, more connected and more thoughtful, we have to create environments where learning is not seen as a deficit.

Recently, I finished a performance-planning session and found myself asking some fairly simple questions.

To what extent do you feel connected?

To what extent do you feel this is cohesive?

Where is the collaboration?

Where is the clarity?

How confident are you in what we are doing?

On the surface, these are ordinary reflective questions. But perhaps they are asking something much deeper.

We can have a plan.

We can have a strategy.

We can have a room full of people.

We can have shared documents, beautifully constructed presentations and an agreed way forward.

But how does it actually feel to the people inside it?

Do they feel connected?

Do they understand it?

Do they feel part of it?

Do they trust it?

Do they believe in it?

Do they feel that their contribution matters?

Because clarity is not simply having information. Confidence is not simply knowing the plan. Collaboration is not simply people speaking. Cohesion is not simply putting people together. Connection is not simply interaction.

These things have to be experienced.

And perhaps that is where coach development sits.

Not in delivering more information.

Not in collecting more qualifications.

Not in producing another framework.

But in helping people interpret their experiences differently.

Helping them notice something they could not previously see.

Helping them ask a better question.

Helping them become slightly more curious, slightly more adaptable, slightly more connected and, ultimately, slightly more effective.

I sometimes wonder whether, if I had my time again, I would choose to be a coach developer.

Honestly?

Probably not.

I might have stayed in coach development in another form. Perhaps sport development. Perhaps performance pathways. Perhaps somewhere where the outcomes felt a little more tangible.

But I chose this route.

And having chosen it, I increasingly realise that it is a much richer path than I understood when I started.

It is messy.

It is ambiguous.

It can be frustrating.

There are no neat equations.

There is no simple formula that says:

Coach developer input = coach adaptation.

Some coaches cannot be saved. Some cannot be helped. Some do not want to be helped. Some simply do not want what we are offering.

And perhaps that is okay.

Our job is not to make every coach become the coach we think they should become.

Our job is to create the conditions in which they might become a better version of the coach they want to be.

That requires patience.

It requires humility.

It requires supervision.

And perhaps, above everything else, it requires us to remain genuinely interested in people.

So the next time I meet a coach, I think I might start somewhere different.

Not with their objectives.

Not with their development plan.

Not with a competency framework.

Not even with my own idea of what they need.

Perhaps I will simply ask:

“What do you think a coach developer is?”

And then listen.

Really listen.

Because their answer might tell me everything I need to know about where we should begin.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to work out whether a coach is any good.

We observe them. We assess them. We look at qualifications, experience and technical knowledge. We consider athlete feedback, performance outcomes, behaviours and relationships. We examine their planning, their communication and their ability to create effective learning environments.

We build frameworks.

We develop competencies.

We create dashboards, metrics and measures.

All of this has value.

But sometimes I wonder whether, amongst all the sophistication of coach development, we can lose sight of a much simpler question.

Would you let them coach your children?

I first thought about this question while sitting with Rob McCracken talking about coaching. At one point, I threw the question into the conversation. It was probably a bit of a punt.

“Would you let them coach your son?”

He smiled.

I won't pretend to know exactly what that smile meant, nor would I suggest what his answer was. But the question stayed with me.

Because there was something powerful about its simplicity.

It seemed to cut through the language, frameworks and complexity of coaching and take us back to something fundamental.

Trust.

The position of trust

Coaching is a position of trust.

That sounds obvious, but perhaps we don't always give it enough consideration.

When somebody walks onto a coaching environment, they don't simply bring technical knowledge with them. They bring influence. They bring authority. They bring responsibility.

And when the person being coached is young, that responsibility becomes even greater.

A young athlete is giving a coach access to their development, their confidence, their experiences and, in some cases, a significant part of their childhood.

That requires more than knowing the sport.

It requires being ethically safe.

It requires being safe to practise.

It requires understanding boundaries, responsibility and the power that exists within the coach–athlete relationship.

It requires a coach who can challenge without humiliating, demand without diminishing and create high standards without creating fear.

Nudge: Before judging what a coach can achieve, consider what you would be comfortable entrusting to them.

Perhaps this is why the question carries such weight.

Most of us have a different threshold when it comes to people we love.

We might be happy for someone to deliver a session.

But would we want them around our children every week?

Would we trust their judgement when things became difficult?

Would we trust them to recognise when something wasn't right?

Would we trust them with our child's confidence?

Would we trust them to challenge them appropriately?

Would we trust them to put the young person's interests ahead of their own?

These are different levels of trust.

And perhaps that gives us a more interesting way of thinking about coaching quality.

From one session to ten years

Imagine your child is ten years old.

They love sport.

They are enthusiastic, curious and perhaps a little ambitious.

You meet a coach who could potentially influence the next decade of their sporting life.

You know what you know about that coach.

You have watched how they interact with athletes.

You've seen how they behave when things go well.

You've seen how they respond when things don't.

You've seen how they use their authority.

You've seen how they deal with pressure.

You've seen whether they continue to learn.

You've seen whether they listen.

You've seen whether they are prepared to change.

And then someone asks:

Would you give this coach your child for the next ten years?

Suddenly, the question feels different.

Ten years is a long time.

Ten years gives a coach enormous influence.

They can shape how a young person experiences sport. They can influence how they respond to failure, how they understand success and how they see themselves.

They can help create confidence.

Or undermine it.

They can develop independence.

Or create dependence.

They can cultivate curiosity.

Or create compliance.

They can help a young athlete discover a love of learning.

Or make them frightened of getting things wrong.

Nudge: Think beyond the next competition. What might ten years of this coach's influence do to a young person?

Results aren't the whole story

This is where the question becomes particularly interesting.

A coach can be technically excellent.

They can have extraordinary knowledge.

They can produce results.

They can win medals.

They can coach international athletes.

But none of those things, on their own, tell us whether they are worthy of long-term trust.

Equally, a coach might not yet have produced a world champion.

They might still be developing themselves.

They might still be finding their coaching voice.

Yet you could watch them work and think:

“I'd be very comfortable putting my child in their hands.”

That distinction matters.

Because perhaps being a good coach isn't simply about what you achieve with athletes.

It is also about what you create for athletes.

The environment.

The relationship.

The learning.

The standards.

The sense of belonging.

The opportunity to become better.

And the ability to leave the athlete stronger than when you found them.

The ethical yardstick

I wouldn't suggest that “Would you let them coach your children?” is a scientific metric.

It isn't.

It shouldn't replace formal assessment.

It shouldn't replace safeguarding processes, qualifications, observation, athlete feedback, performance measures or coach-development frameworks.

It is something different.

It is a yardstick.

A rough measure.

A human measure.

An ethical measure.

And perhaps its strength comes precisely from its simplicity.

Because when we are assessing coaches professionally, we can sometimes become very comfortable with numbers.

Scores create certainty.

Competencies create structure.

Frameworks create common language.

But coaching is ultimately relational.

One human being influencing another.

And some of the most important qualities in that relationship are difficult to capture on a spreadsheet.

Trust.

Integrity.

Judgement.

Care.

Humility.

Consistency.

Curiosity.

Character.

Entrusted with potential

There is another reason I keep coming back to the question.

It changes the conversation from performance to potential.

If we are serious about developing world-class athletes, then of course we need coaches capable of creating world-class performance.

But the athlete cannot simply be viewed through the lens of their eventual performance.

They are a person first.

The medal is an outcome.

The human being is the responsibility.

That distinction feels important.

Because if we genuinely want to create world champions, we need coaches who understand that excellence isn't created by treating young people as commodities.

It is created by creating the conditions in which human beings can flourish.

A great coach doesn't simply make an athlete better at their sport.

They help them become better at learning, adapting, responding to adversity, taking responsibility and understanding themselves.

Perhaps the ultimate measure is therefore not:

“Will this coach produce a world champion?”

But:

“Would I trust this coach to give my child the best possible chance of becoming everything they are capable of becoming?”

And if the answer is yes, perhaps we're beginning to see something important.

A simple question worth keeping

I don't think we should abandon the metrics.

We need them.

We need evidence.

We need challenge.

We need accountability.

We need high standards.

But perhaps, every now and again, we need to step away from the dashboard and ask ourselves a much more human question.

Would I let them coach my children?

Not for one session.

Not simply because they're qualified.

Not because they've won something.

But regularly.

Over time.

Through success and failure.

Through difficult moments.

Through growth and change.

Perhaps even for ten years.

Because coaching is not simply the act of transferring knowledge or improving performance.

It is the privilege of being allowed to influence another human being.

And perhaps that is why this simple question has stayed with me.

Would you let them coach your children?

It may never become a formal metric.

It probably shouldn't.

But as a rough yardstick — a prompt to pause, look beyond performance and consider the trust we place in coaches — I think it remains a remarkably powerful one.

Because ultimately, we don't just entrust coaches with performance.

We entrust them with people.

And sometimes the simplest questions are the ones that remind us what really matters.

There is something incredibly encouraging about spending time in a performance pathway and deliberately taking your attention away from the most obvious things. Away from the scorecards, the results, the selection decisions and, for a moment, even the performance outcomes. Instead, looking more closely at the people who are helping to create the environments in which those outcomes might eventually happen:

the coaches.

Over the past week, I have had the opportunity to spend time alongside a number of coaches working within the England and Wales women's cricket performance pathway. It has provided an opportunity not simply to watch coaching, but to listen to coaches, observe their interactions and, perhaps most importantly, see how they think about themselves and their practice. My overwhelming reflection is a positive one. There is some excellent coaching taking place, but perhaps more importantly, there are coaches who are still learning, still questioning, still reflecting and still trying to understand the impact they have on others. That matters, because the quality of a performance pathway will never simply be determined by the quality of its facilities, programmes or systems. Ultimately, it will be shaped by the quality of the people within it, and particularly by the coaches who spend day after day helping performers and fellow coaches navigate the complexity of development and performance.

What struck me during the week was the diversity of those coaches. They were not the same, nor should they be. Different personalities, different experiences, different ways of communicating, different ways of seeing the game and different ways of leading. One coach brought extraordinary energy, experience and connection. Another brought calmness, clarity and an ability to make sense of complexity. Another was beginning to explore what it means to move beyond being an excellent hands-on coach towards leading and connecting the whole environment. Three different coaches, three different developmental journeys, but perhaps one of the most encouraging things about the pathway is precisely that. There should not be one model of what a great coach looks like. Great coaching comes in many different forms.

Developing Coaches, Not Coaching Clones

Sometimes coach development can unintentionally create the impression that everyone is moving towards the same destination. That there is a particular personality, style or way of communicating that represents the finished product: the loud, charismatic coach; the technical expert; the tactical thinker; the inspirational leader; the calm strategist. Yet the reality is that great coaching comes in many different forms. Some coaches bring energy, others bring calm. Some naturally occupy the centre of the room, while others have enormous influence from the edge of it. Some think aloud, while others process before they speak. Some lead through challenge, while others lead through relationships.

The strength of a healthy coaching pathway is therefore not its ability to make everyone the same. It is its ability to help coaches become increasingly aware of who they are, what they bring and how they can continue to develop. That was one of the strongest reflections from the week. None of the coaches needed to become somebody else. Each already had strengths; the developmental opportunity was to understand those strengths more deeply and develop greater range around them. Because every strength has the potential to become a limitation when it is overplayed. Energy can become exhaustion. Calmness can become invisibility. Attention to detail can become overthinking. Humour can become distraction. Experience can become certainty. Hands-on coaching can become an inability to step back.

The challenge for coach development is therefore not simply asking, "What do I need to improve?" Perhaps the more interesting question is, "What do I already have, and how can I become more intentional about how I use it?" That shift feels important. It moves development away from fixing people and towards helping them become more conscious, more adaptable and ultimately more effective versions of themselves.

When Energy Becomes Contagious

One of the great privileges of the week was being around a coach who genuinely appeared to bring coaching energy with him wherever he went. There was an enthusiasm, a presence and a genuine enjoyment of being around people. This was not simply about being loud or busy; it was about connection. He was interested in the players, interested in other coaches, interested in conversations and interested in what was happening around him. There is something incredibly powerful about being around somebody whose enthusiasm is authentic. People sense it, and energy can be contagious.

That coach also carried significant experience. Years spent in different environments had provided a deep reservoir of knowledge, perspective and stories. He could watch something unfold and connect it to another experience, another player, another team or another moment in his career. That experience is an enormous asset, but one of the most interesting reflections from the week was around how experience can increasingly be used to create learning rather than simply demonstrate knowledge. The best stories do not always provide the answer; sometimes they provide the question. A coach sharing an experience can help another person recognise something about themselves: "That sounds familiar", "I've experienced something similar", "What would I have done?", or "What might I do differently now?"

This is where experience becomes a real gift to an environment. Not when it closes down conversation, but when it opens one up. The next level of development for an experienced coach may therefore not be about becoming more knowledgeable or more experienced. It may be about becoming increasingly intentional about how energy, stories and experience create opportunities for other people to grow. How does my energy create energy in others? How does my experience help another coach develop confidence? How do I use a story to open up a conversation rather than close it down? How do I become a force multiplier for the people around me?

There was also an important reflection around sustainability. If you are constantly available, constantly connecting and constantly giving energy to others, how do you ensure that you also have the opportunity to replenish it? Sustainable coaching matters, particularly in high-performance environments where the demands can be significant. The challenge is not always about giving more. Sometimes development is about learning when to step back, when to observe, when to let someone else lead and when to create space. Perhaps one of the great transitions for an experienced coach is recognising that influence is no longer simply measured by how much they contribute personally. It can increasingly be measured by how much they enable others to contribute.

The Quiet Power of Clarity

Another reflection from the week was the importance of coaches who bring calmness and clarity to complex environments. High-performance sport can be noisy. There are opinions everywhere: data, observations, expectations, pressure and emotion. In the middle of all of that, there is enormous value in somebody who can observe, process and make sense of what is happening.

One coach demonstrated exactly that. There was a thoughtful, contained quality to his work. He did not appear to feel the need to dominate the environment. Instead, he watched, listened, gathered information and, when he contributed, there was a sense of clarity and purpose. That is a significant coaching strength. The ability to take a considerable amount of information and turn it into something logical, accessible and useful is an increasingly valuable capability within modern performance environments.

But observing this coach also raised an interesting developmental question: when does calm become too contained? When might a thoughtful coach need to deliberately turn up the dial? Not because they need to become somebody louder, and certainly not because coaching leadership is a competition to see who can dominate the room, but because sometimes good thinking needs to land. Sometimes an important message needs conviction. Sometimes leadership requires us to step beyond our natural preference.

This is not about asking a calm coach to become loud, or a naturally contained coach to become somebody different. It is about range. Can you remain calm while occasionally increasing your intensity? Can you remain thoughtful while communicating with greater passion? Can you retain your authenticity while becoming more influential? The best coaches are not necessarily those who have the most dominant personality. They are often those who have developed the greatest capacity to respond to what the environment needs.

There was another important dimension to this coach's contribution. His influence did not necessarily come through volume or visibility. It came through relationships and the way people experienced working with him. He helped others feel supported, welcomed and valued. He demonstrated that leadership does not always announce itself. Sometimes leadership is felt. Sometimes it is found in the quality of the relationship, the way someone listens or the confidence they create in another person.

From Coaching the Moment to Leading the Whole

The third coaching journey that stood out during the week was that of a coach beginning to explore what it really means to lead. There is a significant difference between being an excellent coach within an environment and being responsible for helping the whole environment work. This can be a difficult transition because many coaches have developed their identity around being "on the tools": seeing the technical detail, intervening, solving problems, delivering sessions and being busy. Yet leadership often asks us to do something that can initially feel uncomfortable: step back, look wider and see the whole.

One of the most interesting reflections of the week centred around the idea that a head coach does not need to win every coaching moment. The head coach needs to help the coaching team win the environment. That requires a shift from doing to seeing, from intervening to enabling and from contributing individually to connecting collective contribution. Sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can do is intervene, but sometimes it is to trust. Sometimes it is to ask a question. Sometimes it is to create space for somebody else. And sometimes it is to do very little at all.

That can feel uncomfortable, particularly when our sense of usefulness has previously been connected to how busy we are. Yet perhaps one of the signs of a developing coaching leader is becoming increasingly comfortable with the question: "What does this environment need from me right now?" Not, "What do I normally do?" or "Where can I get involved?", but, "What is my most valuable contribution at this moment?"

