Similar Posts
- Close the Gap | Coaching | Fitness | Mindset
What I have learned from coaching ... so far
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.
Walking Naked and Other Uncomfortable Things
Borges is one of those writers that is highly appreciated yet poorly understood. You might have heard of him, but probably you haven’t read his writings. His work reminds me of David Bowie. There is this aura of bizarreness that covers it. It makes it seem disruptive and avant-garde. Yet it’s simple, classic, and universal....
Henrick's Rower and Results Oriented Mindsets
The first time I explained to one of my male athletes that the Concept2 rower was made with a specific body type in mind it totally backfired. Henrick was complaining to me about the size of his arms, telling me it made doing pull ups harder. He was using this narrative to explain why he...
How literate are you?
Because of this digital illiteracy (that we are not fully aware of) we find ourselves in a world of confusion and tribalism today. This is true in the world of politics, and it is true in the world of fitness, nutrition, and mindset. My objective with this post is to give you an overview of two common mistakes the digital reader makes, as well as a tool you can use to evaluate the quality of the information you are reading. Let’s start with the suck.
What I Learned at The 2019 CrossFit Games
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...
Positive Habits of Mind
You see, Mindset is one of those concepts that has become very popular and because of that, it has lost specificity. It is often vague. On top of that, our ideas around it come from academia, especially from the Psychology departments -although not exclusively. This means that we often look at it from one of two points of view 1) a very superficial one; or 2) a pathological one. The first case is represented in the average daily use. When a person says mindset most of the time they just mean attitude. When Henrick tells me: “Juan I went to that meeting with the right mindset, I was ready to crush it.” That’s not a mindset, it is an attitude. The second case means that we have become very good at identifying mindsets that are unproductive. We have identified general trends and their negative consequences. In other words, we are better at understanding the commonalities among the mindsets of people with poor ones, than among those who have good ones. All together, this means that when it comes to Mindset we need a little bit of a Francine attitude in the world. We need to be positive and specific. Just tell people what to do! This post is for you Francine. Let’s do this.
