Good Coaching and Good Personhood

A good coach is a good person.

As I reflect on what makes a good coach, I get all twisted up in the other roles I play.

A daughter, a sister, an employee, a researcher, a housemate, a friend, a writer, a coach – at first, it feels like the things that make me “good” at each of these things are all so different. That Goodness requires something different from me in each role I play.

I think I feel like that because I’m not always good at any of them, let alone all of them. What I am trying to say is there are many times where I don’t live by the guidelines I’ve just spent the last seven articles writing about.

I struggle to know when my brother needs me and when he doesn’t. I get dysregulated when my partner is strung out and overwhelmed. It takes me months and even years to turn my own losses into lessons. Sometimes all I can see is failure - my own failures and others. The intoxicating lure of talent, of being impressive and special and different, distracts me from the importance of being fair and kind.

The very qualities I am writing about are those that often elude me. How is coaching any different?

I think coaching youth soccer is one of the only places where all that noise, the noise of those roles and the ways that I struggle to be “good” at each of them, narrows and quiets down into a single hum. Coaching is a place where, with work and thoughtfulness, I can come to know what’s required of me and how to be good at it. Being a good daughter? A good girlfriend? Not so simple.

Maybe I write about coaching because I find it easier to articulate what makes you good at it. Maybe I write about coaching because I struggle with goodness more generally. Maybe I write about it because I think good coaching sits in the crosshairs of what it means to be a good person.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines crosshairs as “two thin wires crossing each other in a gun or other device, which you use to help you aim at something”. Using something as callous as a weapon to convey a finer point makes me cringe, but there is something literarily interesting about crosshairs, in the setting of sights upon a target, and the place wherein something crosses over something else.

 By trying and failing and succeeding at being a good coach, I set my sights and aim myself towards being a good person. It makes the journey of being a person easier to understand. Understanding my failures as a coach reflects back on me the way I fail in other places. Opening the field up and examining it is a curious and beautiful place to stare back at myself.

In this way, I can come to appreciate why Narcissus couldn’t move away from his own reflection, fascinated with himself in the water. Here is the place where I am fascinated, not by my own beauty, but by my own likeness.

Where was the last place you came face-to-face with yourself?

As I’ve thought and written about what makes a good coach, I’ve come to believe that what makes me “good” is the same stuff that makes me good elsewhere, because goodness cannot be divorced from itself. 

I love that being a good daughter and girlfriend and sister and writer and housemate and coach and everything else I am is made up of the same stuff applied in different ways. And I fall on my face and fuck it up with the same shit styled differently. It is the gift and curse of personhood that we bring all of ourselves to everything we do. Your best and worst parts. The parts you don’t talk about, and the parts you do. I’m no psychoanalyst but there is something truly Good about the integration of those parts in the roles we play. 

I’m reading a book called No Bad Parts, and author Richard Schwartz writes of Self-integration: “Each part is honored for its unique qualities while also working in harmony with all the others.”

Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel adds, “Health comes from integration. It’s that simple, and that important. A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending: instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie.”

Maybe that is why I am writing about coaching right now. It is my place of Self-integration, and I am the metaphorical equivalent of a very tired, very sweaty fruit-salad.

A reminder for you but mostly a reminder for me: if in coaching or leading or parenting or teaching or loving, you come to face yourself, and the way you grow as a result is hard (read: up a creek without a paddle) but healthy, then stay the course. Keep going.

Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong.  

Sometimes it means you are doing it exactly right.  

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu