• Home
•  »  Resources
•  »  Thought Design
•  » Are You Coachable?

 

Are You Coachable?

 

You are ready to achieve your next level on the bike. You’ve been preparing your foundation. You have a killer training plan, you read the right books and you keep up with the latest performance tips on the relevant web sites. But still your cycling performance isn’t up to snuff. Your hand is on your wallet and you are poised to plunk down the bucks to make this season the best ever. But wait! Is hiring a coach really your ticket to success?

Great question! Before you answer, consider taking a good look at the extent to which you utilize the wealth of knowledge, great advice and cutting edge guidance you’ve already collected by means of your own experience, what you’ve studied and read, heard from a coach or trusted peer, or by any other means.

Let’s start by shaking up a basic premise. Knowledge is not power. If it were, you’d already be as fast as you want, have as much money as you want and have the life of your dreams. We all have an abundance of knowledge, but what we don’t seem have is the understanding of how to apply that knowledge to our lives. If we did, we would achieve anything we wanted, when we wanted it, including grabbing all the top three finishes we could get our hands on. For example, you may know that completing VO2 Max and Lactate Threshold intervals, eating well and getting enough sleep are some of the keys to being fast on the bike, but do you intentionally and consistently apply the knowledge of those practices to your actual training, eating and sleeping? If you don’t, what stops you from applying your knowledge?

Try on for a moment the perspective that as a human being, you are nothing if not completely reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that your reasons may actually prevent you from intentionally and consistently applying what you know. That is, if you are not completing VO2 Max intervals, you have a very good reason. Couple your excellent reason with the knowledge that you know (in this case, all about the benefits of VO2 Max intervals) and what you end up with is a bomb-proof conviction that “I’m doing it right”.

You probably know what this looks like. You may get defensive if someone asks you a question or disagrees with you. You have no interest in being told what to do, in your sport, or in any other area of your life. You don’t have any weaknesses, though you sometimes find yourself a victim of your circumstances. If you get defensive when people offer alternatives or disagree, if you don’t actively invite and appreciate feedback, if you don’t ask peers, team members, managers and others around you to offer their perspective or advice, or you don’t challenge your own perspective, you are probably not in the habit of being coachable.

Are you coachable as an athlete? Or do you find yourself interpreting suggestions as criticism and dismissing the ideas of others? Are you acting in compliance with what you know? Or do you stifle that knowledge with equal measures of valid reason? Do you listen to your coach, pay attention, and do exactly what they ask you to do? Or are there times when you let circumstances or feelings rule and your coach’s words go in one ear and out the other? Do you know better? “Hey, I don’t need extra recovery time from the extra two hours spent Sunday on the bike. Really, they were only long slow miles…” What is missing here? Coachability.

Consider your relationship to your training plan. Do you relate to your training plan as a haphazard series of suggested “to dos” vaguely related to your sport? Or do you relate to your training plan as an intentional map of actions built on a foundation of knowledge – specifically, the knowledge of what it takes to generate your next level. Complete the actions on the map, find your way to success. Acting in compliance your training plan is your access to power, an important step on the ladder of success. You build a training plan and you follow it religiously. If your plan says you are going to do six LT intervals of six minutes, by golly, you are going to do it! Don’t want to? Have a valid reason not to? Well, acknowledge your valid reason for not taking the action on your plan (that you were up late last night because you chose to watch the Matrix for the sixth time) and get on with your LT intervals anyway. Acting in compliance with your plan is your access to power, and you are going to stick to it.

So, you know what you know. And you now know that your access to power is being in action consistent with your knowledge. And you’ve made coachability your habit. But you may also know that there are things about yourself, your training and your sport that you don’t know. This can be a very powerful thing to know. Because again, being coachable is about being in action on what you know, getting into a conversation, trying on new perspectives, taking the next level. So now you are ready to try on working with a coach.

If a coach is providing your training plan and you don’t know the goal of a certain workout or training phase, ask. After all, you hired your coach to help you get to what you don’t know. You are counting on your coach’s experience with other athletes in the sport to give them a perspective and knowledge that you don’t have. You depend on your coach to recognize your patterns of training and ways of being and to provide you with plans of action based on this new knowledge that will challenge your current ways of being in your life and in your sport. Even if you think your coach doesn’t fit the above description, it’s important to get on the same page. Maybe there are times when you feel strongly about a workout or rest day. When you create a dialog with your coach about those situations, you are being coachable.

We are all coachable some of the time and un-coachable some of the time. Many of us are un-coachable before our morning coffee. Some of us are un-coachable most of the time, and are a joy to work and live with, I am sure! No matter, you can go from being un-coachable to being coachable in an instant. It’s a choice you always have, in every moment of your life. Solicit input and advice from others. Consider and occasionally use the ideas you get…even the ones from your coach, or (gasp) significant other. Your key to power is not knowing, but coachability: acting in compliance with your knowledge, regardless of the source and in spite of your reasons.
back to top

Jonathan Siegel, Director of Coaching
JDS Sportcoaching, LLC

Jonathan Siegel, CSCS is an USA Cycling certified expert coach. His finest moment of coachability came after flailing in deep powder. If you have a comment about this article or a training question, send an email or call 303.744.2766.