Coaches & Students

It's a common misconception that coaches are there to give you answers. This expectation leads to a passive, submissive learning environment that is not conducive to skill development. It's far more accurate to say that the coach is there to present you with relevant problems for you to solve in your own, unique way.

If a coach simply hands you an answer, they deprive you of real learning. It may feel like you've solved your problem, but that's not how learning works. You need to explore, fail and come up with your own solutions if you want to progress. The coach is simply there to make sure you have the opportunity to develop your style throughout this process.

Everyone has different life experiences, skill levels and aptitude. A coach who tries to cram you into a specific mold is therefore doing you a disservice. Likewise, a student who expects the coach to passively absorb answers is doing their coach a disservice. Both feed into each other: the coach by opening doors, and the student by walking through them.

When coaching another person, your focus has to be on them. A good coach devotes their focus beyond themselves, utilizing their accumulated experience to help others accelerate their progress. The big question is how they accomplish this goal.

More than anything, a coach is there to build a high-quality training environment. This environment represents a place where each student can fulfill their athletic potential to the best of their abilities in the shortest period of time possible. Although the coach has no choice but to correct obvious errors in the student's game, much of the work revolves around allowing the student to develop in their own, unique way.

Sometimes that means deliberately letting students stumble and fail, as painful as that may be. Just as a parent should both keep their children safe and not deprive them of the benefits of failure, sometimes it's necessary to let students lose in their own way. This is part of what it means to care about someone, as there are times when words simply won't persuade and mistakes must be made for the lesson to be learned.

Bad Coaches

Unfortunately, martial arts in particular has a problem with coaches who think the attention should be entirely on them. This is a serious perversion of the role of the coach. If the focus is on you, your ego, your needs, etc. then you cease to be a coach and instead become some sort of quasi-guru.

Although it's quite minor in the grand scale of things, there is power to be had as a coach. Within that environment, the coach is seen as an authority figure. If they're a less scrupulous person, they may be tempted to create a cult-like atmosphere free of criticism of the leader and filled with abuses of their power. This is not what it means to be a coach or teacher, and should never be tolerated by students.

This can manifest in multiple ways, but the most telling sign is that coaches treat their position as a justification for unwelcome intrusions into your personal life. Remember: a coach is just someone who helps you get better at a very specific activity. No matter how profound or meaningful that activity may be to you, they do not have the secrets of the universe hidden in their black belt. That's not how life works.

Bad coaches also try to monopolize their student's attention. They feel threatened if a student explores other training environments or methods, and will try to pressure you into obeying them. Be very clear when interacting with any coach: you are not there to obey, you are there to learn. If they don't understand that, you're dealing with a bad coach and should leave.

Coaching & Competing

Coaching is a skill, one that is often incompatible with the demands of competition. It requires the refinement of communication skills and an understanding of the science of learning. People who are good as competitors are often terrible as coaches, since they have focused exclusively on the game itself rather than the skills needed to teach others.

In order to be effective as a coach, one must specialize and focus on their students to ensure they're successful. When a coach decides to be a competitor as well, they simply cannot dedicate the needed resources to being a good coach. If anything, they hurt their chances as a competitor as well since they have to split their mental and physical resources between two very different activities.

John Danaher, hands-down the most successful jiu-jitsu coach of all time, has done a great service to the martial arts world by showing how effective coach-competitor specialization can be. He sustained childhood injuries that prevented him from ever competing, and he instead focused his full energy on helping his athletes be successful in competition. The results have been nothing short of spectacular, and it shouldn't be surprise to anyone who knows anything about coaching in other sports.

Consider for a moment how ridiculous it would be in sports like football to carry over this competitor coach ideal. Bill Belichick, the most successful football coach in history, was a middling player and couldn't compete even at the college level. Should the players on his team think less of him because he doesn't lead the team onto the field and throw touchdown passes every Sunday?

Additionally, coaches in other sports often have formal training of some kind that makes them better qualified for their jobs. In martial arts, once you achieve a certain rank—by just playing the game—you are suddenly deemed worthy of the coach role. This means that the vast majority of martial arts coaches are throwing darts in the dark when it comes to helping their students improve.

This is all done (for the most part) with good intentions. I understand why coaches feel a need to lead by example, or to demonstrate to their students that they know what it's like to step into that environment. It's healthy for coaches to have some competitive experience, but in martial arts there's an unhealthy focus on the competitive record and current activity level of coaches. My hope is that in time martial arts will catch up with other sports and start to recognize that the skills needed to be a good coach are distinct and require singular focus.

The Role of the Student

It's easy to get the coach side wrong, and it's easy to spot it from a mile away. What's less discussed, but just as important, is how the student plays a role in this relationship.

Unlike the coach, your entire job as a student is to focus on yourself and work to improve what you do on a regular basis. In order for this to work, you must maintain an open and honest mind when it comes to feedback, and you must be an active participant in your own development. Without these pieces, it's impossible to make real progress—even someone with world-class potential will fail with a closed mind and an expectation that others will hand them the answers.

Nothing short-changes a coach-student relationship like this dynamic. When a student has a toxic attitude, there's not much that can be done. Even the best coaches will fail to help them because they don't understand how important their independent participation in the process is.

The Coach-Student Contract

All of this creates a contract between coaches and students:

• The coach's obligation: create a training environment that allows the student to fulfill their potential in the shortest time possible while providing the freedom to develop their own way.

• The student's obligation: approach training with an open mind, explore their own potential and be an active participant in the process.

If either person feels the contract is not being fulfilled, then it's within their rights to walk away. A coach who creates a poor training environment does not deserve to keep their students. Likewise, a student who refuses to engage meaningfully with the learning process does not deserve to keep a coach who must dedicate resources to their development in order to do their job.

As a coach, you shouldn't hold it against a student who leaves. This is natural for many reasons, and it's often an opportunity for an honest examination. Are you holding up your end of this contract? Be brutally realistic, because that's the only way to get to the truth.

Likewise, if you're a student, I hope you realize that you are never obligated to stick with a coach. If you feel your potential isn't blooming, then you are within your rights to find a new environment where it will.