This does not mean losing coaching craft. In fact, maintaining that craft is important. It means becoming more selective about when to use it. It means recognising that sometimes the most powerful intervention is a conversation, a question, a moment of reassurance or simply creating the conditions for somebody else to perform. Coaching leadership is not about becoming less of a coach. In many ways, it is about becoming more than the coach.

From Windows to Mirrors

Perhaps the most important idea I will take away from the week is the opportunity for coaches to move from looking through windows to looking in mirrors.

When coaches enter another environment, the natural instinct is to observe. What are they doing? How are they coaching? What language do they use? How do they organise the session? What can I take away? These are important questions, but deeper learning often begins when the environment becomes a mirror.

What does what I am seeing tell me about myself? What would I do here? What would I not do? What makes me uncomfortable? What am I drawn towards? What am I learning about the coach I want to become?

Every new environment has the potential to become a mirror. The value of exposure is not simply in collecting ideas from other people. It is in using those experiences to better understand ourselves. Comparison, questioning, experimentation and reflection gradually help coaches develop a clearer sense of their own identity: what they believe, what they value, how they want to lead and how they want others to experience them.

That feels particularly important within a performance pathway. We should want coaches to experience different environments, different perspectives and different ways of working. But we should also encourage them to return to their own environments and make sense of what they have seen. The real learning often begins after the visit, when the coach asks, "So what does this mean for me?"

Creating the Conditions for Coaches to Flourish

Perhaps this is where the real opportunity lies for the England and Wales women's cricket performance pathway. We rightly talk about creating environments in which players can flourish. We talk about confidence, belonging, challenge, support, learning and performance. But coaches need those things too.

Great coaches do not simply appear. They flourish within environments that allow them to learn. Environments where they can be challenged without being diminished, where they can receive feedback without feeling judged, where they can experiment, make mistakes, learn from other coaches and continue to develop. Environments where experience is valued but curiosity is never lost, and where development is seen as an ongoing journey rather than something that happens at the beginning of a coaching career.

What was particularly encouraging about the week was seeing coaches at different stages of that journey. Some carrying significant experience while continuing to question. Some developing confidence in their voice. Some beginning to understand the transition into leadership. All still learning. All still developing. All still capable of becoming more.

There is something powerful about experienced coaches still being curious. There is something exciting about emerging coaches beginning to find their leadership voice. And there is something particularly important about creating environments where coaches can develop alongside one another rather than feeling they have to develop alone.

Because when coaches flourish, they create better environments. Their energy becomes contagious. Their curiosity creates curiosity. Their belief creates belief. Their calmness provides reassurance. Their challenge raises standards. Their relationships create belonging. And their willingness to reflect gives others permission to do the same.

A Positive Picture of Coaching

My lasting reflection from the week is one of genuine optimism.

There is real coaching quality within the England and Wales women's cricket performance pathway. Not simply in terms of what coaches know about the game, but in the way they think, the way they connect, the way they care and their willingness to continue learning.

There is no finished coach. There is simply the next conversation, the next environment, the next experience, the next reflection and the next opportunity to become a little more aware of the impact we have on others. Perhaps that is the real promise of coach development: not producing the perfect coach, but creating the conditions in which good coaches can continue to flourish.

The coaches I spent time with this week were different, and that is their strength. One brought energy. One brought clarity. One was learning to see the whole. Each had something valuable. Each had something to develop. And each demonstrated something that should give us confidence in the future: a willingness to learn, a willingness to reflect and a genuine desire to help other people become better.

In the end, that may be one of the simplest definitions of great coaching. It is not simply about knowing more, speaking louder or being busier. It is about having the ability to help another person believe, learn and flourish.

Perhaps that is the real promise of a strong performance pathway.

Not simply producing better performers.

But developing better coaches who, in turn, create better environments for people to flourish.

Because long after the session plan has been forgotten, and long after the result has changed, people often remember something much more important. They remember how a coach made them feel. They remember whether somebody believed in them. They remember whether they were challenged, whether somebody listened, whether they were trusted and whether, somewhere along the way, a great coach helped them believe they could become more than they were before.

That is where coaching becomes something more than instruction.

It becomes leadership.

Connection.

Development.

And, at its very best, a powerful opportunity to help people flourish.

Sometimes the most useful ideas in coach development arrive in the simplest of conversations. Recently, I caught up with fellow coach developer Pete Forster after we had both spent a week at the same competition, although working with different teams. We had shared the same environment and experienced the same competition, but inevitably our observations, conversations and relationships with coaches had been different. As we reflected on the week, Pete used a phrase that immediately stayed with me: “peeling back the onion.” It was a wonderfully simple expression, but the more I thought about it, the more powerful it became as a metaphor for the work we do with coaches.

Particularly when our time with a coach is limited, how much can we really understand about the person behind the coaching? We might have a day together, a session, a competition or a handful of conversations. We see what happens in front of us, we hear what is said and we begin to form impressions. But what we see is only the surface. Every coach has layers, shaped by experiences, relationships, successes, failures, beliefs, assumptions and the environments in which they have learned to coach. Perhaps our challenge as coach developers is not to assume that we can understand all of those layers, but to become better at recognising which layer might be worth exploring.

Every onion has a skin. It is the first thing we encounter and, in many ways, it protects what sits underneath. Coaches have their own version of that outer skin. It might present itself as confidence, expertise, authority, humour, certainty or professional language. Sometimes it might look like ego. At other times it might actually be uncertainty, nervousness or simply a learned way of operating within a performance environment. Whatever it is, it is the layer we initially see. The temptation for a coach developer is to interpret that layer quickly: to observe a behaviour, make an assumption and decide what is really going on. But perhaps the skin isn't something that needs to be removed. Perhaps it is simply the starting point for the relationship.

That is where the idea of peeling becomes interesting. We don't need to arrive with a sharp knife and cut straight through the onion because we are desperate to understand what lies beneath. We can peel slowly, carefully and with curiosity. One layer can reveal another, and a conversation that initially appears straightforward can gradually become something much more meaningful. We might begin by asking, “What are you working on today?” The answer may naturally be about the athlete: a technical adjustment, a tactical problem, a performance objective. We might then ask a slightly different question: “And what are you working on as the coach?” Suddenly, the conversation can shift. The focus moves from the athlete to the person doing the coaching.

That small shift can be significant. The coach may begin talking about trying to intervene less, developing greater athlete ownership, finding a better balance between challenge and support, or questioning an approach that has previously worked for them. We have moved from what the coach is doing to the athlete to what the coach is doing within themselves. The mirror has turned around.

So much of coaching naturally directs our attention towards somebody else. The athlete. The team. The opposition. The performance. The programme. The conditions. The result. The selection. As coach developers, it is very easy to become part of that conversation. Yet sometimes our greatest contribution is to gently turn the mirror back towards the coach and ask: What about you? What are you noticing? What are you thinking? What are you finding difficult? What are you assuming? What might you be missing?

These questions begin to reveal the layers. Beneath a behaviour there may be an experience. Beneath an experience there may be a belief. Beneath a belief there may be an assumption or a value that has shaped the coach's practice for many years. There may also be resources: knowledge, experience, relationships, previous successes and strategies that the coach already possesses but may not currently be accessing. This is important because coach development can sometimes become overly focused on identifying the gap. What is missing? What needs fixing? What should the coach do differently? Perhaps peeling back the onion encourages us to ask a different question: what is already there?

This is where I find the image of deep-sea exploration useful. From the surface of the ocean, we can see very little of what exists beneath it. The deeper we descend, the more there is to discover, but the descent needs to be deliberate. The deeper the water, the greater the pressure. Perhaps coach development is similar. What we see on the surface rarely tells the whole story, and sometimes our role is to accompany a coach beneath that surface and explore what lies underneath. Not because we believe there is something wrong that needs to be uncovered, but because there may be something important that the coach has not yet had the opportunity to see.

That requires judgement. We cannot simply dive deeper because we are curious. We need to consider whether the coach is ready, whether there is enough trust in the relationship and whether the question we are asking is genuinely useful. Sometimes the most valuable conversation may remain relatively close to the surface. At other times, a carefully timed question can take us into much deeper water. The skill for the coach developer is knowing the difference.

There is also something important about pressure. The deeper we go, the greater the pressure can become, and reflection can sometimes create exactly that feeling. There are moments when a coach realises that something they have always done is no longer serving them. There are moments when they recognise that their own behaviour may be contributing to a problem. There are moments when they have to let go of something that has previously made them successful. Those moments can be uncomfortable. They can sting. They can even make us want to retreat to the surface.

As coach developers, those moments can make us uncomfortable too. We may feel the urge to rescue the conversation, provide an answer or demonstrate our expertise. We may want to reduce the discomfort rather than allow the coach to sit with it for a little longer. Yet perhaps discomfort is not always something that needs to be removed. Sometimes it is simply an indication that we have reached another layer, another piece of thinking that deserves attention. The skill is knowing whether to continue the descent, pause for a while or return to the surface.

There is a danger, however, in believing that deeper is always better. It isn't. Coach development is not about reaching the deepest possible point or uncovering every aspect of a person's professional identity. We are not trying to prise open every layer simply because we can see it. Nor should we assume that because something is beneath the surface it necessarily needs to be explored. Good judgement means recognising what is useful, what is appropriate and what the coach is ready to engage with.

This becomes even more important when we only have a short period of time together. We cannot understand someone's entire coaching world in a day. We cannot peel every layer or explore every depth. Perhaps we shouldn't try. Instead, we might ask ourselves: Which layer is worth exploring today? Where is the coach's curiosity? Where is their energy? Where is there resistance? What are they ready to think about? And perhaps most importantly, what do they actually want from us?

Good coach development may therefore have little to do with how many layers we uncover or how deep we manage to go. It may be more about exploring the right layer, at the right time, in the right way and within the right relationship. That requires patience. It requires listening. It requires curiosity. And perhaps above all else, it requires humility.

There is another part of the onion metaphor that I keep returning to. If you take a sharp knife and cut straight through, everything becomes visible at once. You can see all the rings. It is quick, efficient and decisive. But perhaps something is lost in the process. The same can happen in coach development when we arrive with a predetermined diagnosis, a favourite framework or an answer that we are keen to share. We can cut straight through the conversation and tell the coach what we think is happening.

We might even be right.

But being right is not necessarily the same as being useful.

There is something much more powerful about helping a coach discover their own layers. It creates ownership. It creates curiosity. It creates the possibility that the coach may see something that we could never have seen for them. Perhaps our role is not to tell the coach what lies beneath the surface, but to help them become curious about what lies beneath the surface themselves.

And perhaps this is where the root of the onion becomes important. An onion is connected to something. There is a base from which it has grown. Coaches are the same. Their current practice has roots in their experiences, their successes, their failures, the people who have coached them, the environments in which they have worked and the athletes they have supported. Their present is connected to their past.

If we simply separate behaviours from experiences, beliefs from actions and strengths from challenges, we may understand individual pieces without understanding the whole. Perhaps effective coach development isn't about dismantling the coach at all. Perhaps it is about helping them reconnect the pieces and make sense of how they fit together.

How does this behaviour connect to that experience? How does this belief influence this decision? How does their coaching philosophy show up in practice? Which resources can they draw upon? What might they need to add, change or let go of? And what might they need to reconnect with?

I think that is why Pete's phrase has stayed with me. “Peeling back the onion.” It captures something important about the craft of coach development. There are layers to every coach, but our role is not to rip them away, cut straight through them or force our way into the depths. It is to create a relationship in which exploration becomes possible.

Sometimes that means asking a question. Sometimes it means listening. Sometimes it means challenging an assumption. Sometimes it means sitting with silence. Sometimes it means recognising that we have gone far enough for today. And sometimes, if we have created the right conditions, the coach reaches for the next layer themselves.

Perhaps that is the real art of coach development: not revealing something we have discovered about the coach, but creating enough space, trust and curiosity for the coach to discover something about themselves.

To know when to stay on the surface.

To know when to peel.

To know when a conversation is ready to descend into deeper water.

To recognise the pressure.

To pause when necessary.

And ultimately, to help the coach return to the surface with something meaningful from the journey.

Maybe that is what peeling back the onion really means.

Reflective pause for coach developers

• What layer do you tend to notice first when you meet a coach?

• Do you sometimes move too quickly from observation to interpretation?

• What questions help you move the conversation from the athlete towards the coach?

• How do you recognise when a coach is ready to go a little deeper?

• When does curiosity become intrusion?

• How do you respond when a conversation creates discomfort or pressure?

• Are you more comfortable staying on the surface, or are you sometimes too keen to dive deeper?

• What existing resources might be sitting beneath the behaviour you are observing?

• How might you help a coach connect their experiences, beliefs, behaviours and resources rather than simply identifying what needs fixing?

• And perhaps the question worth carrying into your next conversation:

Are you peeling the onion for the coach, or helping the coach learn how to peel their own?

There is something comforting about the shallows. The water is familiar, we can see the bottom, we know roughly where we are and, if we need to, we can usually find our way back to the shore. There is a sense of control. Perhaps that isn't such a bad metaphor for some of our conversations with coaches. We talk about the session, the athlete, the programme, the next competition, the performance and what happened today. These are important conversations; they provide context, information and often immediate practical value. But occasionally something happens that invites us to move beyond the shallows. A question opens another door, a pause becomes a little longer, a coach says something that makes us curious, or a contradiction appears between what they say they want and what they are actually doing. The conversation changes, and suddenly we find ourselves standing at the edge of the surf.

This is where I think the work of the coach developer becomes particularly interesting. If you are a deep-sea diver, are you really going to spend your entire career standing in the shallows? Of course not. But neither would a sensible diver simply walk into the ocean and keep swimming until they were lost. They understand the environment, prepare for the conditions, know their equipment, understand how deep they intend to go and, importantly, know how they are going to get back. Perhaps coach development needs the same discipline. Sometimes we need to leave the shallows and get through the surf. Sometimes the conversation becomes more challenging, complex and uncertain, and we move into deeper water where a coach may begin to explore their identity, assumptions, beliefs, relationships, fears, ambitions and contradictions. That can be powerful territory, but deeper isn't automatically better. Perhaps the question isn't “How deep did we go?” but “Was it the right depth for this coach, at this moment, for this conversation?”

Crossing the surf requires judgement. The waves can be unpredictable; sometimes we get knocked back, sometimes we misjudge the timing and sometimes we need to wait for the right moment before moving forward. Coach conversations can feel remarkably similar. A coach may be ready to explore something one day and not the next. The environment might influence the conversation. The pressure of competition might mean that today isn't the right time. A relationship that has been developing over several months might suddenly create an opportunity to explore something that previously wasn't accessible. As coach developers, we need to learn to read the conditions. Not every wave needs to be ridden, not every current needs to be followed and not every silence needs to be filled. Sometimes the greatest skill is knowing when to wait.

There are also moments when we do choose to go deeper. Once beneath the surface, the environment changes. The light is different, visibility can reduce and the currents become harder to predict. We cannot always rely on what we could see from the surface. This is where curiosity becomes so important. A coach might say, “I just need to communicate better.”The easy response is to talk about communication. The deeper response might simply be, “What makes communication difficult for you at the moment?” That question could take the conversation somewhere entirely different. Perhaps the coach is worried about losing control, perhaps they don't trust the athlete to make the right decision, perhaps they feel responsible for having all the answers, or perhaps they are trying to reconcile the coach they have become with the coach they want to be. We don't know, and that is precisely the point. The deep-sea diver doesn't enter the water believing they already know everything that is down there. They explore, observe, navigate and remain curious.

They also pay attention to their own condition as well as the environment around them, and I think this is an important part of the metaphor. Over the past couple of weeks, I have experienced what sustained coach development can feel like: sixteen days of back-to-back development work across two or three different environments, moving between people, teams, conversations and expectations. It has made me reflect not only on how we work with coaches, but on how we manage ourselves as coach developers. We can become so focused on helping others navigate their waters that we forget to check our own oxygen supply. Every environment requires something different. Every coach brings a different energy. Every conversation creates a different cognitive and emotional demand. We move from one environment into another, often carrying the previous conversation with us while simultaneously trying to become fully present in the next one.

That transition matters. Perhaps one of the less visible skills of coach development is decompression. A deep-sea diver cannot simply rush back to the surface after spending significant time at depth; the ascent needs to be managed, allowing the body to adjust. Perhaps coach developers need their own version of decompression. It might be a pause between environments, a walk, a coffee, a few notes in a notebook, a moment without conversation or simply some time to process what we have seen and heard. We might ask ourselves: What am I carrying from that conversation? What belongs to me and what belongs to the coach? What do I need to leave in that environment before entering the next one?Without that decompression, one conversation can bleed into another. One coach's challenge can influence how we hear the next coach, while one environment can shape our expectations of another. We can become cognitively saturated without even noticing it.

