"Collecting memories rather than medals" - a conversation with Tom Hartley - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Talent Equation Podcast. If you are passionate
about helping young people leash their potential and want to
find ways to do that better, then you've come to
the right place. The Talent Equation podcast seeks to answer
the important questions facing parents, coaches, and talent developers as

(00:22):
they try to help young people become the best they
can be. This is a series of unscripted, unpolished conversations
between people at the razor's edge of the talent community
who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences, and challenges
in an effort to help others get better faster. Listen, reflect,

(00:43):
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot uk.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Enjoy the show.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, well, here is an overdue guest. Most of my
guests are overdue because they should have been on the
podcast a lot longer, a lot earlier than they actually are.
But this one in particular has been on the on
the radar for quite a while. We've had lots of
conversations in a professional setting, but we never really be

(01:20):
nice to be able to record any of them for
the podcast. And as far as you look, gold from
this fine fellow. But anyway, Tom Hartley, welcome. Relatedly to
the talent equation.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thanks ju nice to be a guest at long Last.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
I mean, one of the reasons, if not many, of
the reasons I've been really keen to have you on
is your You are or certainly were very prolific on
Twitter and in general, would either share some really fascinating
insights or ask really poignant questions that I always think

(01:57):
got that particular question. Why didn't I think to ask
that question? But anyway, I know you're more than just
a Twitter personality, So I wonder if you wouldn't mind
just telling the story, like, you know, how did you
your journey, the things that you've done, the places that
you've been, how you got involved in coaching in the
first place, all of that good stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
By the way, I have a tendency to go off
on lots of different rambles with this stuff. So you
and me both were in real trouble. And by the way,
since Twitter became X and all the algorithms have changed changed,
my change my engagement level, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
So my rocky road, my journey to where I am now.
I didn't go to university. I made the very deliberate
choice when I was about seventeen eighteen years old that
I wanted to have loads of experiences in an applied
nature in coaching, and football was always my always my
go to I'm a swim and tail fan. Eight years

(03:00):
old when I got taken to my first ever football
match and Swindon went up to the Premier League, the
Busy Heights, and I knew from that moment onwards working
in football was where I wanted to be, whether that's
a coach or a player or whatever whatever it was.
And I got to about sixteen years old and realized
I wasn't going to make it in a playing capacity,
and I think everybody else realized that a few years previous,

(03:21):
but the collected to tell me, and coaching was always
the obvious thing to go and do. So I studied
my A levels, I got my basic coaching qualifications and
I started to try some stuff out and I was
really fortunate that the the people who run the Community
Foundation at Swindon had an open door and I went
in and they were almost my very first unofficial mentors

(03:43):
or supporters, and I didn't really realize it at the time,
but they just created an environment where they made me
feel really welcome, and they put the support around me
in terms of more experienced coaches and some kids to
go and coach. That gave me the chance to go
and practice my practice, and I spent lots of really
happy years where I started to do some work in
their academy and their community set up, and just loads

(04:07):
from being kind of on the ground and out and about.
But for me, the driver at that point was how
do I make this something that pays the bills and
becomes a profession and becomes a job. And it felt
in football it probably feels like it's still now that
full time jobs in football are certainly gold dust, and

(04:28):
accessing those jobs is a matter of what you know
or who you know, where you are, and being in
the right place at the right time, and a whole
host of other things. But after working on some different
projects and having the opportunity to go and do a
bit of coaching in the States, a job came up
at the FA and they just set up a new
program called the FA Skills Program, which was sponsored by

(04:51):
a big supermarket, and they'd just recruited sixty five coaches
to start this program. But they had resource for sixty
six and I happened to bump into somebody said, ah,
but there's one position to fill in Hampshire. You're quite
close to there, aren't you. And I just happened to
be in the right place to have a conversation, which
up called Nick Levett, who we both know, and Les

(05:13):
Howie who was the head of grass Roots at the
FA at the time, and we got an interview set
up and then the rest really was history. I spent
ten years at the FA and I still reflect on
that time as it was a ten year apprenticeship program.
I had the best time being a coach and working

(05:34):
with in school groups, web settings and then our own
skill centers, which is like your alternative development pathway which
sat outside of academy structures and it was great. So
when the FA developed new qualifications aimed at coaching young people,
we were almost a guinea pigs for that. We had

(05:54):
actual time in our working week to plan and reflect
on our practice rather than just being paid to deliver stuff.
And beyond this hamster wheel of turning out session outter session,
and you were part of this big community of coaches
across the country which got to about one hundred and
twenty at its height, doing really awesome stuff for kids,

(06:15):
and it was based in primary school setting. We were
doing things alongside teachers as well, because ultimately they were
the experts of pedagogy and we were coming in with
knowing a bit about football. Always felt that working alongside
teachers was really powerful because you could bring together the
skills of two professions which were very related but from

(06:36):
slightly different worlds. And yeah, yeah, I spent ten years there,
worked in a few different roles. First experience of leading
a team in coaching as well, which was really interesting too.
And also the thing that really struck me from the
FA when I think back about it was the county
efa structure that exists in football, and how the FA
Skills Program was a national football program, but it really

(06:56):
came to life through the local partnerships and what skills
program looked like in Oxfordshire or Hampshire or Lincolnshire had
the same guiding principles but met a different local need.
And it was really a privilege to work alongside County
fays because they knew their context better than anybody else,

(07:17):
so you were able to take what kind of was
true to the program putting children first, but then blend
it with we're really focusing on this group right now
of graf Room's coaches, and we want to help them. So, yeah,
ten years at the FA and I was ready for
a change. And the thing that I was really missing
was the opportunity to go and take some of the

(07:38):
things I'd learned, especially around working in these different environments.
But how the environments of schools and clubs and player
development pathways were all connected that apply it. So I
went to Arsenal worked for Arsenal Women for three and
a half years, and I definitely did about seven years
work in the three and a half years, such as

(07:58):
the nature of being in that type of environment, but
it was it was fast paced. What's the expression you
try stuff, fail fast, and learn quickly. And we did
some really exciting work when I was at Arsenal. So
we developed our player development pathway. It was all about

(08:20):
the experience for the girls. We wanted. We had some
principles around wanting every girl to love the game. That
was like the number one thing we wanted the experience
to feel like that. The coach the girls met when
they came into our sessions was the best coach they've
ever had. So we spent lots of time with the
coaches in our workforce talking about what does that mean then,

(08:41):
what is the experience of a child if they are
coming to sessions with their best coach ever. And what
we wanted to do was move as well as supporting
the kids to have a great time work with the
coaches in their grassroots clubs. So we raised the water level.
So every experience that child has, it's with Arsenal or
their grassroots club, was just a bit better than it

(09:03):
was maybe last year or the year before that. And
it also gave me the opportunity to go off and
coach around the world and experience what coach development looked
like in the middle of nowhere in Spain where nobody
spoke English, and we spent a week delivering coach education
and stuff for the players with Google Translate, which was

(09:26):
certainly a developmental experience. A home could order of beer
in the evening. That was about it really, through to
going off to North America and Canada, did some work
every day. It was great. There was just just this
rich collection of experiences. The richest experience I had at
Arsenal was coaching in prison. So the ex vice chairman

