Author's preface: For a long time before I did anything else publicly, I was a writer. When I was just beginning my coaching career, I volunteered myself for what I thought was the coolest gig in the sport of swimming, Floswimming. I was given extreme latitude to write whatever came across my mind, and I did. Long after that day, I continued to write blogs in many different forums, often centered around the sport of swimming.
For the past several years, I have become enamored with podcasting. They say that podcasting is the new blog. Back in the day, “everyone” had a blog. Now “everyone” has a podcast. I have, however, realized something. While there are many parallels between the two mediums, they are not the same.
Without drawing this explanation out, I will get swiftly to the point. I have been doing, for some time, weekly podcasts that are entirely monologues. Keen listeners have noticed that sometimes it sounds as if I am reading what I am saying. That is because, I have actually been writing, and then reading it (with many added flourishes) into a microphone. I have, more or less, been blogging in audio format.
I have decided to shift that, at least for the moment. I will now be presenting the same type of information, but in written form only. I will be blogging for blogging’s sake. I will explain why succinctly and then, for god’s sake, let’s get on with it.
I have noticed that I miss blogs, and I wonder if there are more of me out there. When I started writing, at floswimming, everyone believed that video was the future. The internet promised to offer us visual programming that would delight our senses like never before, It delivered. I have also noticed that so many things are amazing at getting our attention, yet also stimulating us to the point of exhaustion. We are at peak stimulation.
Reading, and writing, exists on the other end of the spectrum. Reading is slow, and while some would describe it as stimulating, it is often down regulating in a way that watching some whiz bang video is not. And frankly, I suck at whiz bang, so why play into my weaknesses. Which brings me to the subject of today’s post.
Slow is Better Than Fast
Do you want to provoke people in a sport where performance is almost exclusively measured in seconds and hundredths of seconds? A good place to start is by telling them that up is down, that left is right, and that SLOW, in fact, is better than fast. That is what I’m prepared to defend today.
In fairness, I am overstating the premise. I’m not going to argue that, in competitive terms, swimming a slower time is better than swimming a faster time. I haven’t lost my competitive edge. I’m not about to suggest that in the upcoming Olympic games that Caeleb Dressel and Kyle Chalmers hug it out instead of racing each other in the final because, actually, we’re all like, equal, man.
What I am about to suggest is that when it comes to improvement over the long term, the fastest path is often not the best. That “hacks” and “shortcuts” and even “more efficient” ways to do something are not always what they seem. When I view the sport of swimming today, I believe we have become extremely efficient at producing higher and higher levels of performance. We have come to worship efficiency. We don’t know what we left behind to find this new religion.
So here’s my pitch. If you are truly competitive, if you truly want to be successful, then you know that success is a marathon. A marathon is probably an understatement, since the actual running of a marathon is a matter of hours whereas most success in the field of coaching is measured over years or decades. Therefore, I argue that slow processes, ones that don’t have immediate payoffs but have long term compounding interest, are what you should be overwhelmingly interested in.
Beware the noise
I’m not a stock trader, but like many people I like to imagine that I could be a genius trader if only I was rich enough to take chances. Still, I know that if you zoom in on any given day for any given stock, you will get a very distorted picture of what is going on.
If we were to replace the subjects of coaching, that is people, then we’d see similarly distorted pictures on any given day. Some days the people you coach are wildly up and make massive progress. Some days they seem to be regressing. Other days are completely flat, and everywhere in between.
The data you glean from any single day is noise, but we often don’t treat it as such. That’s because human beings have emotions, and we will often react strongly to those emotions. When things are going well, we can often let our guard down a bit. When things are going poorly, we often believe that something must be done immediately.