Perhaps the professional responsibility of the coach developer is therefore not simply knowing how to dive. It is knowing when to dive, how deep to go, when to return and how to decompress afterwards. Just as a diver needs equipment, the coach developer needs their own navigation tools: a compass, a map, an awareness of the conditions and a sense of direction. For us, those tools might be our principles, values, reflective practice, supervision, colleagues, frameworks and, perhaps most importantly, our ability to recognise when our own judgement is becoming clouded.

Because there is a danger in deep water. You can become fascinated by what you discover and forget where you are. Curiosity can become intrusion. Challenge can become control. Exploration can become over-analysis. The coach developer can become so interested in the conversation that they lose sight of the coach. The purpose isn't the dive. The purpose is what the dive makes possible for the coach. That distinction matters. We are not there to demonstrate how deep we can go; we are there to accompany the coach for as long as our presence is useful. Sometimes that might mean going deeper, sometimes it might mean staying in the shallows, and sometimes it might mean simply standing at the water's edge and waiting.

There is something else about the sea that feels relevant: you can never completely control it. The conditions change, the currents shift, visibility comes and goes, and what looked calm from the shore can feel very different once you are in the water. Coaching is much the same. We can prepare and bring our models, questions and experience, but once we enter into a genuine conversation with another human being, we cannot completely predict where it will go. Perhaps that is why the best coach developers need both confidence and humility: confidence to enter the water, humility to recognise that we don't control it, curiosity to explore, judgement to know when to stop and enough self-awareness to recognise when we need to come back to the surface ourselves.

There is also a danger in thinking that deeper is always better. It isn't. Coach development is not about reaching the deepest possible point or uncovering every aspect of a person's professional identity. We are not trying to prise open every layer simply because we can see it. Nor should we assume that because something sits beneath the surface it necessarily needs to be explored. Good judgement means recognising what is useful, what is appropriate and what the coach is ready to engage with.

This becomes even more important when our time with a coach is limited. We cannot understand someone's entire coaching world in a day. We cannot peel every layer or explore every depth, and perhaps we shouldn't try. Instead, we might ask ourselves: Which layer is worth exploring today? Where is the coach's curiosity? Where is their energy? Where is there resistance? What are they ready to think about? And, perhaps most importantly, what do they actually want from us?

Good coach development may therefore have little to do with how many layers we uncover or how deep we manage to go. It may be more about exploring the right layer, at the right time, in the right way and within the right relationship. That requires patience, listening, curiosity and, perhaps above all else, humility.

There is another part of the deep-sea metaphor that I keep returning to. A diver needs to know how to get back. The purpose of the dive isn't to disappear beneath the surface; there needs to be a route home. In coach development, we can sometimes become so focused on the depth of a conversation that we forget about the return. If we have taken a coach into challenging territory, how do we help them come back with something useful? What have they learned? What will they do differently? What do they now see that they couldn't see before? How will the conversation translate back into their coaching world?

Perhaps the most valuable conversations aren't those in which we simply go deep, but those in which the coach can return to the surface with greater clarity. They may not have solved the problem. They may not have reached a definitive answer. But they might have a better question, a new perspective, greater awareness or simply a clearer sense of what they want to explore next.

So I keep coming back to the image of the coach developer as a deep-sea diver. Not someone who is permanently searching for hidden depths, and not someone who believes every conversation needs to become profound, but someone who is comfortable moving between the shore, the shallows, the surf and deeper water. Someone who can read the conditions, navigate the waves, recognise the currents, carry the right equipment and remain aware of their own capacity.

Most importantly, someone who knows when and how to return.

Reflecting on those 12 days of back-to-back development work has reminded me that coach development isn't only about helping coaches manage their depth. It is also about learning to manage our own. We need to know how to transition between environments, how to leave one conversation before entering another, how to decompress and how to replenish our own resources. Otherwise, we risk carrying the pressure of one environment into the next and gradually losing the clarity that allows us to be genuinely present with the person in front of us.

Perhaps that is the real challenge of the deep-sea diver of coach development. It isn't simply knowing how to go deeper. It is knowing when to. Knowing when to stay in the shallows, when to cross the surf, when to follow the current of curiosity, when to pause, when to turn around and when to return to the surface.

Because the measure of a successful dive isn't how deep we travelled.

It is what the coach is able to see when they return.

And perhaps the same is true for us. After a demanding period of development work, the question isn't simply “How much did I do?” or even “How deep did I go?” Perhaps it is:

“What did I notice, what did I learn, what do I need to leave behind, and am I ready to enter the next conversation with fresh eyes?”

The sea will still be there. The next coach will still be there. The next conversation will come.

The challenge is to know how to enter the water well, navigate it thoughtfully, and find our way home.

I have wanted to write this article for some time.

The nudge finally arrived through the ongoing conversations around equality, diversity and inclusion in sport. We rightly talk about creating environments where everyone belongs, where difference is valued, and where people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives have the opportunity to contribute.

But I keep coming back to one question.

Riddle me this. Riddle me that. Why are so many leaders in sport blue and that’s that!

Not blue in terms of identity, background or demographics. Blue in terms of behavioural preference.

Across many behavioural profiling approaches, blue is often associated with being logical, analytical, structured, controlled, detail-focused and driven by evidence. These are incredibly valuable leadership characteristics. Sport needs people who can analyse information, create clarity, manage complexity, establish standards and make informed decisions.

The question is not whether blue leadership is good.

The question is whether blue leadership has become the accepted definition of what good leadership looks like.

Because if it has, then we need to ask ourselves a more challenging question:

Are we genuinely creating diverse and inclusive organisations, or are we simply recruiting and promoting people who fit the way we already think?

There is a phrase often used in leadership: “Surround yourself with people who believe what you believe.”

There is wisdom in that. Shared purpose matters. Alignment matters. Values matter.

But there is a danger when this thinking moves from shared values to shared behaviours.

Surrounding yourself with people who believe what you believe can create connection.

Surrounding yourself with people who behave how you behave can create conformity.

The challenge across sport is that we often gravitate towards what feels familiar. We recruit people who communicate like us, solve problems like us and approach challenges in a way that reflects our own worldview.

We sometimes mistake familiarity for capability.

We mistake comfort for culture.

Slowly, without ever intending to, we can create leadership teams where everyone sees the world through a similar lens.

The rise of the blue leader is an interesting example.

Across many sporting organisations, we have seen an increased focus on process, policy, governance, systems, data and operational control. Again, none of these things are negative. High-performing organisations need structure. They need accountability. They need clarity.

But leadership is not simply about controlling performance.

Leadership is about unlocking performance.

And performance comes from people.

The danger emerges when process begins to dominate people. When policy becomes more important than possibility. When practices become more important than potential. When the organisation becomes better at managing systems than understanding humans.

A sporting organisation can have the perfect strategy, the perfect pathway, the perfect operational plan and the perfect performance framework.

But people do not perform because of documents.

People perform because they feel valued, understood, challenged and supported.

This leads to another important question.

Where do the other colours of leadership go?

Where are the red leaders — those who bring courage, challenge, ambition and the willingness to make difficult decisions?

Where are the yellow leaders — those who bring creativity, energy, storytelling and the ability to inspire people around a vision?

Where are the green leaders — those who understand relationships, empathy, trust and the emotional world of performance?

The strongest leaders are not defined by one colour.

They are defined by their ability to access all colours when the moment demands it.

There are moments where leadership requires decisive action.

There are moments where leadership requires creativity.

There are moments where leadership requires compassion.

There are moments where leadership requires clarity and structure.

The challenge is that organisations often recruit people based on their strongest preference rather than their leadership versatility.

We select people who fit the existing environment rather than people who might help evolve it.

This creates an important paradox when we discuss inclusion.

We often define diversity through representation — who is in the room.

But perhaps we need to think more deeply about diversity through behaviour — how people think, communicate and lead.

Imagine being an expressive, creative leader entering a culture where every decision is justified only through data and process.

Imagine being an empathetic leader entering an environment where emotion is viewed as weakness rather than information.

Imagine being a challenging, disruptive thinker entering a system where agreement and compliance are valued above constructive tension.

Would those people truly thrive?

Or would they eventually adapt, change and become something they are not?

Because organisations do not always exclude people by closing doors.

Sometimes they exclude people by creating environments where only certain behaviours are rewarded.

This is why the conversation around leadership diversity needs to evolve.

It is not enough to have different people in our organisations.

We need to value different ways of thinking.

I am a believer in psychometric and behavioural profiling tools. Used well, they provide valuable insight. They create awareness. They help people understand themselves and others.

But they should be used as a starting point for reflection, not a finishing point for judgement.

The danger comes when we use profiles to confirm what we already believe.

“We need someone analytical.”

“We need someone strategic.”

“We need someone who is evidence-led.”

All of these statements may be true.

But what if the person who transforms your organisation is the person who asks the question nobody else has considered?

What if the person who changes your culture is the person who sees relationships before processes?

What if the breakthrough you need comes from someone who does not fit the traditional leadership mould?

The future of leadership in sport will not belong to those who are strongest in one area.

It will belong to those who can adapt their leadership response to the needs of the moment.

The best coaches already understand this.

A great coach does not communicate with every athlete in exactly the same way. They observe. They listen. They adapt. They understand that different people require different approaches.

Why should leadership be any different?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not:

“What colour are you?”

Perhaps the better question is:

“What colours can you access?”

Can a logical leader demonstrate empathy?

Can an empathetic leader make difficult decisions?

Can an expressive leader create structure?

Can a task-focused leader inspire people?

The strongest teams are rarely built from people who all see the world in the same way.

They are built from people who see the world differently and have learned how to combine those differences into something greater.

So, riddle me this.

If we continue recruiting leaders who think like us, communicate like us and behave like us, are we really creating diverse organisations?

Or are we simply creating more versions of ourselves?

Maybe the biggest challenge for sport is not finding more leaders.

Maybe it is recognising that leadership has many different shapes, colours and expressions.

Because true inclusion is not everyone thinking the same.

It is everyone having the opportunity to contribute.

There is a particular conversation that seems to emerge once you have spent enough time working in sport development. At some point, usually after a new initiative is announced or somebody presents an idea as though it has just been discovered, someone with a little more experience will quietly say, “We were doing that twenty years ago.” It is a phrase that can easily be dismissed as nostalgia, resistance to change or the familiar voice of someone looking backwards through rose-tinted glasses. Yet the longer I spend working in sport development and coach development, the more I find myself reflecting on that question. Was it really better back in the day, or are we simply beginning to appreciate some of what was already there?

I have now been involved in sport development for almost 22 years. I was probably one of the fortunate ones who came out of university and moved into work relatively quickly, beginning a journey that has taken me across different sports, organisations and roles. Over that time, I have worked alongside some exceptional people. Looking back now, what strikes me most is not necessarily that everything was better then. It certainly wasn't. There were limitations, mistakes, frustrations and things that we would undoubtedly do differently today. But some of the people were exceptional, some of the ideas were genuinely ahead of their time and, perhaps most importantly, there was a sense of excitement about what might be possible.

When I look back at the quality of the individuals I worked alongside, I am often reminded of the energy that came from people who were prepared to think, experiment and try things. There was curiosity. There was possibility. There were people willing to come together around an idea and ask, “What if?” Sometimes those ideas worked and sometimes they didn't. Some initiatives developed and grew, while others disappeared. But all of them created learning. And that, for me, is perhaps the most important point. Organisational learning is not only contained within success. There is enormous value in understanding what was tried, why it was tried, what happened, what worked and what didn't.

My father once said something to me that has stayed with me for years: “We never got over the surprise of getting it right the first time round.” There is a great deal of humour in that statement, but there is also something profoundly important about it. In sport, we can sometimes become so convinced that we are discovering something new that we fail to recognise that previous generations may already have wrestled with the same questions. A new model appears. A new framework is launched. A new approach is presented as innovation. It is given a new name, a new design and perhaps a particularly impressive PowerPoint presentation. Then someone who has been around for a while quietly points out that they were doing something remarkably similar fifteen or twenty years ago.

That does not mean the current idea is wrong. It may be an excellent idea. Equally, the previous version may not have worked. But surely that is precisely why we should be interested in what happened before. The important question is not whether we should copy the past, but whether we have taken the time to understand it. Did something genuinely fail because the idea itself was poor, or did it fail because the timing was wrong? Did the organisation lack the capability to support it? Was the idea ahead of its time? Was it poorly implemented? Or did it actually work remarkably well before being replaced simply because someone new arrived and wanted to demonstrate their own impact?

This is where I increasingly believe sport has a challenge with organisational memory. People move on. Roles change. Funding cycles end. Structures are reorganised. New leaders arrive and strategies are rewritten. The people who were there when important decisions were made leave the organisation, taking with them the stories and context that explain why things happened. Gradually, without anyone consciously deciding that the past no longer matters, the institutional memory begins to disappear. The next generation then starts again, not necessarily because they are incapable of learning from the past, but because nobody has captured the learning or thought to ask the people who were there.

Imagine, for a moment, that you were appointed as the Head of Coach Development for a sport. There would undoubtedly be pressure to make an impact. There would be expectations around strategy, programmes, pathways and progress. There would probably be a desire from others to know what you were going to introduce and how quickly you were going to change things. Yet imagine if the first thing you did was not to create something new. Imagine if the first thing you did was to listen.

What if, during your first few months, you tracked down the people who had been involved in coach development across that sport over the previous twenty years? The former coach developers, programme leads, coaches, practitioners, administrators and leaders. The people who designed pathways. The people who delivered programmes. The people whose ideas were adopted and the people whose ideas were rejected. The people who left and the people who remained. The people carrying stories that have never been formally written down but who, between them, hold an extraordinary amount of organisational intelligence.

Then imagine bringing them together for two or three days. Not as a nostalgic celebration of the good old days, and not as an opportunity for people to complain about how things used to be. Instead, imagine a genuine learning exercise. An organisational reflection. A collective attempt to understand the history of coach development within that sport. What did we try? Why did we try it? What worked? What didn't? What did we stop too soon? What did we persist with for too long? What were our greatest successes? What were our biggest mistakes? Which ideas were ahead of their time? What have we forgotten? What would we do differently now?

And then, perhaps most importantly, you would capture it.

You would capture the stories, the experiments, the failures, the breakthroughs and the unintended consequences. You would capture what people learned through doing the work rather than simply what appeared in the final evaluation report. You would capture the war stories.

I use that phrase deliberately because I think war stories are often underestimated. They are sometimes treated as little more than anecdotes told by experienced practitioners over coffee. Yet those stories contain data. They contain context. They explain the politics, relationships, decisions and circumstances that formal reports often miss. They tell us why something that looked good on paper did not work in practice. They reveal the barriers that nobody anticipated. They help us understand what had to be sacrificed to achieve something else. They are, in many respects, organisational intelligence.

Why would a new Head of Coach Development not want access to that intelligence?

Yet sometimes I worry that people arrive in roles believing that they need to demonstrate their impact before they have demonstrated their understanding. There is pressure to be visible, to innovate and to leave a mark. The temptation is to arrive and immediately begin building: a new programme, a new framework, a new pathway, a new strategy. Something visible. Something that demonstrates movement. Something that can be presented to senior leaders. Something that looks impressive on a CV.

But impact without due diligence can be dangerous.

You may be solving a problem that somebody solved fifteen years ago. You may be introducing something that has already been tried and failed for reasons you do not yet understand. You may be dismantling something that took years to develop. You may be replacing accumulated wisdom with something that simply looks newer.

And sometimes, if we are brutally honest, there is another issue at play. People arrive in a role, make changes, create something visible, demonstrate their impact and then move on to another organisation or another sport. I have increasingly found myself thinking about the difference between what I might call lifers and guests. Every organisation has both, and both have value. Guests bring fresh perspectives, new ideas and energy. They can challenge assumptions and prevent organisations from becoming inward-looking. Lifers carry history, relationships and a deeper understanding of how things work and why.

The difficulty emerges when the guest arrives believing that nothing before them has value. When they believe their role is to create a legacy without first understanding the legacy they have inherited. They build, rebrand, redesign and move on. The next person arrives and feels the same pressure to demonstrate their own impact. They replace what has just been created, introduce their own ideas and eventually move on too. The organisation becomes trapped in a cycle of building, rebranding, replacing and forgetting.

