https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Hkxcb0R4ZOc
What makes a good coach, right? That’s part of what I’m interested in. I thought about this years ago and the first thing that makes a great coach is actually caring deeply about helping the person in front of them solve their problem. The second thing that matters deeply is having the knowledge to help them and the third thing is having the charisma that allows you to create the connection and convince and persuade them to execute and to attend to the lecture. So, yeah, very often the thing that makes somebody an extraordinary coach is much less to do with their awareness of the optimization of sets and reps, more to do with their ability to get a deeper pore with the student or the athlete. I think that’s also, I mean, I run up against this with trying to articulate what makes somebody a good teacher and it’s, you can’t replace the wise use of charisma with just the, you know, the methodological application of technique. It’s just not the same. Something happened to me the other night that is so convergent with what you’re saying. My partner and I, we were listening to some music and I sort of, I knew she liked the Moonlight Sonata and I sort of, I played it on my phone and then she stopped me and said, go and look up this and look up the Moonlight Sonata by this person. Now, she’s a trained musician, I’m not. And so I go and get this other one and I play it and she’s saying things like, notice how he’s robbing a little bit of timing from this note and giving it to that note and notice how it’s deep and she unfolds this appreciation for me and I go, oh my gosh, this is so much better. The other was mechanical, right? It’s perfect technique, but it’s missing all of this, right? It’s missing all of this other stuff. A lot of times the thing that helps you solve complex problems is actually play. Yes, serious play. As a martial artist, right? You could train techniques, techniques, techniques, techniques every day, all day, and you can have a bigger set of techniques than anybody else. But it’s the feel for how to create solutions in vivo with another person that allows you to have success. And that’s fundamentally the same thing in some sense as being a teacher, as being a coach, because play is repetition with variation, right? Yes. The verb, I do Tai Chi Chuan, right? And the verb, you don’t do Tai Chi, the Chinese verb is you play it, the way you play music, right? You’re a Tai Chi player. And it’s the same sort of thing. Serious play is the way we go through these very difficult, transformative experiences. Therapy is a kind of serious play. Martial arts with non-properly are serious play. That’s what we’re saying. I think another disservice our culture has given us is we’ve lost the category serious play. Play has been assimilated to leisure and to fun, right? And some play is entertaining. And I’m not saying we dispense with that. But we shouldn’t reduce all play to entertaining play. Some play is the serious play that engages fundamental transformative processes for us. I have recognized within parkour that it is, and these other practices that have come to build evolve and play, that they that they’re a way to engage in a serious practice of self-information. You’re going to find some novel challenge that you’re going to test yourself against. And then you’re going to play with it by adding variations, by moving things around, by exploring it in new ways. Yeah. In this world that we exist in that has become so ordered in certain ways, we need something that allows us to do that, to reimagine play and to bring play into our life and to engage with it in a serious way.