So many coaches that I speak to are stuck in what I call “fireman mode”. They react to the emotional lows all around them, putting out “fires” when people around them are down. The immediate emotions of any given situation, however, is just noise. It is a distraction. And being in “fireman mode” is extremely limiting. It leads, in many cases, coaches to become victims of learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness was the unwitting precursor of the field of Positive Psychology. So many concepts from the field are mirrors to concepts previously “discovered” in the field of psychology. The idea that people could actually learn to feel hopeless in a situation started with the father of Positive Psychology torturing dogs.
Much like the dogs in Seligman’s studies, coaches in “fireman mode” learn over time that despite the fact that they are racing all around their team putting out fires, they are not progressing in any meaningful way. They feel that they have reached their absolute capacity for giving, and yet it’s “not enough”.
As a coach, you can escape “firemen mode”, but it is nearly impossible to do by yourself. You see, many coaches are naturally empathetic, compassionate people. They care far more than your average sop. So when the people around them react emotionally, they react emotionally. Being in an emotional space almost completely robs you of the ability to think rationally in a situation. So the solutions we often turn to in “fireman mode” may feel emotionally satisfying but are ultimately unproductive in the long term.
The solution is simple, yet evades the coaches who need it most. You must be able to share what you are experiencing with a dispassionate third party. That is, you could really use some coaching. Or therapy can work, too, depending on your situation. Your chances of moving from a fast, reactive, irrational place to a slow, thoughtful and rational place goes up exponentially when you can reflect on what is going on with another person.
This is almost impossible for coaches that sit at the top of a hierarchy, that is almost every head coach. Assistant coaches can always calm their waters with the boss, if they have a decent one. Head coaches often lack any kind of naturally occurring support structure. The most gratifying coaching I do is one on one with coaches, simply helping them to clear the way to act more strategically and thoughtfully about how they actually coach.
What does strategic and thoughtful look like versus reactive? Here’s something I saw at the Olympic Trials in Indianapolis that has been swirling in my head ever since.
Diversifying your portfolio
Why am I making everything about stocks today? I don’t even like finance bros. I am very much not a finance bro, ok? I am, however, newly 41 years old, and that means that every year I become a little more interested in my 401k. A basic principle of investing is that you don’t put all money into one stock.
As I was watching the most spectacular Olympic Trials Ever™ I couldn’t help but notice that many of the best performers competed in diverse sets of events. A decade ago I expected more and more specialization. But as it turns out, it’s not even good for your 50 free to just focus on the 50 free.
I famously committed whole hog to USRPT (Ultra Short Race Pace Training) at one point in my coaching career. It was probably a contributing factor in my wrongful termination from my one, and only, head coaching job. I’ve shared this reflection before, but it’s worth repeating.
If you gave me just a matter of weeks to make someone faster than they are now, I would absolutely try to do as much race pace as possible with them. I wouldn't bother building up their capacity. I would just try to squeeze as much specificity out of them right here, right now. Especially if you told me that they just had to do well in one event. We’d focus the training almost overwhelmingly on one race.
When we expand to a year round environment, the calculus changes. You don’t just reach a point of diminishing returns by overwhelmingly focusing on one thing or a limited set of things. You can actually start to inhibit your progress on whatever it is you are focused on by continually trying to force too much energy through a limited aperture. You gum up the works on the thing you are most focused on.
Investment in training for the 1500 is not particularly beneficial to being good at the 50. But it’s not NOT beneficial. Sometimes, in a given portfolio, this indirect slow method of improvement is actually the easiest way to improve.
To expand this to coaches, most coaches are like myself: complete junkies for the sport. They are missing opportunities for improving their coaching that are completely indirect. They don’t realize that having a hobby, rather than detracting from their coaching, actually will help their coaching to progress faster. They miss that investing in relationships outside of the sport will actually improve their relationships inside. They can become overwhelmingly focused on a few burning branches in an otherwise healthy forest, still stuck in “firemen mode”, trying desperately to be perfect coaches at their own detriment.
If you’re a coach, especially a “head” coach, find someone that can coach you, consistently. It’s the only way to escape the constant tug of the day to day emotionality in coaching for yourself.