Meanwhile, those who have been around for longer are watching.

Often quietly.

Occasionally thinking, “We tried this before.”

But perhaps they have learned that nobody particularly wants to hear it.

This is not an argument against change. Nor is it an argument that the past should be preserved simply because it is the past. Sport has changed and must continue to change. Coaches, athletes and organisations face challenges that previous generations could not have imagined. Technology has transformed the way we learn, communicate and work. New knowledge should challenge old assumptions. Some practices deserve to disappear, and some ideas genuinely have had their time.

But evolution is different from amnesia.

The best organisations do not preserve history for the sake of preserving history. They learn from it. They understand what came before and use that understanding to make better decisions about what comes next. There is something enormously powerful about an organisation being able to say, “Yes, we tried something similar before. Here is what happened. Here is what we learned. Here is why it did not work then, and here is why we believe it may work now.”

That, to me, is intelligent innovation.

Perhaps every new leader in coach development should begin with an organisational history. Before designing the future, understand the journey. Before launching the next programme, map the previous ones. Before deciding what needs to change, understand why the current system was created in the first place. Before declaring something broken, ask those who built it what problem they were originally trying to solve.

Perhaps every sport should have a twenty-year learning review. Not a glossy celebration of history, but an honest account of its learning. A timeline of initiatives, programmes and decisions. The people involved. The rationale behind them. The successes and failures. The things that disappeared too soon. The things that survived because they genuinely worked. Alongside that should sit the voices of those who were there.

Because one day, inevitably, the people doing today's work will also become part of the history.

The question is whether anyone will remember what they learned.

Perhaps things were not better back in the day. In many ways, we may be better now. We may be more knowledgeable, more connected, more professional and more sophisticated. But perhaps the people who came before us were not as primitive as we sometimes assume. Perhaps they were wrestling with many of the same questions. Perhaps they had already discovered some useful answers. Perhaps they also made mistakes that we are now about to repeat.

And perhaps, as my father said, they were simply surprised that occasionally they got it right the first time round.

There is a humility required in recognising that progress did not begin when we arrived. There is humility in asking questions before offering answers. There is humility in recognising that experience is not the same thing as resistance. And there is humility in understanding that the grey-haired person sitting at the back of the room may not be trying to hold you back.

They may simply be holding a map.

You do not have to follow the route they took. The world may have changed, and a different route may now be required. But before setting off, it might be worth knowing where they have already been, where they got lost and where, against all expectations, they actually found the way.

Because perhaps the greatest danger in sport development is not that we fail to innovate.

Perhaps it is that we innovate without remembering.

And in doing so, we spend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources rediscovering what we already knew.

So, if you were appointed tomorrow as the Head of Coach Development for a sport, what would you do first?

Would you immediately begin designing the future?

Or would you first spend some time discovering the past?

Who would you invite into the room? Whose stories have never been captured? What ideas have been forgotten? What failures could prevent you from making the same mistakes? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: how much of what you are about to proudly introduce has already been tried by somebody who simply was never asked?

Maybe before we become too determined to make our mark, we should first take the time to understand the marks already left behind.

A respectful nod to those lifers….

I have been watching military recruitment advertising recently, and I have found myself wondering whether the language has changed because society itself has changed. Perhaps that is inevitable. Advertising reflects the culture it is trying to speak to, and the messages that connected with one generation do not necessarily connect with the next. But there seems to me to be something more significant happening. Years ago, the message felt much simpler and much more direct: your country needs you. There was a clarity to it. The country needed brave men and women prepared to defend it, whether on land, at sea or in the air. The message was fundamentally about duty, service and collective responsibility. It was about we. It was about being part of something bigger than yourself.

Of course, military recruitment has always offered opportunities. A career, qualifications, adventure, travel, friendship, belonging and the chance to develop yourself have never been absent from military life. But when I listen to some of the language used today, I sometimes wonder whether the centre of gravity has shifted. Join the club. Find your adventure. Develop yourself. Get paid. Build your future. Discover what you are capable of. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those messages, but they seem to place the individual at the centre of the story. The question becomes less what can I contribute? and more what can I get? Less what does my country need from me? and more what is in it for me?Perhaps that is simply the language required to recruit people in modern Britain. Perhaps young people quite rightly expect organisations to explain what they can offer in return. But I cannot help wondering what we lose if we become uncomfortable talking about the other side of the contract: responsibility, duty and sacrifice.

Because there is a fundamental difference between joining something because of what it can give you and joining something because, ultimately, you may be required to give everything to it. That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of military service. At its most extreme, service is not about the pension, the qualifications, the travel or the adventure. Those things may be genuine benefits, and they may be important in attracting talented people into the armed forces, but when the metal meets the meat, none of those things matter. War is not about what you are going to get out of it. It is about what you may be asked to give. It is about whether, when everything becomes real, you are prepared to put somebody else before yourself.

There is an interesting paradox here because modern military recruitment also understands something incredibly important: no individual succeeds alone. You do not have to be the person flying the aircraft to be part of the Royal Air Force. You do not have to be the person carrying the weapon at the front to make a difference. There are engineers, technicians, intelligence specialists, medics, logisticians, communicators and countless others who create the capability. The individual becomes part of something much bigger. They become a force multiplier. And that idea of collective contribution is incredibly powerful. But perhaps the question is whether the language surrounding recruitment sometimes contradicts the very thing that makes military service unique. If the primary message is about what you will experience, where you will go, what you will learn and what you will gain, do we risk forgetting the equally important message that there may come a moment when the person beside you matters more than you do?

That is where I think this conversation becomes much bigger than military recruitment. It becomes a question about the society we are becoming. Are we increasingly comfortable talking about individual rights but less comfortable talking about collective responsibility? Have we become so focused on personal fulfilment that the language of duty sounds old-fashioned? Has the idea of sacrifice become something we admire historically but struggle to imagine personally? Because there may come a point when this country needs a generation of men and women prepared to risk their lives for the freedom, security and values of the United Kingdom. We hope that moment never comes. We should do everything possible to prevent it. But deterrence ultimately only means something if there are people prepared to stand behind it. So the question is not simply whether there are brave individuals in Britain. Of course there are. The question is what we are asking them to believe in.

What is the country that we are asking people to defend? That question has become increasingly interesting to me because our national story sometimes seems to be dominated by decline. We hear that the country is broken, divided, failing or that its best days are behind it. We hear increasingly fractured arguments about what Britain is, what it was and what it should become. And perhaps we should ask ourselves what effect that has on the next generation. If we continually tell young people that the story of their country is one of decay and decline, what exactly are we asking them to sacrifice themselves for? This does not mean pretending that Britain is perfect. It never has been. No country is. A mature patriotism should not require us to ignore injustice, failure or the difficult parts of our history. We should be able to acknowledge the things we have got wrong and still believe that there are things worth protecting, things worth improving and things worth handing on. Perhaps that is what patriotism should really mean: not believing your country is perfect, but believing that it is worth making better.

I keep coming back to an image of a young man or woman standing on a landing craft, perhaps crossing the Channel, surrounded by others doing exactly the same thing. The engine is running, the water is moving beneath them and somewhere ahead is something they cannot yet see. They look left. They look right. And suddenly all the abstract language disappears. Freedom. Democracy. Britain. Duty. Service. These enormous concepts become very small and very personal because the person on your left may be the person who saves your life, and the person on your right may be the person whose life depends upon you. That is the moment when the question what is in it for me? becomes almost meaningless. It is about the person next to you. It is about trust. It is about knowing that when things become frightening, uncertain and dangerous, the person beside you will not simply think about themselves.

Perhaps that is the most powerful thing about military service. You join as an individual. You bring your own ambitions, talents, fears and hopes. You may join because you want adventure, qualifications or a career. But you enter an environment where your actions have consequences for other people. You become part of something where competence matters, where trust matters and where courage matters. Ultimately, the person beside you needs to know that when it matters most, you will not simply ask, what do I get out of this? You will ask, what does the person next to me need from me? That is a profound shift from individualism to collective responsibility.

Perhaps modern recruitment does need to talk about adventure, careers, education and opportunity. Of course it does. The armed forces are competing for talented people in a world where young people have more choices than ever before. But perhaps the message does not need to be one or the other. Perhaps we can say both. Here is what you can become, and here is what you can contribute. Here are the opportunities available to you, and here is the responsibility that comes with belonging. You will develop yourself, but you may one day be asked to put someone else before yourself. That seems to me to be the honest contract of service.

Because service is different. It should mean something different. There are plenty of careers that can offer adventure, travel, qualifications and personal development. Military service can offer all of those things, but it also asks a deeper question: what are you prepared to stand for when standing costs you something? Perhaps that is a question we should not be afraid to ask, not just of those who might join the armed forces but of ourselves. What kind of society are we building? Are we becoming more connected or more individual? Do we still understand responsibility as deeply as we understand rights? Do we still understand that freedom has always depended upon somebody, somewhere, being prepared to protect it?

And perhaps the biggest question of all is what story we are telling the next generation about this country. Because one day, if the worst happens, we may need them to step forward. And if we do, the question cannot simply be, what can the country do for you? At some point the question has to become, what are you prepared to do for each other? Because when the noise gets louder, when the uncertainty becomes real, when you stand looking at the person on your left and the person on your right, military service is no longer about individual reward. It becomes about collective responsibility. It becomes about trust. It becomes about belonging. And ultimately, perhaps, it becomes about something very simple: the willingness to say, I am here. You are not standing alone. Whatever happens next, we face it together.

My youngest daughter Sophie and I have recently been watching Sherlock together, the modern version of the stories created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes. We have really enjoyed it.

There is something rather nice about watching a programme together that is not necessarily about learning anything at all. It is simply time spent together. We sit, watch, occasionally try to work out what is happening and, more often than not, realise that Sherlock has arrived somewhere long before we have.

Of course, that is the point.

Sherlock sees things that other people miss.

Or perhaps more accurately, he does not simply see more. He pays attention differently.

A detail that appears insignificant to everyone else becomes important to him. A word. A mark on a shoe. A change in someone's behaviour. Something that is present. Something that is absent. Whilst everybody else is looking at the obvious, Sherlock appears to be asking a different question.

What am I not seeing yet?

And, as I have been watching it with Sophie, I have found myself thinking about Coach Development.

Perhaps a significant part of our role is also concerned with the science of deduction.

Not deduction in the sense of arriving at clever answers or demonstrating how much we know. In fact, perhaps the opposite. The science of deduction for a Coach Developer might be about learning to resist the temptation to arrive at an answer too quickly.

To observe.

To listen.

To notice.

To remain curious.

And, perhaps most importantly, to understand the difference between what we actually know and what we merely think we know.

When we walk into a coaching environment, there is an extraordinary amount going on.

There are conversations taking place. Instructions being given. Players responding. Coaches reacting. Relationships playing out. Moments of energy and moments of silence. There are things being said and things not being said. There is body language, tone of voice, position, proximity and emotion. There are decisions being made in seconds, often without anyone consciously recognising that a decision has been made.

And we begin making sense of it almost immediately.

That is perhaps inevitable.

We see a player looking down and wonder whether they have lost confidence. We hear a coach raise their voice and assume they have become frustrated. We watch a player remain silent and conclude they are disengaged. We see a coach provide an answer and decide that they are too directive.

Perhaps we are right.

But perhaps we are not.

And this, I think, is where the Sherlock Holmes metaphor becomes particularly useful for Coach Developers. The quality of our observation may not simply be determined by what we notice. It may be determined by how carefully we distinguish between observation and interpretation.

There is an important difference between saying, "I noticed the player looked down after the conversation," and saying, "The player lost confidence after you spoke to them."

The first is something we observed.

The second is a story we have created about what the observation means.

The story might be true. But there could be several other explanations.

Perhaps the player was thinking. Perhaps they were disappointed. Perhaps they were tired. Perhaps something entirely unrelated was on their mind. The point is not that we should never interpret what we see. Of course we have to make sense of the world around us. The point is that a good Coach Developer should hold their interpretations lightly.

Sherlock may appear to reach conclusions almost instantly, but the process behind the conclusion is based on evidence, patterns and the testing of possibilities. Perhaps that is something we can learn from.

A Coach Developer might notice a coach repeatedly answering questions for players. It would be easy to conclude that the coach does not trust them or is unwilling to give them ownership. But what if we became more curious?

What else might explain this?

Is this typical of the coach?

Is this particular session unusual?

What is the context?

What is the coach trying to achieve?

What do the players need at this moment?

Perhaps, instead of arriving with the conclusion, we arrive with the evidence.

"I noticed three occasions when the players looked towards you after something happened and, each time, you gave them an answer quite quickly. What was happening for you in those moments?"

That question feels very different from:

"You need to stop giving the players all the answers."

The first creates a space for investigation.

The second closes it down.

And perhaps this is one of the most important distinctions in Coach Development. We are not there to solve the mystery of the coach. We are there to investigate alongside them.

There is another part of Sherlock Holmes that feels particularly relevant.

The clues are not always found in what is obvious.

Sometimes they are found in contradictions.

A person says one thing but does another.

A detail does not fit the rest of the story.

Something that should have happened does not happen.

In coaching, contradictions can be fascinating.

A coach may speak passionately about wanting players to take ownership and then answer every question. They may say that they want players to be brave and then visibly react to mistakes. They may describe relationships as the foundation of their coaching whilst spending most of their time with the same small group of athletes.

But these contradictions are not necessarily evidence of hypocrisy.

They are evidence of being human.

Most of us have a gap between what we believe and what we do, particularly when we are under pressure. In fact, perhaps this gap is one of the most interesting places for Coach Development to take place.

The role of the Coach Developer is not to expose the contradiction.

It is to explore it.

"I wonder if we could look at something together?"

"You spoke earlier about wanting the players to have more ownership. I noticed that when the problem emerged today, you stepped in very quickly. What do you make of that?"

There is no accusation in the question.

No dramatic Sherlock Holmes moment where we point at the coach and announce that we have solved the case.

Instead, there is curiosity.

And curiosity is perhaps one of the most underrated qualities of a Coach Developer.

Because experience can sometimes work against it.

The more environments we have worked in, the more patterns we have seen. The more coaches we have observed, the more quickly we can recognise familiar behaviours. Experience is valuable, of course, but it also creates a risk.

We can see what we expect to see.

We can find evidence for a conclusion we reached too early.

We can mistake familiarity for understanding.

Perhaps the most experienced Coach Developer is not the person who reaches the conclusion fastest.

Perhaps they are the person who knows when to slow down.

Who can say, "That is interesting."

Who can remain with the uncertainty.

Who can resist the urge to fill the silence.

Who can ask, "What else could this mean?"

There is something else in the Sherlock Holmes stories that feels important too, and that is Watson.

Sherlock may be the detective, but Watson is far more than simply someone who follows him around. He provides another perspective. He asks questions. He sees things differently. He provides a relationship within which Sherlock's thinking is revealed.

Perhaps the Coach Developer sometimes needs to be less like Sherlock and more like Watson.

We do not always need to be the person with the observation.

Sometimes our greatest contribution is to help the coach see what they already know.

"What are you noticing?"

"What makes you say that?"

"What else might be happening?"

"What would the players say?"

"What might you be missing?"

These are not questions designed to make the Coach Developer appear clever. They are questions designed to help the coach become increasingly curious about their own practice.

And perhaps that is ultimately the point.

The greatest success of a Coach Developer cannot be that the coach becomes dependent on us to tell them what we see. If every important observation comes from the outside, then what happens when we leave?

Surely our role is, in part, to help the coach become a better observer of themselves.

To become more capable of noticing the small moments.

To distinguish what happened from what they think happened.

To recognise their assumptions.

To become curious about contradictions.

To look for what is missing.

And to hold their conclusions lightly.

There is a phrase that has stayed with me as I have thought about this.

Connection before conclusion.

Coach Development can become too much like interrogation if we are not careful. We can ask excellent questions without creating the relationship in which a coach feels safe enough to answer honestly.

A question is not automatically reflective because it is open.

The relationship matters.

The tone matters.

The timing matters.

The intention matters.

Before we begin investigating a coach's practice, perhaps we first need to understand their world.

Before challenging a decision, understand the context in which it was made.

Before exploring behaviour, understand the intention behind it.

Before offering an interpretation, connect with the person.

The Coach Developer is not standing outside the environment, objectively looking in. We are part of the environment too. Our presence influences what we see. Our experiences shape what we notice. Our beliefs influence what we consider important.

Perhaps, then, the most important deduction is one about ourselves.