(09:49):
of Arsenal football Club chat called David Dean set up
a project called the Twinning Project. And the ambition of
the Twinning Project was to link football club with its
local prison, football as a vehicle to have an impact on
reducing reoffending. And that's a world I never imagined working in,
but realized quite quickly that you're working with people who

(10:12):
have had a radically different journey to you and you
can't go into that space being judgmental or holding too
firmly onto the beliefs around the prison system. So I
went into an HMP down View, which is a women's
prison in South London about sixty times, and football was

(10:34):
the vehicle for loads of other stuff. And did it
have an impact on reducing reoffending. I really don't know.
But what I do know is that we built relationships
with people who struggle, to build relationships with men who
had really negative experiences of learning, and we did stuff that,

(10:55):
if nothing else, made the time that they had in
prison lightly more batterable and slightly more than just doing
their time. Yeah. So there's a whole world of stuff
in there. And then following on from Arsenal, I joined
UK Coaching back at the beginning of COVID and I've

(11:16):
spent four and a half years now to date at
UK Coaching in a few different roles. One is a
coach developer role supporting the development of people who help coaches,
so tutors, assessors, coach developers, that type of person in
a role directly working with coaches through some of the
work we've done with UK Sport and coaches working across

(11:36):
Olympic and Paralympic sports, and then leading the coaching team
at UK Coaching, and as well as doing the doing
and being quite applied with still working directly with coaches
in their context, trying to join the dots to make
the work that we do more sustainable, whether that's on
a community level or through to a performance level. But

(11:59):
I think we've UK Coaching. It was one of those
moments where my learning curve coming to the organization was
really steep. I felt like a peak idiot when I
stepped in the door all that stuff I've been done
over the last twenty years in football, I just realized
that I knew absolutely nothing of someone who I did

(12:20):
a podcast with a few years ago called Damien Hughes
and it takes the Dunning Krueger model of expertise and confidence,
and he calls like that low inexperience but high in
confidence peak idiot. Then moving into the value of humilities,
you realize that you know you know some stuff, but
you're not there yet. And then the hill of knowledge.
And I feel like I've got to a point now
where I'm moving between the humble valley and the hill

(12:43):
of knowledge. Recognizing that every conversation I have with a
sport or a coach or a coach developer, I'm learning
something all the time.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
Is great.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
I remember one of my early conversations with some coaches
at UK Coaching. We had a canoeing coach and a
basketball coach on the same community of practice, and we
are talking about their role supporting athletes in competition, and
the basketball coach was saying, look, I'm intrinsic to the game.
I call timeouts, and then in those timeouts, I'm providing

(13:14):
information and making changes, and that they were an active
participant in competition, where the canoeing coach was saying, well,
say goodbye and they disappear and I'm not there for
the rest of the race. The shape of my coaching
sessions is totally different because I'm coaching for redundancy. And
I had that moment of stepping back from the screen, thinking, wow, yeah,

(13:35):
and what does that mean for trying to join the
dots back into my world as a football coach? And actually,
when do I need to be a bit more like
a canoeing coach? And when do I need to lean
into being a bit more like a basketball coach? I
think one of the things that I constantly reflect on is,
and I use football as my sense making because that's
my home sport. What would football like look like if

(13:58):
it had a little bit more, say, a skate park
culture around coaching or peer to peer learning? Shall we say?
Or could could football? Could the role of the coaching
football just look and feel different if it was an
individual sport and we weren't allowed to coach in competition?
How did that change my team talks at halftime or
my pre match pre match work with players. So yeah,

(14:22):
I've been so fortunate to do it over the last
twenty or so years in coaching, to have such a
wide variety of experiences, working at lots of different levels,
and yeah, every every days a learning opportunity for me.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
Wow, that's I wasn't rambling at all, and it was
in fact extremely coherent and lovely description of the journey.
As usual, I've got like a million different areas I
want to probe. Something you said, I like, no sooner
the peak, idiot, because it I think it resonates. I

(15:01):
think that's how I've spent most of my career and
I'm still there, I think. But when you talked about
this idea of feeling as if you know you were
on this like really steep learning curve, what was it
about going to UK coaching that made you feel as
if you were on such a step learning curve because
your experiences were extremely rich and I would argue in

(15:24):
some cases sort of atypical, you know, particularly when you
talk about, you know, your kind of early experiences in
the community foundation, coupled them with ten years practical application
as you know, a skills coach, and then working through
an academy. You know, that's a really broad already, that's
a very broad CV in terms of different experiences in

(15:44):
different parts of the pathway, and so to feel like
such a novice seems sort of odd.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, there were definitely a few imposter moments, and maybe
it was because you were I was mixing with people
who were just from a different world to me, Like
my relationship with Academy has probably been on and off
through my journey as a coach. I am studying Master's
at the moment around earlier's education, and the content stuff's helpful.

(16:17):
Obviously that the exposure to learning to learn about using
research to inform your coaching practice is the really important
thing for me. But then suddenly finding yourself in a
room with lots of people who work in universities and
not necessarily feeling like I fit in that group was
definitely something that created a spike in feeling like p idiot.

(16:39):
And maybe maybe there's something for lots of coaches in
this stepping away from your own environment for a second,
being able to give yourself a helicopter view of those
experiences that you've had, and then how that does qualify
you for being in for exploring your practice in different
ways and stepping into different environments. It gave me a

(16:59):
chance to zoom out. But maybe I got some vertigo
by zooming out because I wasn't used to being at
that kind of flying height and thinking about things in
a different way. And I remember really vividly when I
when I was applying for the job at UK Coaching,
my stepdad said to me, what do you know about
badminton or ross or hockey? Not much? Really, well, how

(17:25):
are you going to help a coach in that sport?
And I think the thing that I can articulate a
lot more clearly now than I could then is that
the aside from the technical, tactical the specificity of your sport,
there's so much spared challenge, opportunity, learning experience in coaching

(17:48):
and for coaches like it that there are of course
lots of contextual differences for lots of different reasons, depending
on the age group you're working with or what the
intent of the work that you do is. But when
I speak to coaches in my job from different sports,
they face similar challenges. They in many respects they just

(18:08):
need someone to talk to and to vent not then
or just just have have it be listened to really well.
So the support that you can offer to coaches doesn't
have to be knowing more than them. Actually, by putting
yourself in a position where you're doing work together, I

(18:31):
think is quite a enabling thing.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
I mean I've said this quite quite a lot that
I think often not having any technical knowledge or even
tactical knowledge of the domain then means it can be
a significant advantage because you're not tempted to drifted into

(18:57):
that space, which would be easy to do because if
you're interested in that domain, then you would want to
talk about it, and coaches want to talk about those
sorts of things. If you haven't got that, then you
tend to center on other things, which in many cases
are probably more important because they are often things that

(19:20):
drive other things. So, for example, I know a coach
developer who's known we know Rusty who you know both,
who was working with I think it was a rowing coach,
and I think the question that he asked was like
something just through curiosity, you know, why why do you
keep your shoes in the boat? It was something like that.

