When the Head Coach is at their best, so are those around them
The Coach as the Performer
Support Vs Challenge - Research identifies that where there is a balance of high challenge and high support, the environment is considered to be more resilient and therefore more optimized for building performance.
Whilst having a team around them, coaches are in an isolated, high-pressure, leadership role where every decision matters. This coaching enables the coach to identify and understand how to flex their own balance, as well as provides them a form of support - a confidential, neutral, solution focused space to think on a deeper, critical level. It’s a place to figure out how to maximize their own strengths, as well as ways to navigate challenging situations, strategic decisions and difficult conversations.
Leadership Development - The role of the coach is much more than coaching the technical, tactical & skilful side of a game, sport or activity. This is particularly true in collegiate sport. They are a leader and manager of people. They build an environment and influence a culture with spoken and unspoken values and expectations. How a coach shows up matters; how they build relationships matters; how they respond to situations matters; how they coach people matters. They consciously and unconsciously dictate the experience of those in the programme and directly impact how people perform. This isn’t taught in coaching qualifications and badges.
Coaches often have a natural way of leading people, and, there is often an untapped potential to expand and refine these skills. This coaching allows the coach to explore their own leadership, find their blind spots, reflect on experiences, consider live situations, and understand their gaps or areas of further potential and development.
The Ultimate Coach Experience - Coaches are human. We know that people can perform under a huge range of extreme circumstances, but what happens behind the scenes, the experience of the person remains unseen. Research shows that context matters - past, present and future. The coach has an individual blueprint and a life wider than sport which influence how they show up.
As with the athletes, it is essential that the coach considers themselves from a holistic point of view. This coaching therefore addresses all components of life and well-being, ensuring that the individual is healthy, highly self-aware & equipped to self-manage and self-regulate effectively. This minimizes burnout & underperformance and ensures sustainability of performance & positive experience of sport and life.
Better People make Better Coaches
The Work
Working with Head Coaches to create high well-being to optimize themselves as performers.
The work is bespoke, customized & tailored to each coach’s needs & can include:
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Context matters - Taking into consideration all aspects of life & whole person development
Understanding individual blueprint and patterning, and how this impacts their coaching
Addressing balance & boundaries
Identifying ways to develop range - for self, leadership & for coaching
Increasing self-awareness and reflection
Tackling stressors & tough decisions
Self-regulating, emotional management & managing allostatic load
Addressing life and coaching transitions & change
Through the coaching, the coach finds the balance and toolkit that optimises them - as a person and a coach
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Providing a space for a coach to think through, process & problem solve:
Leadership strengths and opportunities
Program vision, values, language & messaging
Live situations
Strategic critical thinking and decision making
Measures of success that are wider than the winning
Culture they want to influence, develop & maintain
Relationship management
Development of positive well-being in the sporting program
Program change & evolution
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Increase your self-awareness & knowledge - We don’t know what we don’t know. You have to be open minded to seeing things through a different lens to enable growth, development & evolution. You have to be coachable!
Understand & maximize your patterns - we all have a blueprint patterned from our childhood & life influences and experiences. Your patterning impacts how you coach. In this process you understand and own your blueprint, reinforcing it where it maximizes you, evolving it where it doesn’t & understanding it where it is unknown.
Our relationship is critical to me best understanding you, your lens, your coaching & your program. You have to be open, honest and embrace being stretched & challenged.
I’m solution focused - I facilitate a process of critical thinking so that you can find your own solutions to the challenges, pressures, decisions & situations you encounter.
My practice is evidence based & practice driven. I do not advise you & I’m not there to be an expert in your sport, your job, or in you. I will put concepts in front of you, and will understand what these concepts mean for you. You make your own choices around them.
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Initially, I will work with you to build relationship & understand each other. This will:
Give me the opportunity to demonstrate and clarify the coaching process, and discuss the parameters, such as confidentiality, ethics etc. Our conversations will give me insight into you, your sporting program, and your life more generally, from which I will start to build an understanding of the work we might do. It also gives me the opportunity to provide clarity for you on where my work starts and finishes (where it can tip into other disciplines).
The conversations will give you a lived experience of being coached by me. You will understand the areas around which I work, and together we will identify areas of strength, as well as those that you want to focus on. It is an opportunity for you to get a feel for working with me and allows you to ask any questions that you may have
Fundamentally, it has to be right for both of us.
Subsequent coaching will then be driven by you. Through this initial phase, we will identify areas to focus on. You will drive what is most important to you and the place you want to get to. I will facilitate and help you to find solution of how to reach them.
It may be that you don’t know exactly what you want from each session, that’s ok. I can help you figure that out too.
Working with Coaches to Develop High Performing People
A big part of maximizing people’s potential is getting the environment right - not just in the traditional sport focussed way, also factoring in other dimensions for increasing human performance. This method utilises a hybrid approach. I work collaboratively with coaches and leadership to create hybrid performance programmes.
Together we raise the readiness & potential of the coach, athletes and the team - consistently and sustainably.
“Sian’s work with the coaching staff in the rugby programme has been instrumental in bringing us all together. We redefined what the rugby programme was, evolving it’s identity and redefining the purpose & values. We developed key language and behaviours that we wanted seen and heard. Success for the programme was about more than winning. We created a safe, trusted space where we could all grow, learn and develop together. As staff we lead by living the culture we agreed that we wanted to see. This work evolved over 4 years, gradually we saw change, in the people and the results. We progressed from 7th, to successfully win the title.”
“Sian is very attentive and engaged. When asking for help she gives honest and frank feedback. I find myself in a new role with passionate and challenging staff. Sian has given me the ability to review and think clearly when making difficult decisions. Without her support I would not have had the same level of in-depth and critical thinking and reviewing as has been carried out”
“Sian has helped me on a 1-1 level, helping me realise my why and how to bring coaches and staff together towards common purpose. She has helped me develop my voice as a leader and how to get ideas and direction across.”
“I have been working with Sian for nearly 6 months. Over this time, I have found our coaching sessions incredibly valuable. The techniques I have learnt through different sessions have not only helped me regulate and change my perspective, but have also helped me work more effectively with my coaching & staff team. Two key things that I have learnt is about the language that I use and how much of an impact that can have on athletes and other coaches and staff. I have made this a focus in my team to create a common language that reflects what we want to build the programme around.
I also learnt value in identifying my anchors to keep me self-regulated, grounded and balanced. This has helped me stay at my best, especially through a long, intense season”
Get in Touch
If you are interested in any of my services, or finding out more, I offer a free, no obligation 30 minute consultation through which you can outline your situation and ask any questions you may have.
Please contact me by any of the options and I will be in touch.
sian.coaching@gmail.com
(667) 274 2125