Not simply:

What is happening with this coach?

But:

What am I bringing to what I think I am seeing?

What assumptions am I making?

What am I expecting to find?

What patterns am I searching for?

What evidence am I ignoring?

What conclusion have I reached too quickly?

As Sophie and I sit watching Sherlock Holmes, I doubt either of us is thinking too deeply about Coach Development at the time. We are simply enjoying a programme together. Trying to follow the story. Occasionally getting it right. More often missing something that, when Sherlock eventually explains it, suddenly appears completely obvious.

But perhaps that is part of the attraction.

The clues were always there.

We simply did not know how to see them.

And maybe that is where the metaphor becomes most useful for a Coach Developer.

Our role is not to walk into an environment and demonstrate that we can see things that the coach cannot. It is not to solve the case, reveal the answer and leave everyone impressed by our powers of deduction.

It is something quieter than that.

Something more human.

To pay attention.

To remain curious.

To distinguish evidence from assumption.

To explore contradictions without exposing people.

To look for what is missing.

To create connection before arriving at conclusion.

And ultimately, to help the coach become a more skilful observer of their own world.

Perhaps the science of deduction is not really about Sherlock Holmes at all.

Perhaps it is about the discipline of seeing.

Because the most valuable thing a Coach Developer may ever give a coach is not an answer to their problem.

It may be the ability to pause, look again and ask:

What am I actually seeing here?

And then, rather than rushing towards the answer:

What might I still need to discover?

Some Sherlock Thinking Tools

The Coach Developer had asked the question many times before.

It appeared in different forms in different environments. Sometimes with some questions. Sometimes over coffee before a session. Sometimes in the quieter moments after a day of observing a coach at work.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

It was a simple question.

Or at least it appeared to be.

Across the table sat Tom, a coach with a good reputation. He was experienced, thoughtful and clearly cared deeply about the athletes he worked with. He had completed the questionnaire before meeting the Coach Developer and, as they began to talk through his answers, the same pattern emerged that the Coach Developer had seen many times before.

Tom talked about his athletes.

“They're working on being more consistent under pressure,” he said.

He paused before continuing.

“A couple of them are trying to make better decisions. We've also got one or two who are still trying to understand their role within the team.”

The Coach Developer listened.

Tom continued.

“One athlete is technically very good, but when the pressure comes on, they tend to go back to what is comfortable. Another one has all the physical capability but needs to trust themselves a little more.”

The Coach Developer nodded.

There was plenty to work with.

The answer revealed what Tom noticed. It revealed where his attention was going. It revealed what he believed mattered.

But after a moment, the Coach Developer asked another question.

“That's really interesting. So what are you working on with them?”

Tom smiled.

“Well, with the decision-makers I'm trying to ask better questions rather than give them the answer. I'm trying to create situations where they have to figure things out themselves.”

He leaned forward.

“With the athlete who struggles under pressure, we're doing some work around routines. Trying to give them something they can go back to when things get difficult.”

Again, the Coach Developer listened.

Now the conversation was revealing something different.

The first answer had been about the athletes.

The second was beginning to reveal the coach.

Tom was no longer simply describing what his athletes needed. He was describing how he intended to help them.

His methods.

His interventions.

His approach.

His coaching.

The Coach Developer made a few notes.

Then there was another pause.

And another question.

“That's really good,” he said. “I can see what the athletes are working on, and I can see how you're working with them to support that. But what are you working on?”

Tom looked slightly puzzled.

The Coach Developer smiled.

“As a coach.”

For a moment, nothing was said.

Tom looked down at the questions.

Then back across the table.

“I hadn't really thought about it like that.”

And perhaps that was the most important answer of the conversation.

Looking through the window

Coaches spend much of their professional lives looking outwards.

They watch.

They notice.

They diagnose.

They anticipate.

They identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and problems.

Their attention is naturally drawn towards the people they coach.

What does this athlete need?

What is this player struggling with?

What does the team need now?

Where can they improve?

How can I help?

There is nothing surprising about this. In many ways, it is the essence of coaching.

The coach is constantly looking through a window.

Beyond that window are the athletes.

Their performances.

Their behaviours.

Their learning.

Their potential.

Ask a coach what they are working on, and the first answer will often be found somewhere on the other side of the glass.

“We're working on confidence.”

“They're trying to become more consistent.”

“We need to improve our decision-making.”

“The players are working on their communication.”

The language varies, but the direction of attention is often the same.

Outwards.

Towards them.

Towards the athlete.

For a Coach Developer, these answers are valuable. They tell us a great deal about what the coach sees. They reveal what is occupying their attention and what they believe is important.

But they also raise another question.

What happens if the conversation stays there?

What happens if coach development becomes another conversation almost entirely about the athletes?

The irony, perhaps, is that we can spend a great deal of time talking to coaches about the development of others without ever asking them seriously about their own.

“What are you working on?”

The Coach Developer returned to Tom a few weeks later.

They had spent time together since their first conversation. The Coach Developer had watched a session, spoken to Tom between training blocks and exchanged a few messages after a difficult competition.

As they sat down again, the Coach Developer asked the same question.

“So, what are you working on at the moment?”

Tom laughed.

“I know what you're doing now.”

The Coach Developer smiled.

“What?”

“You're waiting for me to talk about myself.”

“Maybe.”

Tom paused.

“Well, the athletes are…”

They both laughed.

The habit was deeply ingrained.

Tom began again.

“Actually, I think I'm working on how quickly I intervene.”

That was different.

The Coach Developer said nothing.

Tom continued.

“I watched some of the video from the last session. There were a couple of moments where I realised I had stepped in before the athlete had really had the chance to work it out.”

“What did you notice?” the Coach Developer asked.

“I think I was uncomfortable with the struggle.”

Again, a pause.

Tom had moved somewhere new.

He was no longer simply describing the athlete's struggle.

He was describing his response to it.

And those are not the same thing.

“I say I want the athletes to become more independent,” Tom continued. “But I think sometimes I get anxious when they don't get there quickly enough.”

The Coach Developer nodded.

“And what happens then?”

“I help.”

“Too quickly?”

“Probably.”

Tom looked towards the window beside them.

Outside, athletes were beginning to arrive for the next session.

“I think I tell myself I'm helping them,” he said. “But perhaps sometimes I'm helping myself. I'm making myself feel more comfortable because I know the answer.”

There it was.

The window had begun to change.

When the window becomes a mirror

Perhaps one of the most important moments in coach development occurs when the coach realises they are not standing outside the coaching environment observing it.

They are inside it.

They are part of the system they are trying to understand.

Their behaviours shape the environment.

Their tone shapes the environment.

Their energy shapes the environment.

The questions they ask.

The questions they don't ask.

The moments when they intervene.

The moments when they remain silent.

What they notice.

What they miss.

What they praise.

What they challenge.

What they tolerate.

What they rush.

All of it becomes part of the learning environment.

This is where the metaphor of the window becoming a mirror feels particularly powerful.

Initially, the coach looks through the window.

What is happening with the athlete?

Then the conversation begins to reveal the person looking through the window.

What am I doing to support them?

But eventually, if we are prepared to stay with the question long enough, the glass begins to reflect back.

What am I working on as a coach?

That is a different kind of conversation.

And sometimes it is a more difficult one.

Because it requires the coach to become both the observer and the observed.

“I think I need to listen more”

Several months later, Tom and the Coach Developer were talking after another observation.

The session had gone well.

The athletes were engaged. The intensity was high. There was clear purpose. Tom had created a number of situations in which the athletes had to make decisions for themselves.

The Coach Developer could have given Tom plenty of positive feedback.

Instead, he asked:

“What did you notice about yourself today?”

Tom didn't answer immediately.

“I think I listened more.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There was one athlete who was struggling. Normally, I think I would have gone straight in.”

“And today?”

“I asked them what they thought.”

“What happened?”

“They told me exactly what I was about to tell them.”

The Coach Developer laughed.

Tom smiled.

“And then?”

“I didn't have to tell them.”

It sounds like a small thing.

But perhaps some of the most significant developments in coaching are small.

A slightly longer pause.

A question instead of an instruction.

A moment of curiosity instead of certainty.

The ability to tolerate uncertainty.

The ability to let an athlete struggle without immediately rescuing them.

The awareness that silence is not necessarily absence.

These are not simply technical changes to coaching practice.

They can represent changes in how the coach sees their role.

And that is perhaps where coach development becomes something more than the acquisition of another tool.

Coaching the coach who is coaching

There is an idea worth exploring here: meta-coaching.

Not simply helping a coach coach better.

But helping the coach think about their coaching.

To stand, metaphorically, just far enough away from their own practice to notice themselves within it.

The questions become different.

Not:

What does the athlete need?

But:

What does the athlete's need require from me?

Not:

Why aren't they getting it?

But:

What might I be doing that is making this harder or easier?

Not:

How can I solve this problem for them?

But:

What is my relationship with their struggle?

Not:

What should I say?

But:

What does this moment need from me?

These questions can feel uncomfortable because they challenge one of the deeply held assumptions within coaching: that the coach's role is primarily to provide.

Provide answers.

Provide knowledge.

Provide solutions.

Provide direction.

But sometimes development requires the coach to provide something else.

Space.

Challenge.

Silence.

Trust.

Or perhaps nothing at all.

Tom had begun to understand this.

And it changed the way he described his work.

At the beginning of the year, he had said:

“I'm working on helping my athletes become more independent.”

Later, he said:

“I'm working on becoming less necessary in some moments.”

That is a significant shift.

The athlete had not changed.

The coaching objective had not changed.

But Tom had changed the location of the development.

He had brought himself into the picture.

The questions as an intervention and exploration

This is why I have become increasingly interested in the questions we ask coaches.

A questionnaire can be much more than a way of collecting information.

It can be an intervention in itself.

Consider the progression:

What are your athletes working on?

The coach looks outwards.

What are you working on with them?

The coach begins to describe their contribution.

What are you working on as a coach?

The coach is invited to look back at themselves.

Three questions.

But potentially three very different levels of awareness.

The first gives us a window into the athlete.

The second gives us a window into the coaching.

The third begins to create a mirror.

And perhaps the most revealing moment is not the answer.

Perhaps it is the pause before it.

That pause might tell us that the question has reached somewhere the coach does not visit often enough.

Not because they are a poor coach.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps the willingness to ask, “What am I working on?” is one of the characteristics of a coach who is serious about their craft.

The mirror is not there to criticise

There is an important distinction here.

Reflection is not self-criticism.

The purpose of the mirror is not to find fault.

It is to see.

Sometimes we look in the mirror and notice something we want to change.

Sometimes we see something we hadn't realised was there.

Sometimes we see progress that we have been too busy to recognise.

The same is true in coaching.

A reflective question might reveal that a coach needs to work on their patience.

Or their listening.

Or their ability to challenge.

Or their emotional regulation.

Or their questioning.

Or their tendency to overcomplicate.

But it might also reveal something they are doing exceptionally well.

The mirror is not an instrument of judgement.

It is an opportunity for awareness.

And awareness creates choice.

If I can notice my tendency to intervene too quickly, I can choose to wait.

If I can notice that I only listen for answers that confirm what I already believe, I can choose to become more curious.

If I can notice that I become more directive when I feel pressure, I can begin to understand what pressure does to my coaching.

This is powerful information.

Because the coach is no longer simply reacting.

They are beginning to recognise patterns.

“What are you working on now?”

Towards the end of the season, the Coach Developer asked Tom the question again.

This time there was no hesitation.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

Tom smiled.

“Me.”

The Coach Developer laughed.

“Go on.”

“I'm working on my timing.”

“Your timing?”

“Yes. Not just when to say something. When not to say something. When to challenge. When to leave it. When to let an athlete sit with a problem.”

He paused.

“I think I used to believe good coaching meant always having something useful to add.”

“And now?”

“Now I think good coaching might sometimes mean knowing that the most useful thing I can add is nothing.”

Outside, the athletes were finishing their warm-up.

Tom stood and picked up his notebook.

Then he stopped.

“You know what I find interesting?”

“What?”

“I still care about exactly the same things. I still want the athletes to improve. I still want to help them perform.”

He smiled.

“But I think I'm beginning to realise that if I want them to keep developing, I have to keep developing as well.”

Perhaps that is where the real work begins.

Not when the coach has all the answers.

Not when they have mastered another framework, another model or another technique.

But when they become curious about the person doing the coaching.

When the question changes from:

“What are they working on?”

To:

“What am I doing to help?”

And eventually:

“What am I working on?”

Because every coach spends much of their life looking through the window at the people they are trying to help.

The opportunity for coach development is to occasionally turn that glass around.

To pause.

To look.

And to ask:

What do I see when the window becomes a mirror?

There is something genuinely exciting about the work the ECB Women’s Performance Development Team is doing currently.

For the second year, the team has created the opportunity for Coach Developers to step into the Super Fours Women’s Development Programme and work alongside coaches for a short, intense period of time. It is a relatively simple proposition, but one with considerable potential: a Coach Developer has a maximum of three days to connect with a new coaching team, understand their environment, build trust and add value.

Three days is not long.

The coaches are busy. The players are busy. There are sessions to plan, matches to prepare for, decisions to make and players to support. Yet that is precisely what makes this model so interesting. Rather than taking coaches away from their environment to talk about coaching, the Coach Developer enters the environment in which coaching is actually happening.

The development happens in the work.

That feels increasingly important in high-performance sport. The ECB itself is placing a strong emphasis on developing highly skilled coaches and Coach Developers, while its emerging learning approaches increasingly recognise the importance of meeting coaches in their own contexts.

A unique canvas for coaching

This year's Super Fours Women's Development Programme provided an extraordinary canvas for learning.

The best female cricket players from across England and Wales, alongside players from Ireland, came together to train, compete, play, learn and develop. It is almost a mini-franchise environment: people arrive from different places, establish an identity, build relationships, learn how to work together and then compete.

The game becomes the landscape for learning.

There are technical moments, tactical moments, teaching moments, coaching moments, mental moments, relational moments and emotional moments. There are moments when things work, moments when they don't and moments when people have to make sense of what just happened.

The players are learning how to play the game. But the coaches are also learning how to coach the game. And that distinction matters.

Sometimes in high-performance sport we become so focused on developing the player that we forget to turn the mirror towards the people responsible for creating the environment in which that development happens.

Turning the mirror towards ourselves

For me, this is where the role of the Coach Developer becomes particularly powerful.

A Coach Developer isn't there to judge whether someone is a "good coach". They aren't there with all the answers. They aren't another performance manager. They aren't there to score a session or prescribe the solution.

They are there to become a critical thinking partner.

To create mirror moments.

“What am I doing as a coach, and what impact might it be having?”

That is a very different question from:

“How did the players perform?”

Both questions matter. But one looks through the window at the players, while the other asks the coach to look in the mirror.

And perhaps we owe our athletes that reflection.

If we expect players to be curious, adaptable, reflective and committed to continuous improvement, shouldn't we expect the same of ourselves as coaches?

We owe it to the players to be the best coaches we can be.

And, as a Coach Developer, I feel I owe it to coaches to be the best Coach Developer I can be.

Meeting coaches where they are

One of the biggest challenges of coach development is that coaches are busy people.

They have jobs to do. Teams to prepare. Players to support. Decisions to make. Lives outside cricket.

So asking them to find additional time for "coach development" can sometimes create an artificial separation between development and the job itself.

But what happens when we remove that boundary?

When the Coach Developer is simply there alongside the coach?

Watching.

Listening.

Asking.

Reflecting.

Making sense.

Sometimes capturing something the coach didn't notice. Sometimes offering another perspective. Sometimes saying very little.

Suddenly, Coach Development becomes less of an event and more of a relationship.

The Coach Developer becomes part of the learning ecosystem rather than another layer sitting outside it.

That is why the principles behind the Working with a Coach Developer resource resonate so strongly: think, reflect, learn and grow. The purpose is not to judge, fix or provide all the answers, but to help coaches make better sense of their own practice.

The partnership is two-way

Perhaps the most important word is partnership.

The coach brings things the Coach Developer cannot.

Cricket expertise. Player knowledge. Understanding of the environment. Coaching intent. Knowledge of what they were trying to achieve.

The Coach Developer brings something different. Observation. Questions. Reflection. Different perspectives. Connections. Experience to share. Neither has everything.

Together, they create something neither could create alone.

That is why the ambition isn't simply better coach development.

It is:

Better thinking.
Better learning.
Better coaching.

And ultimately, better experiences for players.