(19:40):
I can't remember. It was something along those lines, and
they'd never thought of it. They'd never thought of that
before because it was just such a normalized thing. Now,
that's one example of just a particular aspect of you
know they're doing. But likewise, very often the thing that
people are always challenged by, for example, is like why

(20:03):
do you do anything that you do the way that
you do it, which is a question we were talking
about before we were recording, and that's a question a
lot of people have never even considered. And to just
go on a really lovely journey of exploration to talk
about the ways in which people operate, why they operate
the way they do, and to fundamentally get to the
bottom of their purpose. If you like their reason for

(20:24):
being what they what they're you know, what their drivers
and motivations are, can sometimes be really revelatory and very
rarely happens.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Absolutely. There's a personal who you probably know as well
called Dean Clark based on artper University, and he described
himself to me as a professional idiot, and I feel
like that sometimes stepping into sports, which are a few
worlds away from what feels like home, and it's you

(20:55):
can ask questions that just unlock stuff because you are
seeing things from the different passpective. I'm into a book
at the moment called The Great Mental Models, and it
talks at the start of the book about three things
that could get in the way of but you could
flip it so could enable learning to take place. And
it talks about proximity ego and perspective. And the ego

(21:16):
piece is an interesting one. I think sometimes it plays
out in lots of different domains that people spend time
inflating or protecting it. But the perspective one is massive,
so it's impossible to really see a situation from every
single perspective on your own being curious and open and
asking questions and moving away from something being right or

(21:38):
wrong to looking at it from a variety of different
perspectives or different viewpoints. It's huge, and like one of
the things that I discovered during my time here at
UK Coaching with some of some research around influences on
coach learning and suppose if you reflect on it, why
do you coach the way that you do? Where you
may rely on some of the experiences you had to

(21:59):
be coach yourself, some of the things you're perhaps showing
on coach education, and maybe what other coaches do near
you in your club, but if you've been in the
same sport or the same environment for an extended period
of time, it's probably really difficult to think about approaching
it differently because you feel safe in what you do,

(22:20):
and how do you know it's that you don't know
what you don't know. And actually, I think one of
the things I love about being in a role that
hopefully is helpful for coaches is that you might be
able to ask the question or just share something that
might feel a little bit disruptive from another point of
view that descends them down the pathway that they haven't

(22:40):
even thought of before.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
Yeah. Yeah, And that's They're the moments I think of
kind of almost like serendipitous epiphany that you almost have
together that you know, like, you don't necessarily know, there's
no plan, you're not necessarily trying to guide someone in
that direction. You just arrive there, and there's great moments.
I mean, I've had similar moments in coaching, you know

(23:03):
where by taking a particular perspective, particular position, position, particular approach,
which is not to be the knowah, you know, not
to be the imparter of knowledge and the solution giver,
but to be the kind of like explorer, the sort
of slightly guidey explorer. What if we went in this direction,

(23:26):
what if we went in this direction, what if we
did this, what if we shape things that way? And
then seeing moments of epiphany that people have that like
I didn't expect and they didn't expect. But they're powerful
and laughing. Those things are, i'll be honest with you,
quite addictive. Quite I sort of like search for them

(23:47):
now a bit.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
We had a coach on one of our programs a
couple of years ago. He explained the experience of having
a coach developer a little like someone holding on to
you while you lean over the edge. So it gave
you the opportunity to get to go and experiment with things,
try stuff out, but have some security in the way
that you do it, rather than just being seen as
radical and disruptive. And I thought the analogy was really

(24:13):
really helpful and for me helps frame the type of
relationship you can have with a coach when you're supporting them.
And I think sometimes Chris Chris in the coaching team
at UK Coaching used to do some work with boxing
and explain once he met kind of professional boxer who

(24:34):
asked him what he did and he said, I'm a
coach developer and the response was along the lines of, well,
what the F is that? And it's almost okay? And
I see that sometimes within like when you're introduced to
a coach, they kind of know your job title that
we don't really know what you do, so being able
to establish this is different from maybe your experience of
being on a course or with a tutor who is

(24:56):
signing you off from something. This is genuinely about support
and discovery. Emily, who's in our coaching team as well,
she said something quite profound the other week around when
she's working with a coach, it's not about the coach's work,
it's about our work that we do together. And I
think in a similar respect, how a coach and an

(25:16):
athlete their learning is really connected because what the athlete
does would then inform what the coach does next week,
and there's a there's a cycle that happens. I think
there's a similar type of relationship between coach and coach developer,
but there's a dance between them. And yeah, absolutely, if
you can be the I like the phrase like coaching

(25:37):
companion because it for me takes away some of the
hierarchy that might come with a title of a role
that we're on the journey together, that we are we're
seeing different things. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
So often people talk about mental but for me, mentory
vote knowledgeable of her that has lots and lots of
experience than all this. It doesn't have to be that,
by the way, but it evokes that, doesn't it. Where
a companion is more someone who is I often use
the term guide by the side.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, I mean you mentioned Russi earlier. I think I've
heard Rusty describe himself as a helper and yeah, someone
else who I came into contact with you doesn't work
supporting coaches over in Australia would describe himself as a
thinking partner. They said, well, there's sometimes whe I'm sat
next to you in the car and the sometimes I'm
in the backseat, and sometimes I'm not in the car

(26:34):
at all, But just by being there, you're a resource. Yeah.
And I think sometimes when coaches start to understand the
type of relationship they could have with someone who could
support them. And I appreciate a coach developer role as
a bit of a premium, because having people who can
work directly with you on a one to one basis

(26:57):
doesn't necessarily appear for many coaches. But I'm sure every
coach listening to this could think of the person they
might go and lean on when when they're experiencing a
challenging moment or a really good moment in many respects,
they're a companion for you.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Yeah, I mean I am. I've often thought, and in fact,
it's one of the areas that I'm very keen to
sort of build upon, is how we can establish these
ideas of coach development as a contract and embed it

(27:35):
within whatever forms of coach education that there are. The
reason being is I think a lot of people end
up being kind of informal coach developers by virtue of
the fact that they're in you know, they have but
they're in an environment, and there's others who are less

(27:57):
experience that they're working alongside in either in a superre
either being supervised by or they're learning from informally. And
how we can develop the skill in people who do
that in a variety of different ways. You know, there's
lots of different approaches to that. Some of it can

(28:17):
be a bit more instructional, some of it can be
a bit more directive, some of it can be more questioning,
some of it can be more exploratory and helping helping
others on their journey, almost like reaching back. And I
think that's something that would benefit or the whole coaching community.
A this idea that Supporting others on their developmental journey

(28:42):
is part of your AH. It's part of being a coach.
Coaching others to coaches, part of being a coach as
well as coaching practice participant, but equally supporting and giving
others that leg up because, like you know, I imagine

(29:03):
you described at the start of this that when you
went to the Community Foundation at Swindon as a relatively
inexperienced individual who just says I want to help out?
Can I help out? You were given a really supportive
environment that I imagine without that probably wouldn't have given you
the kind of then springboard to go on to do
the other things. So the fortune that you managed to

(29:25):
find an environment like that that's going to be supportive
where you've essentially got coach developers wrapped around you, orbeit
not with deformal title, you're just surrounded by coach development
and coaching conversations. If we could afford that to more people,
either by the people around them affording that and creating
that environment, or by access to others who are available

(29:49):
for people to engage with. I just think what would
that do to the world of coaching. It would probably
feel like a less daunting place to be and an
actual fact would probably feel like a great place to be,
which then from the perspective of recruitment, retention, etc. Would
potentially be really quite transformative for coaching.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think you said to me once around a cultural expectation,
yeaches who are good words strong word. It's a good articulation.
But yeah, of course there are many ways in which
that support structure could come about in coaching. But I
would if when I reflect on my experiences, especially early
in my journey, I think I was fortunate to have

