Should it be really metric lead or metric informed?
Like all great wisdom this is something that had stuck with Prof Chris for more than 20 years and when he said this to me, it felt like it was passed down to me, especially with my obsession to quantify all things. It got me thinking how could my venture be both! Lead and informed!
Discussing technology enabled sports coaching with to Professor Chris Chris Edmundson - High Performance Coach was a real eye opener. To give a bit of context, I came across professor Chris, recently, by accident whilst looking for mentors for my journey as performance coach and wanting to pursue a doctorate in sports and coaching. Having done it alone for the past 5 years, it was organic that I reached to mentors to further hone my craft. For reasons unknown, almost like some sort of intuition I added Prof Chris and reach out with a couple of questions and a call for help and to be mentored.
Going through Chris’s profile, he embodied high performance, not just coaching but also as an athlete and a human! I could see that our coaching philosophies were very much in sync and to learn from someone with close to 30 years of experience working with high performance athletes across various sports would be a privilege and to tap into that wisdom would be like hitting gold!
Long story short,
Prof Chris was gracious and welcoming to reply to me saying, let me try answering over a call rather tapping out a long message which spoke volumes of the coach he is and more importantly the man he is! What really stuck out for me was his approach and nonconformity nature to high performance coaching. Engineer and psychologist like human centric approach to coaching and his commitment to life long learning. The approach to coaching with, ‘I don’t have all the right answers but we are going to find it together’ is another testament to this! His eccentric nature and being an absolute outlier and generosity combined with his wisdom and knowledge makes him a tier A performance coach and a stoic in nature! Embody your wisdom!
We spoke about ‘sentient’, my startup, in great detail and the advice I received was invaluable. In my quest to find or create the holy grail of coaching he really gave me a few key takeaways to think about and how to integrate it into a coaching system enabled by technology!
To be mentored by a trailblazer is a gift, I always believed trailblazers are born but could only be forged by other trailblazers to be the trailblazers who they were born to be of their time! It’s no secret, anyone worth their salt were outliers. To conclude, this reminds me of the famous Aristotle quote, “There is no great genius without some touch of madness”
Signing off,
RO
FOR SENTIENTS BY SENTIENT
