Earlier this week I posted a podcast with three-time US Olympic coach Greg Meehan. It’s worth listening to. There’s two things I want to comment with regards to the podcast.
The first, which I will cover shortly, is that I don’t typically book “famous” coaches onto the podcast. I’ve struggled with why that is. Is it because I don’t naturally travel in those circles? Was Nikki Kett, despite her recent descent into ayahuasca right when she told me that I’m subconsciously sabotaging my own success?
Or can my ego not handle it? I don’t know, but having Greg on encouraged me to pursue more high profile guests on the Swim Brief. I had a blast doing the interview, and to boot I learned a lot while doing it.
Which brings me to my second point. Towards the third act of the podcast, Greg and I get into a discussion of “balancing” personal life and coaching. The way that he answered the question made me reconsider my perspective.
Chasing Perfection
One thing that I hear frequently from coaches, regardless of whether they are married, single, have kids or no kids is this. They often feel guilt about neglecting their personal life when they are at work, and they feel guilt about neglecting their work when they are in their personal life.
My natural inclination, as I think many people share, was to view it as a zero sum game. You have a pie of your time and attention, and if you could just find the appropriate percentage to give to your job and the appropriate percentage to give elsewhere, everything would “work”.
Another way to imagine balance is to picture yourself walking a tight rope. There is such a narrow band for success, lose your footing to either side and you will suffer a catastrophic fall. You can imagine that’s quite an unrealistic approach to take with dynamic situations that involve real people, not math equations.
The true a-ha moment was when Greg showed me the implicit perfectionism in that framing. Where did the guilt of neglecting your personal life come from? For me at least, it came from an idealism, that if only I were better I could out-coach Bob Bowman while simultaneously being lauded by my wife at the “World Husband of the Year” awards. Throw in my children feeling my presence at every crucial moment as well as my friends all agreeing that I was empathetic, supportive AND hilarious, you have the sum of my unrealistic expectations for myself.
Harmony is something else entirely. Harmony is not a single pie, it’s more of a layer cake. Two things that you can overlap on each other. They don’t always need to be consumed in the same bite, but when they are it’s all the more appealing.
Since I pivoted to interviews this past summer, there is one revelation that has cut across all of my interviews with highly successful coaches in our sport. My ego tells me, perhaps correctly so, that I “can hang” with them. I could do what they’re doing. I could coach a top USA Swimming club. I could be a Division 1 college head coach. Even as I speak to Meehan, I think to myself, I could get a swimmer to the US Olympic team.
But I’m not. What is the difference between myself and those that are doing it? What distinction do I draw between the theoretical possibility and the realized aspirations? They are willing to do it.
I’ve talked often about the difference between motivation from compulsion and voluntary motivation. Put more simply, the difference between needing to do something and wanting to do it. Ultimately, perfectionism drives compulsion until you collapse on all fronts. But “volunteering” is more than spontaneously deciding that you “want” to do something.
One of my recent revelations about myself is that I get zero satisfaction from the completion of mundane tasks. Some people, they organize their closet and they feel like they really did something! I am not one of those people. Therefore, if I look to any particular task that I may think I should complete, I can’t anticipate a sense of satisfaction for having done it.
Therefore, I must construct for myself a more complex interconnection of motivations. I take the mundane tasks and explicitly build up their connection to something that I know I desperately want. I weave the synapses to something that holds great emotional weight, so that I am not just FOLDING THE LAUNDRY.
No, sir, I am making sure my wife and I grow old and gray together.