(30:33):
a series of happy accidents where I've ended up in
environments that felt really supportive, where I could learn and
there were people to go and talk to. I think
within some of the work we're doing a UK coaching,
if there are people who get lent on by coaches,
how do we help them with the tools and resources

(30:54):
around them to be as good as they can be
at supporting those around them. And I think you hit
on a massive point there about making it a great
place to be. And I hear stories around coaches maybe
feeling like they're a bit of a commodity within their
environment or their sport, and if we were to flip
that In contrast, how how do we help coaches feel

(31:16):
like they're a really valued member of the community and
recognizing that we can have some people or structures or
systems that are just there to help them, and the
system becomes one which is about appreciation and development and
community rather than maybe some of the pain points that
coaches experience at the moment, people would stick around for

(31:38):
longer and probably get better, enjoy it more, and therefore
the kids they coach would have a better experience themselves.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Yeah. I that point about commodity, I think is one
that really resonates sard that a lot, you know, doing
research into coaching experiences and coaching motivating and you know
kind of you hear this notkin of being almost you know,

(32:07):
kind of used, I suppose in many ways. And I
don't think it's a wilful It's not used in the
sense of like people are wilfully just using people to
meet their needs. I think it's more of a benign neglect,
you know, I think about so. I took over as
the chair of my club recently, I say recently a
few years ago, and I the first thing I did,

(32:31):
obviously being a workforce development person, coaching development person was
said to the committee, right, who have we got coaching
all of our seconds next year? And there was just
like blank basis, have we not got some kind of
a matrix or something that basically tells us who we've got,
what they're you know, kind of what their background is,

(32:52):
and what they're training or qualification level if they've got
that is, and all of those sorts of things. Have
we got everything covered? Again? Blank faces? So you know,
start doing a bit of work and you know, map
out across the eight or nine different sessions for different
age groups and adults than everybody else, you know, there
was very little of it with green, which meant we've

(33:15):
got somebody that we know is going to be reliable
and appropriately trained and you know, equipped to do the
job with that audience group. And everybody else was just
kind of whoever else. So there was a lot of green,
very little green, a little bit of orange, and a
lot of red. And for me, I was like, do
you not see that this is an enormous risk because
for a number of reasons, One, we might not be

(33:38):
able to put on the session for the people who
are members of the club that they deserve. Two, we're
not sure of the quality of those sessions. And three,
what if some of those sessions are absolutely terrible, Like
that's not going to be great reputationally, and it's certainly
not going to be great for the experience of the individual.
But it's like that no one had ever thought about that.
They're not actually considered that they as a committee were

(34:01):
responsible for the best possible experience, not just for the participants,
but for the practicalness. Because then the other thing that
came to light was that what you ended up having
was the same people just doing a lot of a
lot of coaching because there was no one else to
do the coaching, and then them feeling overwhelmed, overburdened, burnt

(34:23):
out like a means to an end being used, not
necessarily because anybody on the committee had ever gone, oh,
let's just really use this individual. It was we don't
know what else to do, and we don't know how
to do it any differently. And if I'm totally honest,
their focus tended to be on collecting in the membership

(34:44):
peace more than it did on and paying the bills
more than it did on providing great experiences. And one
thing I hope I've managed to get across to them
is providing great experiences for your coaches and for your
participants actually pay you back if you only care about
the money, because more people come to your club so
you get more membership revenues. That's not about that, but

(35:07):
it is. It's a happy accident that actually a focus
on your work for and a focus on the experiences
they provide happens to grow your club base, which then
helps you put out more teams. It helps you to
put teams out on the weekend when everyone's struggling to
It helps you your club get better because you've got
more players to select from. Blah blah blah, blah blah.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Totally. If you position it that you'll affect the participant
experience through the coach, and then affect the coach experience
with the support that you put around, then the opportunity
for growth is absolutely massive and if you do it.
If you don't do a great job, then people aren't
going to come back tomorrow. I wonder as well. Like
from the fast and furious nature of what community and grassrouits,

(35:51):
sports can sometimes feel like it's really difficult to be
able to take address to really look at the depth
chart of coaches you might have in your system and
work out who's coming through next to be able to
do the work that we need to do. And like
what you said, takes my mind off to a few
different experiences and places. When I was working at Arsenal,
we had a player development program which was it ran

(36:14):
alongside the academy and provided like this opportunity for girls
to play in their grassroots club whilst having additional support
from us. And because it was Arsenal, we would have
attracked quite big volume of kids to come along, and
we needed a good, high, high quality coaching team to
be able to a be available, but be deliver stuff

(36:35):
that the kids would want to come back and platform.
So I intentionally over recruited and always had one or
two additional coaches, almost like your uncle doctor, so they
wouldn't necessarily need to be there there on the Monday
night practice, but if a coach couldn't make it, or
if there was a certain problem, they were available to

(36:55):
step in. And there was some really nice, unintended concert
sequences of doing some work like that, because the coaches
who were there felt like that burden of responsibility which
was on their shoulders was e slightly because they knew
that if they had a life challenge that there was
always someone available to step in, and we built to
that over a period of time. But I would say

(37:18):
it was something that contributed towards a really positive coaching
culture within our little group of coaches because they recognize
that there was an understanding of them as people rather
than just come in, delivered the session, get paid for
two hours, and then go home again. Yeah, it's huge,

(37:39):
and it gave us the opportunity to then start to
connecting coaches who we think might be there for next
year and give them the opportunity to hit the ground
running with the work that they did. So yeah, I
hear you completely in terms of factoring the way that
you succession plan into your club development, it's critical. I'm

(38:01):
feeling it at the moment with a Girl's Emerging Talent
Center or I do some work. At the moment, it's
really difficult to attract coaches to come in because it's
an hour and a half a week and the pay
isn't great. So I'm thinking about how do we change
the experience for people who are part of this club.

(38:21):
It's got to be more than the amount of money
they earn from it and more than just the ninety
minutes they do. If they feel like they can genuinely
get better by being part of the environment, then they'll
probably want to come and work here. So it's a
slow change and relationship with coaches someone who we just
employ to coach, a someone we really help.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah, I mean, when you've got that sort of brand
name like Arsenal, I can imagine that the recruitment challenge
was probably less so because people wanted to be part
of it, because they saw it as an opportunity to
rub shoulders with other coaches that they would either learn
from or develop from. And also it's attractive to those

(39:03):
coaches I imagine, be associated with a name like Arsenal, Whereas
when you're working in a more community type setting or
a grassroots setting, you haven't got that to offer. So
I suppose you have to then make the experience and
then people talking about the experience the thing that then
people are attracted towards.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yes, absolutely, I suppose that we weren't sure of people
wanting to work in the environment, but it was more
about them trying to identify and select the coaches who
we think would have the biggest impact in the environment,
something you said earlier, Especially when it's difficult perhaps finding

(39:47):
the right coaches to come into your club. Something that
I would want to pay attention to is who's great
at working with children rather than who's got a great
knowledge of football would probably be a primory driver for
bringing someone in, because ultimately, with the right experience and
the right support around them, all the football stuff will
just come in time. But working with kids is massive.