Care before challenge

One of my strongest reflections from this week is that effective Coach Development is relational before it is technical.

Before coaches can be challenged, they need to feel understood.

Before they can be encouraged to think differently, they need to feel that someone has taken the time to understand their world.

That means caring about the person, understanding their context, listening carefully, exploring through questions, supporting what matters to them, challenging when appropriate and building enough connection for honest conversations to take place.

Only then can a Coach Developer genuinely add value.

Care creates the conditions for challenge.

That feels particularly important when the Coach Developer may only have three days.

The temptation could be to arrive with a plan and try to maximise every minute.

Perhaps the better approach is to arrive with curiosity.

What matters to this coach?
What are they trying to achieve?
What are they noticing?
What are they uncertain about?
What might they not be seeing?
What would make this experience valuable for them?

Those questions can be more powerful than any predetermined development agenda.

The opportunity is bigger than the three days

There is another possibility that excites me.

What if we opened these environments up even further?

Imagine guest coaches coming into a competition environment simply to watch, listen and ask questions.

Not to take over.

Not to coach.

Just to learn.

Imagine coaches from another programme sitting alongside a coaching team for half a day. Imagine a Coach Developer connecting coaches across programmes, counties or even sports.

The learning potential is huge.

Suddenly, the competition isn't simply an event.

It becomes a living learning laboratory.

The competition creates the environment. The athletes create the challenge. The coaches create the experience. The Coach Developer helps people make sense of it.

And the wider coaching community becomes part of the learning ecosystem.

Hard to measure doesn't mean low value

This kind of work presents an obvious challenge.

How do you measure it?

How do you quantify a better question?

How do you measure a conversation that changed the way a coach thought?

How do you put a value on a coach noticing something about themselves they had previously missed?

How do you measure the impact of someone feeling cared for, supported, understood and encouraged to think differently?

Some things in high-performance sport are relatively easy to count.

Others are much harder.

But hard to measure doesn't mean low value.

Perhaps we need to become more comfortable recognising the value of the things that sit between the numbers.

The value of being alongside

For me, one of the most powerful aspects of this experience has been the opportunity to work with coaches as they do their actual job.

Not watching from a distance.

Not waiting for a formal review.

But being alongside them.

That proximity creates possibilities.

You see the moments between the moments.

The conversations before training. The decisions made in real time. The interaction between coaches. The response to something unexpected. The way a coach changes tack. The things that happen so quickly they may never make it into a post-session reflection.

Sometimes the Coach Developer can simply say:

“I noticed that…”

And that is enough to open up a completely different conversation.

Other sports should take note

This is why I think other sports should look carefully at what is already happening around them.

We don't always need to create another Coach Development programme.

Look at the competitions, camps, training blocks, pathway events and performance environments that already exist.

Ask:

Where are the coaches?

Where are the learning opportunities?

Where could a Coach Developer add another layer to the ecosystem?

The answer might already be sitting there.

The competition is already happening.

The athletes are already learning.

The coaches are already coaching.

The environment already exists.

Perhaps all we need to do is connect a Coach Developer into that space.

A leap of faith worth taking

Credit to the ECB for taking a leap of faith with this kind of work.

It is an investment in something that doesn't necessarily produce an immediate, obvious output. It isn't always easy to measure. It doesn't always produce a neat metric at the end of three days.

But perhaps that is precisely why it matters.

Because coaching isn't simply about what happens on the pitch.

It is about the thinking behind the decisions.

The relationships that shape the environment.

The questions we ask.

The things we notice.

The things we miss.

The willingness to reflect.

The courage to change.

And the commitment to keep learning.

The ECB's wider Coach Development strategy is explicitly seeking highly skilled coaches alongside inspired and highly skilled Coach Developers. This kind of situated, relational work feels like an important expression of that ambition.

The craft of coaching

A Coach Developer doesn't make a coach better by giving them more answers.

They help create the conditions in which a coach can find better questions.

That, for me, is the real opportunity.

To move Coach Development from something that happens to coaches to something that happens with coaches.

From observation to partnership.

From judgement to curiosity.

From answers to questions.

From looking through the window at the players...

to occasionally turning the mirror back towards ourselves.

Because we owe it to the players to keep getting better.

We owe it to the coaches to create meaningful opportunities to think, reflect and grow.

And we owe it to the game to keep exploring better ways of learning within it.

Great players keep learning.
Great coaches do too.

Learning, reflecting and evolving isn't extra to coaching.

It is part of the craft.

There is something that gets me thinking whenever I walk into a high-performance environment. Before I have spoken to a coach, watched an athlete train or sat in a performance meeting, I often find myself looking around. What is on the walls? What are the statements? What are the slogans? Which logos are displayed? What photographs have been chosen? What achievements have been celebrated? What stories are we telling about who we are? We often think of these things as decoration, but I am increasingly wondering whether they are actually part of the coaching and performance environment. The walls may be silent, but they are constantly communicating.

Walk into a high-performance centre and the environment can tell you an enormous amount about an organisation. It reveals what it values, what it remembers, what it celebrates and, perhaps most importantly, what it believes people should aspire towards. Recently, walking into the ECB Performance Centre, I found myself looking more carefully at the achievement boards. To one side are the achievements of the men’s game. In the middle are the caps and representations of players who have progressed into England teams across the men’s, women’s and disability game. Then there are the women’s achievements: World Cups, T20 successes, ODI successes and other significant moments in England Cricket’s history. There is something powerful about this. It creates a sense of belonging. It says: This is England Cricket. You are part of something bigger than yourself. It connects the person walking through the building today with the people who came before them and provides a sense of heritage, identity and continuity. Perhaps that is exactly what we want from a high-performance environment.

But then another question occurred to me: where does heritage finish and pressure begin? The position of an achievement on a wall matters. The date matters. The context matters. Perhaps even the distance between one achievement and the next matters. An achievement board can initially feel like a celebration of excellence, but as time passes, does it gradually become something different? The World Cup won several years ago remains on the wall. The Ashes won in a particular year remain on the wall. The names remain, the photographs remain, the trophies remain. But the people walking past them have changed. The coaches have changed. The players have changed. The game has changed. Yet the achievement remains. There is something almost paradoxical about this. The longer we go without repeating the achievement, the more significant the achievement becomes historically, but might it also become psychologically heavier for the people trying to create the next one?

What was once a celebration can slowly become a comparison. They did it. When will we do it again? Why haven't we done it? How long has it been? The shine of the achievement does not necessarily disappear, but perhaps the way it is experienced by the next generation changes. I remember hearing about a basketball organisation in the United States that deliberately considered removing some of its previous achievements from view. The thinking was provocative: could the very thing intended to inspire people actually hold them back? If every new group walks past reminders of what previous generations achieved, does it create inspiration, or does it create an invisible expectation that says, you are here to reproduce what they did?

That distinction matters because sport is ultimately judged by what happens next. The scoreboard does not care about the history on the wall. The opposition does not care about the trophies in the cabinet. The next World Cup does not care about the previous World Cup. The next Ashes series does not care who won the last one. History matters, of course, but history cannot perform for you. This creates an interesting tension for high-performance organisations. We need heritage. We need stories. We need to celebrate those who have gone before us. We need to acknowledge the people whose work created the platform upon which today's athletes and coaches stand. But we also need to be careful that heritage does not become a weight rather than a foundation.

Perhaps the question, therefore, is not whether achievement boards should exist. Perhaps the better question is: what psychological job do we want them to do? Do we want them to say, look what we have achieved, or do we want them to say, look what is possible? Those two messages are subtly different. One looks backwards; the other looks forwards. One celebrates the destination; the other communicates possibility. Perhaps high-performance environments need to be much more deliberate about that distinction. An achievement can be both a reminder of what has happened and an invitation to consider what might happen next.

The same thinking applies to values boards, behavioural statements, slogans and quotations. We put things on walls with good intentions. We might want to reinforce a culture, remind people of expected behaviours, celebrate excellence or inspire. But intent and impact are not the same thing. An achievement board might communicate pride, but it might also communicate pressure. A values statement might communicate clarity, but it might also communicate compliance. A quotation about winning might create motivation, but it might also reinforce a fear of failure. A photograph of a successful team might create belonging, but it might also create comparison. A slogan about excellence might inspire, but it might also make someone believe that anything less than excellence is failure. None of these consequences are inevitable, but they are possible, and that possibility is worth considering.

This is where I think there is a fascinating opportunity for coach developers and performance leaders. Whenever we introduce something into an environment, perhaps we should undertake a simple form of cultural red teaming. Before putting something on the wall, ask: What is this intended to communicate? Then ask: What else could it communicate?And perhaps the most important question: What might someone interpret from this that we haven't intended? It is a simple discipline, but it encourages us to move beyond the creator's intention and consider the experience of the person receiving the message. High-performance environments are full of psychological signals. Some are obvious; many are invisible. Some are deliberate; others emerge accidentally. The environment is constantly speaking, even when nobody is talking.

Perhaps we therefore need to think of the walls of a high-performance centre as another member of the performance team. What are they saying? Who are they speaking to? When are they speaking? And what happens when a young athlete walks past them every day for three years? What happens when a new coach arrives? What happens after a disappointing tournament? What happens when the organisation has not won for five years? What happens when a player walks past an achievement from an era they were not even born into? The meaning of the same object can change depending on the person, the moment and the context. That is why I find this so interesting. It is not about criticising achievement boards; quite the opposite. It is about taking them seriously.

If we are going to deliberately design performance environments, then perhaps we should be equally deliberate about the messages embedded within them. Maybe every wall should have a purpose. Maybe every statement should have a job. Maybe every achievement should tell a story. And perhaps every story should ultimately point towards the future. Because the people walking through the building today are not there simply to admire yesterday. They are there to create tomorrow.

The challenge for high-performance organisations is therefore not to forget their history. It is to use history without becoming trapped by it. Celebrate the World Cup. Remember the Ashes. Honour the caps. Recognise the performances. Tell the stories. But perhaps alongside them we need something else: something that reminds the people in the building that their responsibility is not simply to reproduce somebody else's success. Their responsibility is to create their own.

Perhaps that is the most powerful message a high-performance wall could ever communicate: your job is not to repeat their story; your job is to write the next one.

Coaching is often described as a profession built on knowledge. Coaches study their sport, understand technical demands, analyse performance data, design training environments and develop strategies to help athletes improve. Yet perhaps one of the biggest influences on coaching effectiveness is not simply what a coach knows, but how a coach thinks. Behind every decision, every conversation and every intervention sits a complex network of beliefs, experiences and assumptions that influence what coaches notice, what they ignore and how they interpret behaviour. The invisible opponent in coaching is not always the opposition, the conditions or the pressure of competition. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is understanding the unconscious thinking that shapes the way we coach.

This does not mean coaches are doing something wrong. Biases, assumptions and shortcuts are part of being human. They help us make sense of a complex world where we are constantly required to make decisions with incomplete information. The challenge for coaches is not to eliminate these influences, because that is impossible. The challenge is to become more aware of them, to recognise when they may be influencing our judgement and to develop habits that allow us to make better decisions. This is the foundation of the Coach Mindfulness Dashboard — a framework designed to help coaches explore four critical areas: how we see, how we think, how we speak and how we shape the environments around us.

The first responsibility of a coach is to see clearly. However, seeing is not always the same as observing. Two coaches can watch the same athlete perform and create completely different interpretations of what they have witnessed. The Halo Effect is a powerful example of this. One positive characteristic can influence our entire perception of someone. A talented athlete can quickly become labelled as committed, coachable and mentally strong. But talent does not always equal professionalism, and success in one area does not automatically translate into strengths elsewhere.

The opposite challenge is the Horn Effect, where one negative characteristic begins to define someone. An athlete makes mistakes, struggles with confidence or fails to meet expectations, and that moment can become the story attached to them. Over time, the label becomes stronger than the evidence. This is where Confirmation Bias can appear. Coaches may begin looking for information that supports their existing beliefs rather than genuinely exploring what is happening. A coach who believes an athlete struggles under pressure may notice every mistake in important moments while overlooking the occasions when that same athlete demonstrates resilience and performs successfully.

The reflective coach therefore asks an important question: “Am I seeing the person in front of me, or am I seeing my opinion of that person?” The Primacy Effect reminds us that first impressions can become powerful. The first training session, the first conversation or the first competition can influence how we view an athlete for months or even years. Equally, the Recency Effect warns us that the latest event can dominate our judgement. A poor performance yesterday can sometimes erase months of improvement. Effective coaches understand that people are not fixed; they are constantly developing.

The second area of the Coach Mindfulness Dashboard focuses on how we think and make decisions. Coaching requires judgement, but judgement can be influenced by invisible biases. One of the most relevant principles in modern sport is Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Sport has become increasingly data rich. Coaches now have access to more information than previous generations could have imagined. Technology, analytics and measurement can provide valuable insights, but problems occur when the measurement becomes more important than the purpose behind it.

A cricket coach may want a fast bowler to increase bowling speed. The athlete begins chasing the radar gun rather than developing rhythm, accuracy and long-term durability. A batter may focus so heavily on statistics that they become risk-averse and lose their ability to adapt. A technical coach may focus on a number rather than understanding the human being behind the number. The question every coach should ask is: “Are we improving performance, or are we simply improving the measurement?”

Other thinking biases create similar challenges. Anchoring Bias occurs when coaches become attached to early information. An athlete may once have been described as “not ready” and that judgement continues even after they have developed. Authority Bias reminds coaches that status does not always equal truth. A senior person’s opinion may carry influence, but ideas should ultimately be judged on their quality and evidence.

The third area is how coaches speak and influence others. Coaching is communication. Every conversation, every question and every piece of feedback sends a message. The Pygmalion Effect highlights the importance of expectations. When coaches genuinely believe an athlete can improve, that belief is often communicated through greater investment, better feedback and increased opportunities. Athletes sense when a coach believes in them.

However, the opposite can also occur. The Golem Effect describes how low expectations can limit performance. Sometimes athletes do not lack ability; they lack an environment that encourages belief and possibility. Coaches must therefore reflect on the messages they communicate through their words and actions. Who receives attention? Who receives challenge? Who receives opportunities?

The Framing Effect reminds us that the way information is presented influences how it is received. Saying “you made 30% errors” creates a different response from saying “you achieved 70% success, now let’s explore how we improve the next stage.” The information may be similar, but the emotional and motivational impact can be very different.

Another important communication challenge is the Curse of Knowledge. Experts often forget what it feels like not to know. Coaches can become so familiar with technical concepts that they forget how confusing they may appear to someone learning. Effective coaching is not about transferring information; it is about creating understanding.

The final part of the dashboard focuses on how coaches shape environments. Great coaches do not simply develop athletes; they create cultures where people can flourish. The Groupthink Effect highlights the danger of environments where agreement becomes more important than challenge. High-performing teams need psychological safety — the ability to question, disagree and explore alternatives without damaging relationships.

The Social Loafing Effect reminds coaches that responsibility can disappear when everyone assumes someone else is accountable. Strong environments create clarity. Everyone understands their role, their responsibility and how they contribute to collective success.

At the heart of coaching is the ability to create the conditions where people can perform at their best. Flow Theory describes moments where challenge and capability are balanced, where athletes are fully engaged and performance feels natural. Coaches cannot create flow directly, but they can create the conditions that make it more likely.

The purpose of understanding psychological laws, biases and effects is not to make coaching complicated. It is to make coaching more conscious. The mindful coach recognises that they have blind spots and actively looks for them. They understand that every athlete is more complex than the evidence they currently hold.

A mindful coach continually asks four questions: What am I seeing? What assumptions are influencing my thinking? How might my words influence this person? What environment am I creating through my behaviour?

The science matters. The data matters. The technical detail matters. But coaching remains a human profession. The greatest influence on performance may be the person standing in front of the athlete and the way that person chooses to see, think, communicate and lead.

The journey towards better coaching begins with curiosity.

Not simply asking, “What do I know?”

But asking:

“What might I be missing because of the way I currently see?”

We often talk about coaching through its positive characteristics: leadership, empathy, curiosity, challenge, communication, care and expertise. We celebrate the coach who creates environments in which athletes can flourish. We talk about psychological safety, learning cultures, collaboration and multidisciplinary teams.

But perhaps we don't talk enough about the darker side of coaching.

Not because coaches are bad people. Far from it. Coaching is a role that can carry considerable responsibility, status, identity, authority and pressure. Whenever those things are present, there is the possibility that a coach can become defensive when that authority, knowledge or identity feels challenged.

