This post is overdue. Perhaps by a few years.
Finally, earlier this week, I saw a few posts on Reddit that made me thumb through stacks of papers to find my initial draft. What comes here, at its finest, is merely personal experience. I would call the lesson “established rules” if I had enough scientific evidence and numbers to put behind each “principle,” but after all, as a blogger, I lived my own life, and only once. I just happen to have worked in IT and interviewed/coached people for years and now also do the same in CrossFit and extreme fitness.
The delay wasn’t entirely my fault. Initially, my brain was consciously attempting to ignore the similar patterns it observed in mentoring and coaching in two vastly different areas, but at some point, I had to pause, and it was when I decided to study or at least acknowledge and document the similarities closely.
At the cost of sounding too cliché, I wish I knew all this when I started my journeys.
Let’s start with the most obvious ones; that we still tend to miss:
- The Free $100 Bill Principle: If you offer any elaborate coaching service beyond friendly chatters over coffee free of charge, this is as impactful as the financial advice I receive in the email almost five times a day. Jake has a wealth of knowledge in technical interviews. In fact, I guarantee you that if he had ten prep sessions with an average engineer, they would stand a 90% chance of getting into any Fortune 500 company. That’s all positive. What is not so positive is that Jake struggles to convince people to follow his advice and, even worse, convince people he is legit. Define a clear boundary between friendly advice and developing formal plans; unless you are getting paid to develop professional plans for free. Thousands of years of civilization have taught us that everything has a price, and the more valuable things must logically be pricier. As a coach, you won’t live long enough to change that.
- The Worried Third Party Principle: If you are approached by a third party (e.g., a supervisor, husband, wife, sister, etc.) that wants you to improve someone else’s life or career, it’s almost certainly a doomed deal already. A good percentage of people who seek my advice on a career path or fitness, for that matter, are not actually the end consumer of those services. There is always an anxious father who thinks his kid must become X, a worried boyfriend who believes his partner deserves to make 2X at work, a kind wife who believes her husband must hit the gym more often, etc. While, in my experience, they all have the best intentions in the world, these cases seldom succeed. The client must want to change and must want it real bad. The fact that he or she isn’t the one seeking advice and someone else is pushing them forward can be the first red flag of a bad ending.
- The 10/100/90 Attainment Principle: In my most successful plans, the first 10% of milestones were 100% attainable by 90% of the participants. While you will get a small percentage of patient mentees, who will wait for months to see the first results (once I waited three years), the majority of people must see tangible results, or they’ll lose their motivation and confidence; even beyond that, they might lose their trust in you and the entire program. This could be that super entry-level certificate or the first 5 pounds. The Spartan Sprint Obstacle Course Race can be difficult, but it always starts with a run and never the most challenging obstacle. And even the first few obstacles are designed to be overcome by most participants. Those little wins are key to building confidence, establishing routines, developing persistence – and instilling trust in you and the program. A massive first goal way down the road is probably reached by very few.
- The No-Self-Cloning Principle: One of the worst ways to coach people is to train them like you trained yourself or, even worse, to make them be You 2.0. They might become better but will never be the same as you. I had the privilege to know and closely monitor the career path of one of the most successful soccer goalkeepers who also played at the World Cup. He would get up at 4:00 am and go to bed at 8:30 pm. He would begin with a personal trainer for another 2 hours when everybody finished the daily practice sessions and team skirmishes. His stellar career as a goalie never got him the same position as a coach. In fact, almost no one could work with him. Out of despair, he even tried training a U13 group of wanna-be goalies, and he got nothing but bad feedback from their parents. How I succeeded and what worked for me was aligned with my world, my time, my genetics, my family, and the market at that time. Every coaching plan has to be individualized.
- The Avoid-the-Customizers Principle: Coachability, sadly and chiefly, is not teachable, or even if it is (which I haven’t seen), it would be extremely difficult. Over the years, and on many occasions in both IT and fitness fields, my lowest success rate has consistently been with the one very specific community. It is not the least educated, the busiest in life, the least motivated, and certainly not the freshest first-timers. It’s always been the group that grabs the plan and comes back with their own version of it. Then their own iterations of their version, then the adjusted implementations of each. That self-composed song is never fully played. Or again, I have not heard of any yet. That’s where all the damaged gallbladders, knees, and discs lie. The same ditch where you can find the failed job interviews or never reached career goals. On the opposite side, tall stand the most successful mentees of mine. The ones who religiously followed the plans, provided feedback, shared data points, and pushed me hard to improve their experience on that very path toward the very goal we agreed upon they started. Unfortunately, the lesson I learned the hard way here was to run from the “customizers.” Just bolt. Probably the worst thing you could do is to become part of the game by trying to “optimize” their versions and iterations as they come up with them. Playing along certainly won’t make the plan any better than what a professional put together.
- The Power of Surrender Principle: Not every battle is to be won, or even fought. If one doesn’t want to change, you cannot and better not try to change them. One of the hardest lessons to teach any new coach is the ability to realize when to hold back, when not to give advice, when to refer the mentee to another processional, and eventually when to step down. Sometimes, you must surrender right at the beginning by rigorously interviewing people you will be coaching and being picky about your criteria. While this could limit your revenue stream in the short term, in the long run, it would save you more time and assets than any other efforts you would have spent on the client.