(40:10):
I was at a meeting not so long ago and
someone was reflecting on real high quality coaching in community
and youth settings, and they just highlighted, well, probably the
best coaches at this stage are ultimately got lots of
the skills and the qualities of really good youth workers,
but with sport as a vehicle to do stuff and

(40:33):
to extra tech tap things around the edge. And I
see that completely. That coaches don't just deal in designing
practices and delivering them. They're dealing with the whole person
who steps into their coaching session. So that coach you
can listen really well and know when to individualize stuff
or not to lean in and lean out and build

(40:55):
those relationships with the players beyond the football stuff. It's massive.
The biggest influences on my journey as a football coach
called Peter Sturges, who lead a lot at.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
The FA, And.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
I always imagine myself, like in the shoes of a
ten year old receiving coaching from Pete what it must
be like. Like he's such a he's such a jedi
at being able to create rapport in a really caring
way but also still deliver some really high quality football

(41:29):
messages at the same time. He's almost got two truths
in the same hand. It's football and it's people.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
Cooled, two tups in the same hand. Yeah, Pete who
won Lifetime Achievement Award or the UK Coaching Awards if
I remember correctly, from a very good evening last year. Yeah, no,
I know what you mean. I had the privilege to
observe him in action only once, actually, and I could
definitely resonate with that ocean of the connection almost being

(42:04):
the primary driver before the activity.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Yeah, without a shadow of a doubt. I watched peach
Pete coach once and I remember how intentionally was about
welcoming kids into the session and asking them a question
about their interests of their day, and then how he
was really skillful and reconnecting with whatever they said at
some point later in the session when he needed to

(42:30):
go and coach them. What you're experiencing now is a
bit like when Sonic gets stuck on that level and
just this this real, this, real masterful at ease of
being able to just link their their the world of
a child with what you're trying to go after in
your football session.

Speaker 3 (42:51):
Mm hmm, love that. Love that the other person who
you've made me think of? Who of that? Really well?
It goes back to Rusty, but it's actually his partner
in crime, or at least I've seen them do this.
They both do this really well, So I'm not saying
Rusty doesn't, but John Fletker, who is his sort of

(43:13):
alter ego within the Magic Academy. I've watched them co
coach a number of times, and like they're very intentional
about that. So one one of them is managing the
activity and the other one is then responsible for connections.
So they'll be like walking through the activity talking to

(43:33):
the players, asking them like, you know, what's the what's
their favorite football team? And did they watch did they
see the the performance by Coldplay in Glastonbreed the other
week or whatever it might be. Whatever they wherever they
can create some form of connection, they'll create the connection
and then build off that when they prop roles or

(43:56):
when you know they're in activities.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, there's a real skill to it. I think that
co coaching piece is when you really get into it,
really quite a difficult thing to do really well. That
requires some thought and some planning. And do you know
what you just said something that I'm holding on to
around You mentioned something earlier about why do people coach

(44:21):
the way that they coach? I think through this conversation,
I recognize it myself. I'm name checking quite a lot
of people and feel like that I've been on this
really unique journey, but very intentional about recognizing what I'm
picking up from different people and different experiences along the way.

(44:41):
I think that for any coach, recognizing what's rubbing off
on you from the different people that you spend time
with are exposed to could have a massive impact on
your coaching practice if you're open to try and look
at things which might feel slightly disconnected from your world,
but then have a go at contextualizing it.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Yeah, you know it's interesting because I asked that question.
It's kind of become a default question I asked every
time I'm in front of a group of coaches. So
I'm very fortunate to get us to go and speak
at various places and deliver sessions. And the first the
question that's poe as a partly as a conversation startler,

(45:23):
but the starter, but also partly because I'm curious, and
I guess I'm I'm conducting a kind of a dealthy
style research experiment by basically, you know, like every time
I'm in front of a room of coachd asking that
same question, you know, why do you coach the way
that you coach? And it's interesting people don't always take
that the right way, uh, But then I clarify it

(45:48):
by saying, why do you do what you do the
way that you do it? So the first question, why
do you coach the way that you coach? Can be
quite philosophical and esoteric, and it's a use question to
frame because it's asking people a little bit about their motivations,
and people often come to me and talk about their
motivations for coaching useful and I'm always fascinated by that.

(46:11):
But then the second question, why do you do what
you do the way that you do it sort of
digs a little bit more into method and why do
you choose the method that you choose, Why do you
choose the approach that you choose. And the reason I'm
interested in that is because I want to know what
the influences are. I want to know where they stem from.
And interestingly, as you probably know, I've been on a

(46:35):
bit of a micro campaign of late talking about coch
education and the state of coke education and where coach
education could be. And it's interesting that in this conversation
we haven't really talked about formal coach education very much.
What we've talked about is your developmental journey, which I
described as atypical, because what you've done is you've been
able to essentially have the best kind of apprenticeship. You've

(46:59):
operated in guilds almost with other craft people, and you've
learned from those craft people, and you've assimilated some of
their ideas, and then you've moved to others and assimilated
their ideas, and you've built up a framework of approaches
based on probably the best of what you've seen from
multiple craft people. That is unique, right, or I would

(47:22):
say that's rare, not many people get to have that
a lot of people. More often people are coaching on
their own and learning through bitter experience sometimes or failures.
But equally, you know, people do go on formal educational courses.
But it's interesting to me that whenever I'm asking that
question of coaches throughout the world, how rarely they point

(47:43):
to those formal education experiences as being formative in their
coaching journey. More often than not, it's others that they've
had opportunities to interact with, observe work alongside mimic. They're
the stimulusis or their own experiences as participants has shaped them.

(48:06):
Either they had a positive one that they wanted to
emulate or a negative one that they wanted no one
else to have ever again, so they're often the drivers
and the motivations. And then the actual practical method methodological
stances is usually harnished from the best of what they've
seen from others. And if you get a lot of exposure,
that can be enormously powerful in terms of you developing

(48:30):
your craft. But if you don't have the opportunity for
that exposure, then your developmental journey can just be that
bit more elongated, truncated and sometimes difficult.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Yeah, without a shadow of a doubt. And I think
with what you just describe their points, maybe some differences
between coach education and coach development by the way I
would see it anyway, I've been down that coach education
pathway through my football journey, and I would say that
some bits which have been absolutely fantastic and some things
which have burnt up on re entry. But I'm sure

(49:05):
every coach experience is that to a greater or lesser
extent on their journey. It goes back to the point
I think you were making about more coaches having access
to some kind of help or support within the environment
that they do their coaching, and recognize the fact that
there are so many volunteer coaches across the UK that

(49:27):
it would be unrealistic to think that people could have
really broad experiences and connections beyond their sport when they're
a volunteer and they're only able to give two or
three hours a week. So if the environment that they're
coming to to give those two or three hours a
week just helps them develop in one way, shape or form,
then that would be better for everybody. I think one

(49:52):
of the things that I've noticed from some of the
work we've done at UK Coaching is the opportunity to
try and make connections for coaches into different sports and
different worlds, so you can put the coach in that
position of asking that begin a question, or the rookie question,
or starting to look at somebody else's practice but with

(50:14):
a fresh set of eyes. Is such a rich learning
experience with the right type of support. But maybe it's
obviously it's not accessible for absolutely everybody to do that.
I don't really there's not a specific point I'm trying
to make that. I'm just acknowledging the fact it's hard.

