Eight Athlete Development Lessons I Learned from Charlie Francis

Derek Hanson's site Runningmechanics.com has an article on lessons learned on athlete development from the late Charlie Francis, Canadian athletics coach. Due to Francis' links to doping and Ben Johnson specifically, I thought about whether to link to this resource, however the post by Hanson is full of coaching wisdom that deserves to be shared and evaluated on it's on merits. 

1. Cast a Wide Net

2. Nothing is Too Fundamental

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Walk Away

4. Adapt to Your Individual Circumstances

5. Coach to Your Athletes’ Strengths

6. Don’t be Tied to One Approach

7. Recovery Will Determine Training Objectives

8. Quality Begets Quality

Read the full article - a great resource for athlete development of any discipline.

The 53 Greatest Lessons 2013 Taught Me

I'm usually more interested in experts who are out in the field practising their craft at the coal face, compared to professional presenters/speakers, however on RobinSharma.com there is a post about 53 lessons learned, which has some thought provoking points applicable to coaches. Here are a few I selected:

"Success has less to do with hard work and more to do with massive focus on your few best opportunities."

"Real leaders have the guts to have the hard conversations."

"Self-belief is so incredibly important. Because if you don’t believe you can achieve a vision/goal, then you won’t even start to do the work needed to achieve that vision/goal."

"Our biggest enemy is our own self-doubt. We really can achieve extraordinary things in our lives. But we sabotage our greatness because of our fear."

"You rarely go wrong when you trust yourself."

"Small little details done excellently and consistently stack up into something the world sees as Mastery."

Any coach can see something applicable to their coaching context in that list.

Lessons Learned as a Performance Coach

Propel Perform has a guest post from Sports Performance Coach Jorge Carvajal about a conversation he had with a young coach about lessons learned. He had these three pieces of advice: 

“Trust your abilities as coach!”

“The athlete needs to be sold.”

‘’Be an economist with you program design!”

Read the full article to get the context behind Jorge's answers. 

Follow Jorge Carvajal @carvperformance