Similar Posts
Who is talking to you?
This happens to Hector all the time. He is in the middle of a training session and he encounters a place of challenge. If the struggle gets real, his mind starts going. At that point, he looks at me and he will explain he had a long week, or that he has never been good...
Some Things I Learned from my Son's Birth
When you don’t know how to start writing, stop thinking and just start. I learned that after 5 years of dissertation writing. The funny thing is that I used to always refer to my dissertation as my “parto” (the labor, the moment of childbirth). This is a common Spanish phrase to refer to something that is long and gruesome. Two days ago, my son Elías was born. After 48 hours of difficult and painful work from my wife together with a great team of medical specialists he is here in the world cute as fuck, healthy and ready to kick ass. I must say I will never call again something a parto, unless it really it is. A dissertation, challenging as it is, not a parto my friends. And my dissertation is not a baby.
Your own personal culture
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.
Learning New Skills
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.
#GOALS
Years ago, I had one excellent opportunity as a teacher. I was trusted to teach a whole class on the mathematical and literary aspects of Alice in Wonderland. For me, that shit was heaven. Let me put it this way, imagine you are a big Star Wars geek, and then a university decides to pay...
Training Hard
We all love to train hard. We love the feeling of working our asses off, yet I think training hard, truly training hard, is greatly misunderstood. Hours of media featuring Energy Drinks, Athletic Shoes, and awesome-sports-movies-action-montages has lead us to confuse training hard with intensity. We have this image in our head that training hard is finishing a workout sweaty and gassed, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling like somebody just punched us in the face and stole all our money while quoting Jame Joyce. That outcome turns out to be fairly easily achieved: just do 50 burpees as fast as you can without stopping... it will take you less than 5 minutes and if you really commit to not stopping you will finish on the ground regretting life.