(50:35):
It's hard for coaches to seek this out, but having
people around you who can offer you help on your
way is massively important.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Yeah, and I guess I suppose it's going to appeal
really because you know, you lead a team that specialize
in this. You were one of them, you know, you
were one of that team, and you now lead a
team that specialize in the support in developing you know,
in developing coaches, and often the people who get that
kind of support are usually the ones who are in

(51:06):
sort of quota to the performance or elite realms. And
some of that to do with the resources that are
provided there. And it's also to do I think the
links of the sort of the pressure trains and some
of the acute needs of people in those particular realms.
But I believe and have forever and will wang on
probably to eternity about this, that the people in community

(51:29):
contexts are no less deserving of that kind of support
and have no less of a difficulty or challenge in
terms of that what you're operating. You know, coaching groups
of young people, very often with specific needs, is a
challenging endeavor, and very often it's it's given to people

(51:50):
who are relatively new starting out, So you have the
rookies coaching the rookies sort of thing, and I think
that's really difficult, and I think it's a lot to
ask of people. And it's no surprise that as coaching becomes,
i think, more recognized for the skill set that's required,
more and more people are becoming more reluctant to step
into it because they're intimidated by the fact that it's

(52:11):
quite a calending endeavor. And I think it doesn't have
to be that way, particularly if you've got really good
support resources around you. I mean, one of the things
I've taken away from our conversation is it's always been
one of the first step of the in my co
chair and care care role of the club was to

(52:32):
make sure that we've got the right people in the
right places leading the activities. And then if there's other
people helping, then the helper experience is enhanced by the
fact that they don't have to be seen as being
responsible for leading the activity. So that's the first stage.
Second stage then will be to create a community of
learning around those individuals and to create a really supportive
environment that others would want to be part of, which

(52:55):
in turn I hope will grow. But I guess this
is an appeal in lots of to you've articulated. I
think very powerfully the impact that coach development can have,
and I would like to take that to be the
privilege of a few to become the norm for many.
But we need to find a way of doing so.
Some of that is access to technology, but a lot
of it is actually just through this notion of building

(53:17):
this cultural expectation about supporting others and equipping people. More
of our practicing coaches with the skills to support and
nurture others and build their own micro environment, because environments
are everything, you know, so being in an environment that
is supportive I think is helpful. So I guess I'm
using the platform as a way to say more of this,

(53:39):
please everybody.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Yeah. Absolutely, there's no silver bullet for this, and it's
highly dependent on the situation and the context of every
coach and then the clubs where they're working. Something that
from experience I've found really valuable when working with coaches
is starting to map, like who's in your network, who's
available to you to be able to go and access
support from I was over. I volunteered for a week

(54:07):
in Canada the week before last, supporting a group of
coaches within a club system there, and we spent one
evening with some of the female coaches in the club
a just listening to some of the challenges that they
faced through their journey, some of the hopes and aspirations

(54:27):
for the group of into the future. But we got
some lego figures. Actually, this was where I was flexing
some of my coach development skills. Bought some lego figures
that they assembled as like a small avatar of themselves,
and then they started to map with jelly Babies who
was in their network, who are the people that they
would pull closer to them but depending on certain situations
and then push what impact would that have on the

(54:49):
rest of their network? And the I guess the interconnectedness
of the stuff that we do. But it helped people
start to recognize, well, who's the who's like the fire
starter in my group, Who's the person who's coming to
me with fresh ideas or I can go to with
fresh ideas to really think differently, Or who's my safety net,
Who's the person I might bent to, Who's a person

(55:09):
who I might see is why is in my network
I might go and ask for some help or have
a coaching conversation with And it started to identify a
how they could do this for each other with the
resources that they had available, but also then like where
the gaps were and who they might want to go
and try and seek out and then lean into the
club structure to help them form those connections. And I
think for me it helped it. I went away reflecting

(55:34):
on this group, They've got lots of the answers themselves,
they just need a little bit of the help in
teasing some of it out. And actually there's a real
potential there with the club that they're working in to
support them by connecting them to each other or other
people externally to their environment. But the whole notion of

(55:57):
just who's in your corner, who's in your network did
you go to in certain situations, just amplifying that that
message is sometimes really powerful. And then they got the
opportunity to eat their network with the jelly babies.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
At the end, I would just about to say that
your your models didn't last very long. I imagine, well,
do you know what we did?

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Do you know what we did? And this is this
is me that some people will listen to this and say,
oh my goodness, Tom, that's really fluffy, but I quite
like it. We bought a polaroid camera and everybody had
a polaroid of themselves with the little Lego avatar as
a little something that hopefully makes the experience sticky and
they take home with them. And the person who I

(56:38):
was out with in Canada, who was who invited me
over for the trip, called Max. We were talking about
memories rather than medals. So at the end of a
competition for kids, why don't we do something where children
leave of a polaroid of them and their teammates, and
it helps them create a scrap book of memories through
their season that make really strong emotional connections to their

(57:02):
learning points in the year, rather than the medal. That's
not really a very human thing. And I know we're
going off on a very different tangent here again, going
back into my time at Arsenal, we thought really, really
long and hard about the individual development plan for players
and how we wanted them to own the process. So

(57:23):
we had an experiment one season where we asked the
players to come with a picture which was the front
of their plan, and some took it very literally photograph
of a player arounding a goalkeeper, and some took it
in a very abstract form. There was an eight year
old who had a picture of clown school who when
quiz on it, said, well, it's I want to learn

(57:44):
something here, but I also want to have loads of fun.
It gave the children the opportunity to take more accountability
about their development and what they are being intentional about
in practice, and for me, the idea of children being
able to find create artifacts through their season that helps
them look back on the wow and the ouch moments

(58:07):
is an incredibly powerful thing and rather than a coach
stepping into that traditional end of season review meeting giving feedback.
If a child is empowered and supported to generate some
stuff for themselves, then the coach can sit alongside the
kid and generate the key back together. And for me,
it completely transforms the experience they have and the all

(58:28):
or nothing nature of that type of discussion.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Oh yeah, I think. I mean that's really interesting. Are
there so many things I want to talk about? And
that's what you said this as a tangent, but this
is what I love about these conversations is the fact
that we have this opportunity to go down the different,
different little rabbit holes. The two things I wanted to
pick up on personally, I want to really talk about
that being thoughtful about that experience, in this notion of

(58:55):
memories rather than medals and connections and learning moments and
those sorts of things. Before we get there, though, you
talk about this idea of like these lego avatars. You
said before we started recording, that you sometimes you clearly
clearly do, but you like to be playful in your

(59:17):
practice developing coaches, and if I guess, is an example
of that. There's something really interesting because I did some
work with a with Sarah Kellerho's been on with her
a couple of times, hockey coach working with Ireland, and
she's a Lego serious play practitioner, so you can go

(59:40):
on a training course in Denmark with Lego to become
a serious play practitioner. And she's used to let Lego
as a consultant with us in the past. And it's
fascinating because they talk about this notion of build to
think and it is interesting how being playful creates opportunities
for people to express themselves and using model and describing