One particularly interesting place to observe this is in the relationship between the coach and the sport scientist. The sport scientist arrives with a different form of expertise. They may bring data, evidence, analysis, testing, research and questions. They may challenge assumptions that have previously gone unquestioned.

And somewhere deep down, perhaps the coach occasionally experiences an uncomfortable thought:

“If they know something I don't, what does that say about me?”

That question can create a threat. And when people feel threatened, they don't always respond with curiosity. Sometimes they protect themselves.

“I Don't Know How to Use You”

Before we judge the coach too quickly, perhaps there is another possibility:

“I don't know how to use you.”

This is an important distinction. A coach may be perfectly willing to work with a sport scientist but have never learned how to do it effectively. What should I ask you? When should I involve you? What information do you need from me? How much should I challenge you? How much should I trust the data? What do I do when your evidence conflicts with my experience? Are you here to support me, assess me or challenge me?

Perhaps what sometimes looks like resistance is actually a lack of relational literacy.

The coach knows how to coach. The scientist knows how to do science. But neither has necessarily learned how to make the relationship work.

And if that uncertainty isn't acknowledged, something more problematic can develop:

“I don't know how to use you” can become “I use you badly.”

From there, the relationship can move towards its darker possibilities.

USE

The first is use.

The coach sees the sport scientist as a valuable resource. “Can you test this?” “Can you give me the numbers?” “Can you produce the report?” “Can you prove what I'm already saying?”

There is nothing inherently wrong with using expertise. Coaches should absolutely use the expertise around them.

The problem begins when the relationship becomes purely transactional. The scientist becomes a supplier. The coach remains the decision-maker. The expertise is consumed rather than integrated.

The question becomes less:

“What can we learn together?”

and more:

“What can you give me?”

ABUSE

Then comes the darker possibility:

abuse.

Not necessarily abuse in its most extreme form, but the repeated misuse of another professional's expertise, time, knowledge or position.

The sport scientist becomes the person expected to solve every problem, produce information at short notice, validate decisions they weren't involved in making or take responsibility when something doesn't work.

They become the convenient scapegoat.

“The science said…”

“The data showed…”

“The testing told us…”

Suddenly expertise has become a shield. The coach claims the benefit when things go well and distances themselves from the science when things don't.

That isn't collaboration.

That's exploitation.

CONFUSE

Another response is confuse.

Complexity can create authority. The more complicated the language, the harder it can become for others to challenge it. Coaches can do this. Sport scientists can do this too.

Jargon can become a protective mechanism.

If everyone understands the conversation, everyone can contribute. If nobody understands the conversation, the person with the technical vocabulary retains control.

So perhaps we should occasionally ask:

Are we using complexity to improve understanding, or to protect ourselves from being questioned?

AVOID

Then comes avoidance.

The report isn't read. The conversation doesn't happen. The evidence is politely acknowledged and then ignored.

The scientist becomes someone who is “around” rather than someone who is genuinely part of the performance process.

Avoidance can be particularly interesting because it doesn't necessarily look like conflict. There is no argument. No confrontation. Just distance.

But distance can be a very effective way of protecting existing beliefs.

HIDE

Then there is hide.

Perhaps one of the hardest things for a coach is admitting:

“I don't know.”

Yet that might be one of the most powerful phrases in coaching.

A coach who feels threatened may hide uncertainty. They may pretend to understand. They may avoid asking questions because asking might reveal a gap in their knowledge.

But hiding what we don't know prevents us from learning.

The confident coach isn't necessarily the one who knows the most. Perhaps it is the coach who is most comfortable saying:

“I don't understand that. Help me.”

The same applies to the sport scientist. They don't need to know everything either. They need the confidence to say:

“I don't know if this is meaningful in your context. Let's explore it.”

DIVIDE

Another darker response is divide.

Coaching becomes coaching. Science becomes science. Strength and conditioning becomes S&C. Psychology becomes psychology. Nutrition becomes nutrition.

Everyone retreats into professional territory.

The multidisciplinary team becomes a collection of disciplines rather than a team.

And once the boundaries become entrenched, the language changes:

“The coaches think…”

“The scientists think…”

“They don't understand coaching.”

“They don't understand performance.”

The word “they” can be incredibly revealing.

Because high-performing environments require an “us.”

DISCREDIT

Then we reach perhaps the most obvious defensive behaviour:

discredit.

If the evidence threatens the belief, attack the evidence.

If the scientist challenges the coach, question the scientist.

“They've never coached.”

“They don't understand cricket.”

“They're too academic.”

“They've got no feel for the game.”

Sometimes those criticisms may contain legitimate concerns. But sometimes they become a convenient way of dismissing expertise without having to engage with it.

And this isn't exclusively a coach problem.

Sport scientists can equally discredit coaches:

“They're old school.”

“They don't understand the research.”

“They just go on gut feel.”

“They're not evidence-based.”

Both sides can protect their identity by diminishing the other.

The result is the same:

less learning.

CREDIT

There is another subtle behaviour worth considering:

credit.

Who gets the credit when something works?

The coach? The scientist? The athlete? The wider team?

Healthy environments share credit. Unhealthy environments can become competitive about it.

The coach may use the scientist's work but rarely acknowledge their contribution. Equally, the scientist may present findings as though the data alone created the performance improvement.

The question becomes:

Are we trying to be right, or are we trying to make the athlete better?

CHALLENGE

And this is where the model becomes interesting.

Because challenge doesn't necessarily belong on the dark side. Challenge might actually be the way out.

The sport scientist should challenge the coach. The coach should challenge the sport scientist.

But the challenge needs to be about the idea, not the person's identity.

The coach can ask:

“Show me the evidence.”

The scientist can ask:

“What makes you believe that?”

The coach can ask:

“Does this actually matter to performance?”

The scientist can ask:

“What if your assumption is wrong?”

That's not conflict.

That's professional curiosity.

The mature relationship isn't one where everyone agrees. It is one where people feel safe enough to disagree.

The Real Threat

Perhaps the real issue isn't sport science at all.

Perhaps the real issue is identity.

When coaching becomes part of someone's identity, any challenge to their knowledge can feel like a challenge to their worth.

The coach isn't necessarily thinking:

“I want to control this scientist.”

They may simply be thinking:

“I need to remain credible.”

“I need to remain the expert.”

“I need to remain in control.”

“I can't let people see that I don't know.”

And suddenly behaviour that looks arrogant, dismissive or controlling may actually be a form of self-protection.

That doesn't excuse it.

But understanding it might help us address it.

The Challenge for Coach Development

Perhaps coach development has focused heavily on what coaches should do.

Maybe we also need to explore what happens to coaches when they feel threatened.

What happens when someone knows more than them? What happens when an athlete challenges them? What happens when a sport scientist disagrees? What happens when data contradicts experience? What happens when another coach becomes more successful? What happens when authority is questioned?

Because the true test of coaching maturity may not be what happens when everything is going well.

It might be what happens when the coach's identity becomes uncomfortable.

Can they remain curious? Can they listen? Can they say, “I don't know”? Can they change their mind? Can they give someone else credit? Can they tolerate being challenged? Can they allow another expert to be better than them at something?

Perhaps humility is more than a desirable coaching characteristic.

It is a performance capability.

A Challenge for Both Sides

The responsibility doesn't sit solely with coaches.

Sport scientists need to examine themselves too.

Are we genuinely trying to understand the performance problem, or are we trying to demonstrate our expertise?

Do we speak in language the coach can use?

Do we understand the context before presenting the evidence?

Do we recognise the limitations of our data?

Do we listen to coaching experience rather than automatically dismiss it?

Do we challenge constructively?

Do we make the coach better, or simply make ourselves look clever?

Because the relationship is ultimately reciprocal.

Coaches need scientific expertise. Scientists need coaching expertise. And both need the athlete at the centre.

From Threat to Curiosity

Perhaps the journey looks something like this:

THREAT → “I DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE YOU” → PROTECTION → USE → ABUSE → CONFUSE → AVOID → HIDE → DIVIDE → DISCREDIT

But there is another pathway:

THREAT → CURIOSITY → CHALLENGE → LEARNING → INTEGRATION

The difference may be relatively simple.

One pathway protects the coach's identity.

The other develops the coach's capability.

And perhaps the question we should be asking isn't:

“Are you an evidence-based coach?”

Perhaps the more revealing question is:

“What happens to you when the evidence challenges what you believe?”

And perhaps the sport scientist deserves an equally uncomfortable question:

“What happens to you when the coach doesn't accept what your evidence tells you?”

That might tell us considerably more about both professionals than what happens when they agree.

Questions to Sit With

For the Coach

• When a sport scientist challenges my thinking, is my first instinct curiosity or defence?

• Do I genuinely understand how to work with scientific expertise?

• Have I ever used science to validate a decision I had already made?

• What am I most uncomfortable admitting that I don't know?

• Have I avoided evidence because I knew it might challenge my beliefs?

• Can I allow someone else to know more than me without feeling diminished?

• Do I give appropriate credit to the expertise around me?

• What would a genuinely challenging but psychologically safe relationship with a sport scientist look like?

For the Sport Scientist

• Am I trying to solve the performance problem or demonstrate my expertise?

• Do I understand the coach's world before presenting my evidence?

• Can I make complex information useful and understandable?

• How do I respond when a coach challenges my evidence?

• Do I genuinely listen to coaching experience?

• Have I ever used complexity or jargon to protect my credibility?

• Am I helping the coach become more capable, or simply becoming more important?

• What could I do differently to move the relationship from “science and coaching” towards “we”?

Perhaps the greatest sign of a mature performance environment is not that the coach and sport scientist always agree.

It is that neither feels threatened when they don't.

The darker side of coaching isn't necessarily about bad people. It is about people experiencing threat, uncertainty, ego, pressure and responsibility — and how they respond when those things collide.

The challenge for coach development is not to pretend that the darker side doesn't exist.

It is to make it visible.

Because what we can see, we can question.

What we can question, we can learn from.

And what we can learn from, we can change.

Perhaps the ultimate measure of expertise isn't how much we know.

Perhaps it is how comfortable we are allowing someone else to know something we don't.

Recently, I bumped into Paul Felton, one of the ECB’s lead coach developers in bowling mechanics and biomechanics, alongside his work supporting the development of sports science practitioners. It was only a brief 15-minute conversation, but it was one of those interactions that leaves you thinking long after it has finished.

What struck me most was a conversation about something that feels increasingly important in high-performance sport: the pursuit of truth.

There is an old-fashioned view of sports science that its role is to find truth — to look beyond the smoke and mirrors, beyond the fashionable ideas and the latest trends, and to search for what actually matters. It is about curiosity, exploration and being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The challenge, of course, is that truth is not always what we want it to be.

Sometimes the evidence challenges our beliefs. Sometimes it challenges our practices. Sometimes it challenges the language we use to describe what we do. But the role of a sports scientist is not to confirm what we already believe; it is to help reveal what is actually happening.

That thought naturally led me to coaching.

Because ultimately, coaching is also about truth. It is about understanding what works, why it works and how we can help people perform better. But there is a critical difference: the truth in sport only becomes valuable when it can be understood, applied and acted upon.

This was the part of my conversation with Paul that really stood out.

Paul is currently supporting PhD students in areas connected to biomechanics and human movement. Within that learning process, there is a focus not just on the science itself, but on the ability to communicate that science effectively with coaches.

That is a skill that cannot be underestimated.

I was reminded of a conversation I once had with Peter Moores about coaching. During that conversation, he said something that has stayed with me:

“You have lost the language of the player.”

That statement has become increasingly relevant when thinking about the relationship between sports science and coaching.

For sports scientists to have genuine impact, they need to understand and speak the language of the coach. They also need to understand the language of the athlete.

The role of the sports scientist is rarely to directly coach the player. The coach remains the key connection point. Therefore, the most effective sports scientists are those who can work alongside coaches, helping them understand, interpret and translate information into something meaningful for the athlete.

Being right is not enough.

Being current is not enough.

Having robust evidence is not enough.

If the message cannot connect, it cannot influence.

A coach might receive the most scientifically accurate information available, but if it does not feel relevant, realistic and connected to their environment, it may never become part of their practice.

The skill is not just knowing more.

The skill is knowing when, where, how and with whom to share that knowledge.

I have seen situations where sports scientists become frustrated because their information is not being listened to. The natural reaction can sometimes be to believe that the issue is the coach not understanding the value of the science.

But perhaps another question needs to be asked:

Have we understood the world of the coach?

Have we understood their pressures, their priorities and their language?

One of the best examples of this came from my time working with sports scientists in boxing. A coach once described a particular practitioner through a brilliant analogy.

He said:

“This is the kind of person who, if you ask him the time because he has a watch and you don’t, he will tell you where the watch was made, how it works, who designed it, what materials were used, the warranty details and the history behind it.”

Then he added:

“All I wanted to know was what time it was.”

It was a humorous story, but it contained a powerful message.

Depth of knowledge matters. Expertise matters. Understanding the detail matters.

But expertise only creates impact when it is delivered in a way that helps someone else.

The coach is often the generalist of specialists. They bring together technical knowledge, tactical understanding, psychology, relationships, communication, culture and decision-making. They hold the complexity of the whole environment.

The sports scientist has the opportunity to go deeper into a specific area, providing insight and understanding that others may not have access to.

The magic happens when those two worlds connect.

When the depth of the specialist combines with the breadth of the coach.

When information becomes understanding.

When understanding becomes action.

Perhaps the future of sports science is not about being the person with all the answers. Perhaps it is about becoming “sports science on tap” — available when needed, in the right amount, delivered at the right moment.

Sometimes a coach needs detail.

Sometimes they need simplicity.

Sometimes they need a challenge.

Sometimes they need a question.

The art is recognising which one is required.

Because there is always a danger that we provide a solution looking for a problem, rather than solving the problem that actually exists.

High-performance environments are complicated. The problems faced by athletes and coaches are rarely solved by one discipline, one perspective or one answer.

They require collaboration.

They require curiosity.

They require different people holding different viewpoints while working towards a shared purpose.

The exciting future is one where coaches and sports scientists learn together — where they work on problems rather than protect positions, where they respect difference rather than seek agreement, and where they triangulate solutions by combining multiple perspectives.

The pursuit of truth matters.

But so does the ability to communicate that truth.

Because knowledge alone does not change performance.

Connection does.

And perhaps the greatest skill of the modern sports scientist is not simply understanding human movement.

It is understanding humans.

There is something quite powerful about returning to a familiar environment after being away from it for a while.

Over the past week, I have once again had the privilege of being invited into the England Women’s Super Four programme at Loughborough University. I was there last year, so there was a degree of familiarity, but twelve months is a long time in sport. It gave me an opportunity to look again, listen again and, perhaps most importantly, notice things differently.

I have been around cricket for a long time, but I have also been out of the immediate cricket environment for long enough to see it with what I might describe as a relatively educated pair of fresh eyes.

My first question was simple: what has changed?

The most seismic shift I noticed was technology.

The modern game is now captured in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable not that long ago. Scoring systems, video, ball-tracking, trajectory, weather information, pitch maps, hitting areas and an ever-expanding range of performance data provide coaches and players with an extraordinary amount of information.

And now, of course, there is AI.

For coaches, this represents a significant paradigm shift.

I can remember a time when coaches would manually code sessions and matches, often with their heads down, trying desperately to capture every detail. There was an understandable belief that the more information we collected, the better our understanding would become.

But perhaps the challenge has now moved.

We don't have an information problem.

We have an information selection problem.

The knowledge available to coaches is rich, vast and increasingly sophisticated. The professional skill is not necessarily knowing more. It is being able to identify the important threads within all that information and turn them into something meaningful for the player.

That got me thinking about the shift from giving feedback to generating feedback.

Technology can now help us generate enormous amounts of information about what has happened. But information itself isn't feedback. Feedback only becomes useful when somebody makes sense of it.

I have increasingly encouraged coaches to think about performance analysis, data and technology as potential truth givers. They can reveal something about what actually happened in the game that might otherwise be difficult to see or remember.

But I don't think the technology should sit at the top of the triangle.

In fact, perhaps it isn't a triangle at all.

It is more of an offset triangle, where three different perspectives interact.

The first is the player.

Before we show them the data, what did they feel? What did they see? What did they notice? What were they thinking? What did they believe was happening?

Can they make sense of what was happening internally while they were operating within the boundary of the game?

This matters because the player's recollection and reflection are incredibly valuable. We should not rush to replace their experience with a data set.

Instead, we can ask:

“What do you think was happening?”

Then we can explore whether their perception aligns with what actually happened.

