If you read about on this website, you’ll hear me mention the term ‘Performance Coach’ quite often. But what exactly is a Performance Coach? Well, it’s a question that is oddly tricky to answer.
There’s a lot of confusion and unsurety over the answer. If we simplified the answer by simply looking at qualifications, in the UK, there are three levels of qualification: Foundation; Development and Performance Coach awards. But while the Foundation and Development Coaches are relatively easy to define, even experts fail to really understand the Performance Coach.
Many assumptions often come to the fore. Performance Coaches must be the best one right? So surely they coach the best people? Say at the Olympics. They’re the ones working with the elite? Likewise, surely you’re bound to find Performance Coaches working with those under the most stress? Perhaps, and probably, yeah but does that also make it exclusive?
What about recreational climbers? Climbing has often been an activity that has shunned formalised competition, judging difficulty – and thus each other – based on the difficulty of the climb itself (think the fabled E grade). If those climbers trying routes with death fall potential or insanely complicated or technical moves, surely that’s where you’d find a Performance Coach.
Maybe they’re the ones working with the ones who will become the elite? So youth coaches. After all, there’s a common misconception that coaching is for kids. Again, yes, this is a good place to find one but does this lead us to a definition? Not necessarily.
In this article, I’m going to dig into my own definition of a ‘Performance Coach’. And spoiler alert, it is not necessarily what you might expect. Please note, though that this is MY PERSONAL DEFINITION, not that of any other governing body or organisation.
Time Frames
Firstly let’s go back to distinctions from Mountain Training. Their awards are generally delineated by the length of time that a coach works with their group. This is reflected in what is required at assessment:
- Foundation Coaches will be assessed on a one-off session with a group of individuals. These may be people they have worked with before but not necessarily
- Development Coaches are “focused on helping climbers improve over a series of sessions” and thus, on assessment, will include two sessions: one with existing clients and one with new ones
- Performance Coaches “work with climbers over a long period of time” typically creating training plans and the like
But I remain to be convinced. Increasingly, I’m finding that there is a marked difference between Development and Performance Coaches that I observe; something much more subtle.
Then it struck me: there is a way that these different level coaches can think about these time-frame differences while not necessarily having repeated contact time with their clients over time.
The Gardener Anaolgy
I love a good analogy and this one seems to sum things up quite nicely: The Gardener Analogy. Note that all through this, each level coach plays an important role and each will help to improve either the climber/client/garden. The difference is how they go about it and crucially, the way they approach the situation.
We can think of different coaches in the same way as gardeners tending to a garden. Indeed, someone’s climbing performance can work incredibly like a garden, growing and developing over time, sometimes not quite going in the direction we thought we would, sometimes getting messy, occasionally getting swamped and overwhelmed by external factors, occasionally getting barren by a lack of input. The coach’s role, then, is to keep the garden on track, growing in the right direction.
This is where the different levels come in. Each level coach/gardener may well work every day so it is not the contact time that changes but the approach.
- The Foundation Coach pulls the weeds and collects the litter. They deal with the immediate, they keep things tidy and largely deal with the obvious issues that come to the fray. The garden will then continue to grow naturally, free from the distractions that may come along.
- The Dev Coach reacts to the season and knows some are perennial plants and others ephemeral. Yes, they will also tend to the weeds but that isn’t their focus. They are now starting to plant new plants in the garden but have in the back of their mind this idea that planting one plant near another may work right now but may not work later.
- But this is where the Performance Coach stands out. Again, they can weed, they can plant herbacious borders but there is more. The Performance Coach can see much further into the future and will plant the sapling. They are no longer looking at how the garden is right now but more that it may become. They might stay to watch it grow and develop but they may also leave others to it, safe in the knowledge they have planted the seeds for the future. They do not then need to stay to water it
As you can see, each of these roles has merit; they all perform a different task. In some ways, the Foundation Coach plays a much bigger role in the day-to-day maintenance/improvement and that’s fine. But then, as we’ve said, the Performance Coach can play any of the previous roles where the others cannot.
There is scope to move up the scale though. With learning and development, it is certainly possible for any coach to move up to the next level and as we’ve said, it is a case of adding more skills rather than losing old ones.
Am I Good Enough To Hire A Performance Coach?
Well, this is indeed the question many people comment to me. They look at other clients I work with and think they’re not operating at the required level. It is simply not true.
If we come back to our analogy, we have mentioned nothing of the state of the garden being tended. It may be big, it may be small. It may be in great shape, it may be in complete disrepair. It really doesn’t matter.
Nor do we necessarily need to commit for long periods of time. We can, and we can hire any of the three gardeners for as long as we wish; that is not what will change. What we gain from the Performance Coach is the knowledge that they are not coaching us to the next grade, they are planting the seeds that will see us improving for many years to come.
The benefit of a Performance Coach is that they are planting the seeds right now. You may not even realise it at first but eventually, that little shoot will start to grow into something much bigger and more beautiful.