(01:00:04):
the model tells you things about them that they probably
wouldn't self disclosed necessarily. It's a super powerful learning modality.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Oh my goodness. Yeah, And that was the first time
I met you face to face when you and Sarah
were delivering a hockey session next to each other and
Sarah delivered a Lego a Lego session.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
Afterwards, I forgot about them.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Yeah, it's such an interesting way to get people to
articulate things that they struggle to find the words to articulate,
and the build to think space, and like the artists,
that comes with just building Lego. Anyway, we did some
things with some coaches about a year ago at UK
Coaching where we bought in bucket loads of Lego and

(01:00:47):
asked them to build their coaching philosophy, and we spent
about two hours on this topic where a by the
nature of doing an activity like that, they sat down
next to someone they didn't know and they built some
stuff that they had a common session, but actually the
thing that they created was unique and about them, and

(01:01:07):
everything had significance and meaning in there. And even though
that they didn't take them models home, they were able
to take photos of them and capture them and no
pun intended build on it the next time you came
into a conversation. It's incredibly enabling in different ways. And
I remember you and Sarah did some stuff around creativity
with the hockey sessions and the players were building something

(01:01:29):
through Lego that highlighted their interpretation of what being creative was.
Many many ways you could you could use that. But
one of the things I love about an approach like
using Lego is that there's no right or wrong, and
if you're somebody facilitating a session like that, you just
need to be curious to ask people to dig a
little bit deeper. There's not a checklist of stuff that

(01:01:52):
you have to complete to get through it. And the
fact is that that happened about six years ago, that
that session and we're still talking about it now highlights
the significance of doing things like that which are different
to the traditional type of experience.

Speaker 3 (01:02:09):
M completely, I mean, I'll never forget. We did a
workshop this is when I was at Sport, England, and
we're in one of these opposites where they've got glad
and people peering in and you've got this room full
of lego and looking at some of the quizical looks
that made me laugh. But we were doing a thing

(01:02:29):
around some of the barriers for women in coaching still
under represented, and one of the participants did created a
model with an igloo. What's that about? So well, the
igloo is represent the kind of the thing that we
need to break in order to unlock the barriers that

(01:02:51):
are in the place. And then through a bit of
ongoing conversation, we discovered that actually the igloo has a
lot of bricks and you could try and break all
of them, but it would be difficult. But if you
focused on one, you could then make the kind of
you could probably put all your energy into one brick
and then you could break through it, and then you

(01:03:12):
could then start to one breath break up the other one.
So the metaphor from that was that the strategic approach
was not to try and solve all the problems, to
solve one big one and then begin to then knock
off the others, which is like super powerful. I'm like, wow, God,
that's such a clever idea just emerge from somebody playing
about with some plastic.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Yeah. Absolutely, and I think you can. There's a contrast
here that you can do things which are fun and memorable, engaging,
which people just remember because they enjoyed it, but actually
there's a there's a deeper truth to it and some
real meaning that can can unfold, or you can make
sense of some stuff by go activity like that. It's

(01:03:58):
almost the ripple effect of this kind of work that
is the really important thing, rather than the I guess
the bright spot of that particular intervention. Another thing I've
played with would be the right word, whether it's been
on an FA level. One course in prison and coaching
in Africa was jelly sticks, sorry, jelly sticks, cocktail sticks

(01:04:23):
and jelly beans building towers, which I'm sure is an
activity lots of people have done for lots of different reasons,
but we focused it around the qualities of a great coach,
so people would spend time exploring it and discussing it
and come up with it like a diamond mined list
of what they would describe as some really valuable qualities.
But then we brought them to life by blindfolding one
person who had to build a cocktail stick and being

(01:04:46):
tower whilst the other person coaching through it and help them.
And then we had that reflective conversation about well, what
were you like as a coach in a really difficult
situation and what qualities did you lean into what did
you neglect? And it serves both purposes. It makes the
coach learning event memorable, but it really helps you dig

(01:05:10):
into stuff that you could which is beyond the PowerPoint
slide M.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The other thing I wanted to
just talk about as well and pick unpick was you
talked about this in the design of the environment and
creating the best experience possible. I wonder if we can
just dig into that and how did you go about that,
because I know I can imagine like one of the
things that, and I know people liked book has to

(01:05:36):
come away with some practical ideas. So what sort of
things did you do to come up with those ideas?
How did you how did you sort of like, what
sort of things did you do? What worked, what didn't work?

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
All those sorts of things with the individual development plans.

Speaker 3 (01:05:52):
Yeah, and you know, just being intentional about the way
that you design that experience for people.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Well, there's a book which I can't remember the name
of now, but it's written by the brothers called Chip
and Dan Heath. Make It Stick, Make It Stick. It's ironic.
I forgot the name of it, right, But yeah, one
of the principles it talks about in that book is
around strip away content that hype and experience. And if

(01:06:22):
you were to almost look at the the intensity of
experience through your practice or your workshop, what are the
key moments who you want the experience to be really
a high emotional connection or a low emotional connection. And
that for me has really stuck with me when designing
these types of activities that are aim to hook people in,

(01:06:43):
I think from like an individual development plan process and
changing it so it's not about coaches giving feedback but
children own their own development. I'm not saying for one
second at all, let's just throw it over to the kids,
because they don't know where to start. And as my
great colleague Marianne would talk about it, that you could

(01:07:04):
move from handcuffs to handrails. Some people need some tighter
constraints to help them learn, whereavers need a bit more
space and freedom. So the one of the let's call
it an enabling concept that I'm working with the design
of anything like this is that we need to give
some structure to help the learning take place. So with

(01:07:26):
the club, I'm doing some working with the players at
the moment for their individual development plan. We're using kind
of a FIFA style skills card where the players are
scoring themselves out of one hundred and a few different attributes. Now,
don't tell the players, but this score doesn't really matter
at all. I don't mind if they give them score

(01:07:47):
themselves an eighty five or a twenty five. It's the
conversation that that unpicks with the coach afterwards. And something
I something that was brought to my attention that I'd
never really thought about before, was from the great Stephen Rolnick,
whose background is in motivational Interviewing and Positive Psychology who
were saying, well, scales are great because it helps you
work out what you need to do to get to

(01:08:08):
the next level. That you can also have that really
appreciative conversation about what sustaining you above the lower score,
and I think that could be really valuable when you're
working with any participant. Is and again using Steven's language,
how can we be treasure hunters rather than deficit detectives.

(01:08:29):
As a coach, if you're going into that coaching conversation
to say, well, you scored yourself an eighty, but why
are you better than a seventy five? Like what are
the things that you're doing that's keeping you above that
I imagine would feel quite different to a lot of
players who are going through that process, because my experience
is telling me that those IDP discussions come at critical

(01:08:52):
moments in a season where it's all about being released
or being retained, and therefore you're not really having an
authentic conversation, and they're generally driven by the coach. So
to flip it to say that the child leads it,
but the coach asks helpful, curious questions to dig a
bit deeper, feels more holistic, it feels more individualized and

(01:09:17):
actually with a bit of help, the kids know themselves
better than anyone and then the masters their own destiny
in this and the coach. Coach's role is from like
the the information giver or the teacher, to the to
the to the companion or the champion for that kid.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
Yeah, I love it, love it. Yeah. I mean the
reason I'm interested is because I've seen lots of different
approaches to IDPs and I'm always curious as to how
people do it and that you know, they can be
more or less formal. So for example, at England Rugby,
even some of the aspiring professionals they had almost like
a single piece of paper which was like a college.

