When I pause to think about it, I’m swinging between a number of roles throughout the week. One of those roles is that of coach at Mark Fisher Fitness. Another is as the manager of our Program Design Team. The third is as a passionate educator pushing our Motivation and Movement LAB series forward. I do these while trying to make sure there’s coffee waiting for my girlfriend when she wakes up every morning.
It’s a challenge to do any of these things without being inspired to learn more while I go, which is why I attend events like the Perform Better Functional Training Summit. (If you haven’t seen it, I think my yearly recap is absolutely worth the read.)
On the way to Providence last week, I hopped on the phone with Matt McGunagle of Strength Portal, a platform for trainers to enhance their ability to train and track client progress. Matt and I were on the phone for almost an hour, and he whipped up a 10-12 minute read that contains some of the biggest things I’ve learned over the course of my career. Here are three of my big rocks:
- Relatedness is everything. The usefulness of a particular program or exercise is limited by how well we communicate to our Ninja/client/athlete. Significance is all about our relationship, not about our technical knowledge.
- On a related note; your formal fitness education or certification is likely not as important as your ongoing education within the field. So much of our education is happening in house. Someone may go to a conference and then they will come back and teach the rest of us what they learned. It was an incredibly organic teaching environment where we were all sharing ideas at about the same rate. When everyone can learn from everyone, both within a team and without a team, we’re bound to continue to greatness.
- On a personal level, my greatest aspiration as a coach is to pass on my skillsets to others. I saw this beautiful quote that someone posted on Facebook the other day: In the Zen tradition the Zen Master doesn’t have any students because he has taught his students to be their own teachers. That’s my highest aspiration. I want to teach my clients and my co-workers to teach themselves.
Excited to dive into more of MFF’s inner workings, and what I’m personally working on?
Harold Gibbons 