One of those funny short week days today. I have Friday off work this week so that we can go on a family trip and we had yesterday off due to a Public Holiday, and so this week is going to be a very short 3 days long. It is always a little bit strange when you get these weeks as you just feel like you are getting started when the week ends. It begs the question whether it is actually worth getting started in the first place. The short week also makes it really hard to remember what day of the week it actually is. I spent most of the day being pretty sure that today was Monday.
Oh well, I am happy to soldier on with my 3 day work week if I have to. Tough, but somebody has to do it.
As well as not spending much time in the office, the other thing I am not doing much of this week is coaching. I will be down the pool a couple of times with Swim Smooth but that is about it, since we are going away this weekend, there won't be any coaching on the weekend. I am really loving coaching, but it will be nice to have such a nice quiet week. Coaching has been fairly solid since I started a few months ago, so the quiet weekend is welcome.
On the coaching front, I am really happy with how it has been going. I signed up my 7th athlete today, which means I am nearly at my capacity of 8. As well as that, over the past few months I think I am starting to get an idea of what sort of coach I think I would like to be. It turns out I am a very talky one.
In all seriousness I am learning that for me coaching is about the personal contact. I like being hands on, speaking to people and making sure I am providing the right solution to them. It makes the process sort of time consuming, but I suspect that if I did it differently I wouldn't be happy or satisfied with it. It makes me also realise that long term I probably don't want to run a big squad. Certainly while I am also working full time I simply don't have the time to coach a lot of people, not if I want to do it the way I do. However, even if I was to stop working I think I would have to cap the training group to a relatively small number to ensure I was able to keep the quality of my coaching at the level that I expect of myself.
It has been an interesting experience learning what my coaching style is, but it a lesson that I am glad to be learning. Heading into coaching I really had no idea about what my 'coaching philosophy' was and I was hoping that it would be something that I would form as I got into it. In fact my lack of philosophy was something that worried me, it felt like something important and I felt like not having an idea of how I would coach meant I was a bit of a phony. As I develop a better idea of what sort of coach I am it is giving me a bit of confidence and assurance about how I am doing things. My style might not be for everyone, but it doesn't have to be, the more I think about it, the more confident I am that it is the right way for me. Having this confidence means I am not second guessing myself as much if I am doing things differently to how I see others coach. I know what is working for me and my athletes and that is all I need.
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