(01:09:58):
It's a college of images, you know, it's like certain
faith from magazines and things, but it was images that
told a story about them and their goals and their
aspirations and the areas that they intend to focus upon
to build on their strength in order to become what
to manifest if you like, their aspirations. But it's a

(01:10:22):
visual representation that they then keep and can stick up
as a poster and they use it as a reference point,
which is tangible and physical and real and is something
that they can you know, others like you say, you know,
it's been things like selfies and polaroids and creating a
series of kind of personalized images that talk about them
as humans and family and things that are important to

(01:10:45):
them and the connections that they make and the strength
that they're trying to build. I've seen lego models built
that articulate their goals, and there's lots of creative and
exciting different ways that people have created, you know, a
development plan, but using usually either using a visual a
visual or a model as a metaphor, or you know,

(01:11:10):
using lots of different creative means, drawing written PowerPoint slides,
lots of different ways of doing it. And I think
because when people, I think they think of individual development plans,
I think they probably think of some kind of word
document with a table, and I don't think they're necessarily
but I think things that are much more real and
create and created by those individuals I think are rich,

(01:11:32):
are really rich.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
Yeah, lived not laminated, right, but yeah, that's something I'm
playing with this season. And I think I'm working out
the readiness factor of the coaches and the children who
were working with because that's face it, doing things differently
might feel a bit uncomfortable for some people. So the
thing i'm the idea I'm working with is we'll have

(01:11:56):
some points in the season where we'll have those and
discussions with players and coaches where they can bring their
IDP and talk about it. But the notion that every
child can have three coaching conversations with their coach that
they can call at any time like a timeout, And
I like the idea of it until someone tells me

(01:12:17):
it's a bad idea, because I want children to recognize
when do I want to really engage with my coach
and explore this together, or when can I go to
solve this for myself, or can I go and ask
my parents or another teammate or someone else. So there's
some learning to learn stuff backed into the process of

(01:12:38):
kind of calling a conversation because it gives children a
safe place to experiment. Well, did I really need to
use that time out then or could I wait to
another point in the season.

Speaker 3 (01:12:50):
Yeah, I like that. I like that. And the other
big thing about that, I think is that the notion
of almost being deliberate about creating the space for children
or young people to connect because it's easy, isn't it

(01:13:11):
for them to just you assume that you're approachable, but
you're not necessarily you know, you're an adult authority figure.
And depending on how their kind of background and their
environments will depend on whether they feel comfortable or confident
enough to actually engage with an authority figure. But likewise,
being intentional about that opportunity, it almost helps the toach

(01:13:36):
to know that that's something that they're providing. Because it's easy,
isn't it, to just get into the doing, And it's
enough to try and be managing the session and stop
chayoff from hearing, an accident from happening, And you can
easily just start falling into that mode and not create
the space for opportunities for conversation, whether it's in session

(01:13:57):
or outside of session.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Yeah, and it's always a close especially for your grassroots
semi employed in the right word, part time coach sessional.
If you've got a group of twelve kids and you're
having to write individual development plans for them, all, that's
a lot of heavy lifting. Whereas if you reposition it

(01:14:20):
and the children know their plan and your role as
the coach is different, you might actually get into some
better work when you're doing it with them, I think also,
and without it sounding too meta, like the conversation about
having the conversation then starts to come up. You could
then talk about, well do you think that was the
right time for us to be able to talk about
this thing? Or if you were to have that discussion

(01:14:42):
time out again, how would you use it differently? And
I think it starts to provoke lots of different learning
that equips the participant for loads of stuff outside of
football or outside of the sport that there's so much
in it. I think the other thing is just where
my mind goes around IDPs and the processes around parents.

(01:15:04):
And I know that could be a whole other conversation completely,
But something I've tried to be really deliberate about through
this process is I think there's two things. One is
parents and helping parents understand the role that they can play,
which is beyond a taxi in a bank, but not
getting in the way of some stuff that makes the

(01:15:25):
experience tricky to kids. I think that's really important for
coaches to be able to think about and plan for,
because if we keep parents too far away, then the
distance becomes a problem and parents might make up their
own mind about what could be going on, and lots

(01:15:47):
of room for inaccuracies occur. So if coaches are really
skillful with I don't know, including parents in the debrief
or helping them with the someessions that might start a
really productive conversation on the car journey home from training.
You could really bring parents on. Are somewhere an extra

(01:16:08):
person in that grassroots, multi disciplinary team. The other thing
that's in my mind is around helping children or participants
work out who they're going to go and ask for help.
So one of the things we have in our IDP
for children in the club where I'm coaching this season
is on a monthly basis, will ask the kids to

(01:16:29):
think about who am I getting my help from this
month and in some months that might just be the
same person a few times, but it gives them the
opportunity to think. I think more broadly around it could
be the coach here, but there could be a coach
and another activity I do could help me with something
that draws back into this environment. And for me, asking

(01:16:49):
the question and putting it on the table is a
an avenue is better than not doing it at all,
Regardless of the outcome.

Speaker 3 (01:16:59):
I love that, But I've just written something down there
which is a massive takeaway, the parents as part of
the grass roots multidisciplinary team, because you don't have multi
disciplinary teams in the grassroots generally speaking, you don't have
psychologists and physiologists and physiotherapists and all those sorts of things.
That's a parent, right, They're a medics, the psyche, the

(01:17:20):
emotional support, all those sorts of things. So in actual fact,
considering the parents as part of your multi disciplinary teams
actually a really nice way of framing things. And I
get an awful lot of queries from coaches about parents
and difficulties and all those sorts of things, and engagement
in that respect I think could be the answer to
many of these problems. Look, we've been going at it

(01:17:43):
for an hour and twenty minutes, and I know that
you've got a hard stock in a couple of minutes,
but I just wanted to say thank you very much
for joining me. It's it's been long overdue, but it's
been well worth the wait, and I can feel that
there's a lot of other jumping off points that we
could go on to. So I'd be looking at would
if you're willing. I'll be looking forward to a part
two because there's always all the things that you think

(01:18:04):
about afterwards. Is there a way people can get in
touch with you if they if any of this has
sort of prompted the need for some kind of additional
understanding or something along those lines.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Of course, Art two would be great. By the way,
at Thomas W. Hartley to follow me on X Yeah,
that's probably the easiest way to get touched. And if
if you're not on there, then get on there. Thanks.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
Yeah, that's that's that's your DM's lighting up right now. Tom.
Thank you very much for joining me. It's great. All
the best with everything that you're doing with the team.
I know they're an amazing bunch of people, and uh
and I know the work you do is really valued
and and really impactful. And you're doing on the graph
roots and the questions you keep posing people I think

(01:18:53):
are really powerful. So they've got to you've got to
keep those coming to. Really enjoyed our conversation and look
forward to part two.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
It's been a pleasure. Thanks to.

Speaker 1 (01:19:06):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
like the show, then please consider supporting it by leaving
a review on your favorite podcast player, telling your friends
about it, or even becoming a hero and show your
appreciation by becoming a patron. Just head over to the
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"Collecting memories rather than medals" - a conversation with Tom Hartley

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"Collecting memories rather than medals" - a conversation with Tom Hartley