The second element is the data and technology.

This can provide another perspective — a different version of the truth. It can challenge perception, confirm it or sometimes create an entirely new question.

That distinction between honesty and truth is interesting.

We want players to be honest with themselves and honest with each other. Their reflection is their honest account of what they experienced.

But the data can sometimes act as the truth giver.

It might tell us where the ball actually landed, what trajectory it followed, what the weather conditions were, where the player was positioned or what happened repeatedly across a period of time.

Neither necessarily has to be “right” or “wrong”.

The opportunity lies in bringing the two together.

The third element is the coach.

The coach's role is not simply to present the truth. It is to interpret it.

This is where professional judgement becomes so important.

What information do we need to share?

With whom?

When?

Why?

And perhaps most importantly, what do we want the player to do with it?

There may be competing or conflicting metrics. There may be five pieces of information that are technically interesting but only one that is genuinely useful.

This is where I think coaching remains fundamentally human.

Technology can capture the game. It can analyse the game. It can increasingly describe the game.

But it cannot replace the coach's responsibility to understand the person playing the game.

In fact, perhaps one of the greatest opportunities technology gives us is not more coaching information, but more coaching thinking time.

If technology can reduce the amount of time coaches spend capturing, coding and collating information, it potentially creates more cognitive bandwidth for coaches to think.

And I think we need to protect that.

Coaches need time to look up from the screen.

To watch.

To listen.

To notice.

To use their senses.

To develop that instinctive feel for the game.

To ask themselves: What am I seeing? What am I noticing? What might happen next?

There is a real danger that sophisticated technology could paradoxically make coaching less sophisticated if coaches become overly dependent upon what the technology tells them.

The opportunity is to use technology to create better thinkers, not replace thinking.

This also connects to another theme that has emerged for me over the past few days: feed-forward conversations.

If the player has told us what they experienced, the data has helped us understand what actually happened, and the coach has interpreted the significance of both, then the conversation shouldn't necessarily be about what was.

It should increasingly be about what next?

What do we need to get ahead of?

What might the player need to recognise earlier?

What decision could they make differently next time?

How can we prepare them for the game that hasn't happened yet?

That feels particularly important within a development environment.

I have also been struck by the willingness of coaches to support players who are trying things.

When someone is stretching their game, there will inevitably be moments when execution isn't perfect.

But what are we actually praising?

Are we praising the outcome?

The attempt?

The effort?

Or the decision-making process that led to the attempt?

A player can make an excellent decision and execute it poorly.

They can also make a poor decision and execute it beautifully.

Those are very different coaching moments.

If we want players to expand their games, we have to create environments where exploration is possible. Otherwise, when an environment feels like an audition, players will naturally retreat towards what they already know they can do.

That challenge applies to coaches too.

How do we stretch our own coaching?

How do we explore our strengths rather than simply repeat them?

During the programme, I have tried to contribute in a relatively simple way — by dropping in questions.

“What has been the best coaching moment you've seen this year?”

“What has been your biggest learning?”

I also sat down with the head coach and asked him to consider three words that described where his coaching currently was, and three words that might describe where he wanted it to go.

There was no complicated framework attached to it.

Just a question.

But sometimes a good question creates more reflection than a good answer.

One of the things I have noticed repeatedly in coach development is that questions reveal how people think.

Some coaches engage immediately. They have been thinking about these things already.

Others pause.

They say, “That's a really good question. I need to go away and think about it.”

I don't see that as a weakness.

In fact, perhaps the willingness to sit with a question is one of the characteristics of a reflective coach.

Returning to the Super Four after a year has therefore reminded me that the game is changing rapidly.

Technology is changing.

Data is changing.

AI is changing.

Performance analysis is changing.

But perhaps the fundamental challenge for coaches remains remarkably consistent: make sense of complexity and help another person make sense of their game.

Cricket will never be run by a spreadsheet.

It will never be entirely explained by data.

And technology should never exceed the expertise, judgement and decision-making of the coach.

Instead, it should create the conditions for better coaching.

For me, the exciting possibility is this:

The data can be the truth giver.
The player can be the honest revealer.
The coach can be the forward thinker.

Bring those three perspectives together, and perhaps we enter a genuinely exciting era of coaching — one where technology doesn't reduce the human element of coaching, but gives coaches more space to think, question, notice and help players prepare not just for what has happened, but for what might happen next.

There is something uncomfortable about the relationship between cricket and alcohol. Perhaps it is uncomfortable precisely because alcohol has been woven into the fabric of the game for so long that questioning it can feel like questioning cricket itself.

Over the past 12 months, we have seen a number of incidents involving cricketers and alcohol that have prompted difficult questions about behaviour, responsibility, professionalism and consequence. These incidents are rarely as simple as “player drinks too much, player gets punished.” Beneath them sits a much bigger cultural question: what relationship should modern professional cricket have with alcohol?

Historically, the relationship has been remarkably close. Think about the traditional cricket club. The bar has often been as much a part of the clubhouse as the changing rooms, scoreboard or tea room. When I was growing up, I remember seeing first-hand how important the bar could be to a local club's financial survival. The income generated through selling alcohol could help keep the whole organisation alive.

It seems strange now. In some ways, the message was almost: play cricket, finish the game, get in the bar and drink. The social experience was inseparable from the sport.

Perhaps those were different times.

Or perhaps they weren't.

Because alcohol remains deeply embedded within sport. Cricket is certainly not unique, but it has a particularly strong historical association with drinking. Look at the sponsorship landscape around sport and the connection becomes even more obvious. Beer and lager brands have historically been prominent around cricket and other major sports, while more recently we have seen the growth of partnerships with fast-food, snack and other lifestyle brands.

The commercial message is powerful: sport, celebration, friendship, consumption and enjoyment can all sit comfortably together.

And, to be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with having a drink.

Professional cricketers are human beings. They work long seasons, travel extensively, spend huge amounts of time away from home and operate under enormous physical and psychological pressure. At the end of a long day, after a hard-fought game, sitting down with teammates and having a beer can be a perfectly understandable way of unwinding.

Most people understand that.

We all have our own ways of switching off after a difficult day. For some people it might be a glass of wine, a beer, a meal with friends or simply sitting down and doing nothing. So perhaps the question isn't whether players should drink.

Perhaps the more important question is where does drinking stop being part of healthy socialising and start becoming a problem?

That boundary isn't always obvious.

A couple of beers with teammates at the ground is one thing. Going out for dinner and having a drink is another. Deciding to go into a city, entering a nightclub and continuing to drink until judgement, awareness and self-control have disappeared is something else entirely.

And that is where the conversation becomes much more difficult.

But what about the coaches?

There is another dimension to this conversation that I find particularly interesting because of my own interest in coach development.

Imagine the photograph.

A couple of professional cricketers are outside a nightclub. One has become heavily intoxicated. There is an argument. Security staff are involved. Perhaps the police arrive. Perhaps somebody is arrested. A photograph is taken.

The next morning, that photograph appears online.

Now imagine that standing a few metres away is one of the team's coaches.

Suddenly, the conversation becomes very different.

Perhaps the coach hasn't been drinking at all. Perhaps they have had one drink. Perhaps they are simply there because they felt some responsibility towards the players. Perhaps they are trying to make sure everyone gets safely back to the hotel.

But the photograph doesn't necessarily tell that story.

It simply shows a coach standing alongside players in a nightclub at two o'clock in the morning.

Would that coach face the same consequences as the players?

Probably not.

They might face much more serious consequences.

This raises a fascinating question about the different expectations placed upon players and staff.

A professional player might argue that they are an adult and have a right to socialise in their own time. A coach may have precisely the same human rights and freedoms, but their professional responsibility is different.

The coach is part of the organisation.

They may be responsible for standards.

They may have a duty of care.

They may be expected to model professional behaviour.

They may also be subject to employment contracts, codes of conduct and policies that extend beyond the playing field.

So should coaches go out drinking with players?

That is where things become really complicated.

The coach as protector — or professional boundary-setter?

There is an argument that coaches should go out with players.

Not to drink heavily.

Not to become part of the party.

But to be present.

To keep an eye on things.

To recognise when somebody has had enough.

To help a vulnerable player get back to the hotel.

To intervene if something starts to escalate.

To make sure everyone gets home safely.

That sounds like responsible leadership.

But there is another argument.

Perhaps the safest thing a coach can do is exactly the opposite.

Go to bed.

Close the door.

Lock it.

Stay away from the nightclub.

Don't become involved.

Wake up in the morning and deal with whatever happened afterwards.

Because the moment a coach enters that environment, they potentially expose themselves to a whole series of risks.

What happens if a player gets into a fight?

What happens if someone is injured?

What happens if the coach tries to intervene and gets hurt?

What happens if the coach is photographed?

What happens if the coach has had a drink themselves?

What happens if somebody makes an allegation?

What happens if the coach's attempt to protect a player is subsequently interpreted as inappropriate involvement?

Suddenly, the coach who went out with the best intentions may find themselves facing questions about their own conduct.

And that creates a fascinating dilemma for organisations:

Do we want coaches to be responsible for protecting players in social environments, or do we want coaches to maintain a professional distance from those environments?

Perhaps we cannot expect coaches to be both.

What does the contract actually say?

This also makes me wonder about something much more fundamental.

When a professional player signs a contract, what exactly are they agreeing to?

And when a coach, sports scientist, physiotherapist or other practitioner signs their employment contract, what exactly are they agreeing to?

Are there explicit clauses around alcohol, socialising, behaviour and conduct during the season?

Are there expectations about maintaining professional standards away from the workplace?

What happens if someone is arrested after becoming intoxicated?

What happens if their behaviour brings the organisation into disrepute?

What happens if an incident becomes a national story?

At what point does a night out become a breach of a professional agreement?

These aren't hypothetical questions anymore. Modern professional sport exists in a world where behaviour away from the field can become part of an athlete's or coach's professional identity within minutes.

The old distinction between work and personal life is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain when someone is representing an organisation every day.

And perhaps that means contracts and codes of conduct need to be much clearer.

Not necessarily more punitive.

Just clearer.

Players and staff should know where the boundaries are before they cross them.

The uncomfortable double standard

There may also be an uncomfortable double standard here.

Players sometimes receive a degree of tolerance because they are young, highly paid, highly competitive individuals who are expected to have a social life.

Coaches, however, can be judged differently.

A coach can become the adult in the room.

The person who should know better.

The person who should have seen the risk coming.

The person responsible for standards.

The person who should have walked away.

And perhaps that is fair.

But it creates another question:

If coaches are responsible for the behaviour of players when they are at work, where does that responsibility end when the players leave the workplace?

At the boundary of the hotel?

At the entrance to the nightclub?

After the first drink?

After the fifth?

When somebody becomes vulnerable?

Or when the police arrive?

There is no easy answer.

Maybe the real issue is clarity

Perhaps what professional sport needs isn't simply a stronger alcohol policy.

Perhaps it needs a much clearer philosophy.

Players need to understand that being professional doesn't mean they cannot drink. It means understanding the consequences of their decisions.

Coaches need to understand whether they are expected to provide pastoral support outside working hours or whether their responsibility ends when the formal working environment ends.

Organisations need to understand what they expect from both groups.

And everyone needs to understand the consequences before something goes wrong rather than afterwards.

There is also an important distinction between support and surveillance.

We should not create a sporting culture in which adults are monitored every time they go out.

But neither should we pretend that professional athletes exist in exactly the same social world as everyone else.

They don't.

They are increasingly visible.

Their images are everywhere.

Their behaviour can affect teammates, sponsors, clubs and governing bodies.

And coaches live in that same world, perhaps with even greater expectations placed upon them.

Perhaps the answer isn't to remove the drink

The temptation might be to say: just ban alcohol.

But that probably misses the point.

If people want to drink, they will find ways of doing it.

If drinking is culturally embedded within the group, simply removing alcohol from the official environment may push the behaviour somewhere else.

The better question may be how we create cultures where people can socialise without alcohol being the central mechanism of belonging.

Where having a beer is fine.

Where not having a beer is equally fine.

Where celebration doesn't require intoxication.

Where a player can say, “I've had enough,” without somebody saying, “Go on, have another.”

And where coaches don't have to decide between abandoning players to their own devices or potentially compromising their own professional boundaries by following them into the night.

Maybe the most mature culture is one in which everybody understands their own responsibility.

The player is responsible for the player's choices.

The coach is responsible for the coach's choices.

The organisation is responsible for creating clear expectations and providing appropriate support.

And when something goes wrong, responsibility should be determined by what actually happened rather than simply by who happened to be standing in the photograph.

Because perhaps that is the real challenge for cricket.

Alcohol isn't going away.

The clubhouse bar isn't going away.

Players aren't going to stop wanting to celebrate.

Coaches aren't going to stop caring about their players.

So the question isn't simply drink or don't drink.

It is:

How do we create a professional sporting culture in which adults can make choices, understand consequences, look after one another and still maintain the standards expected of elite sport?

And perhaps that conversation needs to include everyone — players, coaches, practitioners, leaders and organisations.

Because the photograph outside the nightclub may only last a few seconds.

But the consequences of what happened before it was taken can last a very long time.

Earlier this week, a coach asked me for some feedback. Over a cup of tea at breakfast, I found myself describing him in three words. We talked about his strengths, including how our strengths, when overplayed, can sometimes become weaknesses.

It was a simple conversation, but it stayed with me.

Later in the week, I was looking through the National Trust guidebook. As a family, we have become members this year, and we were looking at the different places we might visit. Each property has its description, photographs and practical information. Then I noticed something familiar: “Getting here.”

And suddenly, the connection appeared.

What three words would describe what got you here?

And perhaps the more interesting question is:

What three words will help get you there?

There is something powerful about three words. They cannot possibly describe the whole person. They are not a complete assessment, nor should they be. But perhaps they can act as a prompt, a mirror or even a compass.

Feedback can sometimes become complicated. We have frameworks, competencies, behaviours, strengths and development plans. All have their place, but occasionally the most useful feedback is something much simpler.

Three words.

Imagine asking a coach:

What three words have helped you get to where you are today?

Perhaps they might say driven, curious, resilient.

Then ask:

What three words might help you get to where you want to go next?

Perhaps the answer becomes patient, trusting, adaptable.

The interesting part is not necessarily whether the words are right or wrong. It is the conversation that follows.

Because what got us here does not automatically mean it will get us there.

A coach may have become successful because they are highly knowledgeable. Their expertise has undoubtedly helped them. But perhaps their next challenge is to ask more questions and provide fewer answers.

A coach may have built their reputation on being demanding. That standard may have driven improvement. But perhaps the next stage requires greater flexibility.

Someone may have taken enormous responsibility for everything around them. That ownership may have helped create success. Yet their next step may be learning to trust others more.

The strength has not disappeared.

It has simply become something to manage.

This is perhaps the uncomfortable truth about strengths: overplayed strengths can become weaknesses.

Confidence can become certainty.

Challenge can become confrontation.

Care can become control.

Knowledge can become instruction.

Drive can become impatience.

Responsibility can become the inability to let go.

Development, therefore, might not always be about finding something completely new. Sometimes it is about understanding what has served us well, recognising when it has reached its limit, and deciding how we need to adapt.

That is where I see a connection between mentoring and coaching.

Perhaps mentoring helps us understand what got us here.

It can help us make sense of experience, recognise patterns, understand our strengths and appreciate the journey we have already travelled.

Coaching might then help us explore what will get us there.

The destination may have changed. The demands may be different. The environment may have shifted. The person may have developed.

And so the route may need to change too.

Perhaps that is why the GPS analogy resonates.

A GPS needs to know where you are before it can help you decide where you are going. It does not judge the route you have taken. It simply helps you navigate the next part of the journey.

Maybe good feedback can do something similar.

It can help someone pause, locate themselves and consider their next direction.

So perhaps, rather than always asking, “What do I need to improve?”, we might occasionally ask something more reflective:

What three words got you here?

And then:

What three words will get you there?

They might be the same words.

They might be completely different.

Neither answer is necessarily better.

What matters is the thinking they provoke.

Perhaps the three words are values. Perhaps they are behaviours. Perhaps they are characteristics. Perhaps they are simply words that mean something deeply personal to the individual.

And perhaps that is the point.

The best feedback does not always tell someone where to go.

Sometimes it helps them understand where they are, recognise how they arrived, and choose the direction they want to take next.

So here is the nudge I am taking from a breakfast conversation and a National Trust guidebook:

What three words got you here?

And, perhaps more importantly,

What three words will get you there?