Close the Gap

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    Discernment vs. Judgement

    ByJuan Acevedo

    I know I go against all the best SEO/marketing practices. My blog posts are long, I don't have a lot of popular keywords, I don't give a nice summary in the form of three to four bullet points at the beginning, and I don't create a lot of rankings. Yup, I don't do that often. Instead, I start my blog post with a quote from an obscure Austrian write from the beginning of the 20th century. I know our attention spans are short, and we live now in the ethos of the busy life, and precisely because of that, I try to make sure that my three pages are worth your time and make you stop, think, and breathe. I hope you will find this post insightful and that it will help you have a nice break in this Thursday afternoon. Please read it and let me know how it goes!

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    Banzo's sword and metric fixations

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Are you a victim of your metrics? Are you constantly trying to better your metrics, just to feel frustrated and unaccomplished? I have been there, it is awful. In this post I present to you a set of principles that will help you use metrics to serve you and not the other way around.

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    Your own personal culture

    ByJuan Acevedo

    I remember the day I spent a full hour talking to an advertiser about creating my own personal brand. It was like if your uncle Phil who just started jogging spent an hour talking to your friend Jody the ultramarathoner about the importance of having the right running shoes. I did not know the concept at that time, but I was deep in my research of the printing press in the seventeenth century. What I was learning was that most writers of the time had a strong sense of branding. They understood their books as objects in themselves and so they cared about every little aspect of them. They usually would include a self portrait in each of their books. Those portraits, man! They were quite literally an intellectual coat of arms. Everything had a meaning and everything was there for a reason. No contemporary nobel prize winner has ever thought so deeply about the cover of one of their books. The cool thing for me is that there was no pretense that they did not care about material, venial, graphical, or commercial things. They put themselves out there and they wanted people to understand them exactly and fully as they were. The advertiser I was talking to looked at me and with a duh-but-warm smile and said: “yeah, it is all about personal branding.” My head exploded a little.

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    What I have learned from coaching ... so far

    ByJuan Acevedo

    I arrived to coaching after teaching at the college level for fourteen years. I am a voracious learner. I loved (and still do love) universities, and I loved the idea of getting paid to create knowledge and help others learn. However, during all those years in academia, I always felt there was something missing. Despite being surrounded by amazing people, both good students and brilliant colleagues, I always felt lonely. Teaching in a university and academic research are solitary tasks. The whole building -the physical and the institution- is founded on medieval and early modern ideas. Books, authors, and teachers are the main players of the game, and everything revolves around them. It took me years of research to understand that universities by conception are not made for students, universities are made for authors. It was when I started coaching that I understood all this. It was really after spending thousands of hours within the walls of my garage teaching people the basics a human movement literacy that I saw what I felt was missing.

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    Building Confidence

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Confidence is not an end-point. Confidence is based on habit -the folks at Harvard Business Review have it right. You see, the main thing is that confidence is the trust you have in yourself. It is not how much you weigh, or your marathon time. Roger is not waiting to win the Olympic gold to feel confident, on the other hand, he might win it because he is. Your weight or your marathon time will not give you confidence. Trust is not built on one particular outcome. Trust is built on regular delivery.

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    Close the gap!

    ByJuan Acevedo

    What matters is that staying true to your own self is hard. It takes work, and it does not come easy. Quite the opposite, what comes naturally is often not who you want to be. Recording all those videos is easy. Polishing and sharing them is hard. Yet who I want to be is not a video-journaler, I want to be a guide who helps others to be more faithful to themselves by sharing what I have learned in as many mediums (it should be media, but that's confusing) as I can.

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    What I Learned at The 2019 CrossFit Games

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Last week I got to spend one week in Madison, Wisconsin, attending the CrossFit Health Conference and the CrossFit Games. It was a very rewarding experience from beginning to end. I got some good stories about meeting “famous” people and their weird unexpected quirks. I witnessed amazing athletic performances and got to hear some of...

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    Learning New Skills

    ByJuan Acevedo

    When I  start working with a new client , I ask them, how do you think I can help you? The answer is never what a coach would like to hear. I would like to hear some romantic, grandiose version of how awesome coaching can be and how it can change your life for good in ALL the aspects.  But of course it’s never this. The standard answer is structure and accountability. Which usually translates to: tell me what to do and make me do it.  My very first task is to reframe that idea for my athlete, more than providing structure and accountability what I do is create contexts in which they can find what works best for them, and what they want. I create contexts in which they thrive.