Jennifer Greggain Chats High Performance Coaching and the Women in Coaching Program

So there may be a lot of different ways you could answer this.

But if you were to look back at maybe your first year teaching or coaching and like look back through like a crystal ball or the opposite of a crystal ball and watch yourself give a lesson or coach somebody.

And now what you know now, what do you think you would have noticed about yourself? And what do you think that you've learned over the years and through all your education that has kind of like helped you shape you into the coach you are today?

Oh, wow.

That is an amazing question that I would love to spend a good hour answering.

But on the short version, I would say less is more.

I think, you know, as an early coach, and I see a lot of early coaches doing this as well, is they feel like you have to give everything in one lesson or, you know, a lot of things in one lesson or one session with an athlete.

And that's certainly not, that's something that I've learned that, you know, less is definitely more.

Let's just kind of Um, peel back some layers and just kind of, um, see if we can, um, just pinpoint one or two little things at a time.

I would say that number one and number two, like as a coach, like this is more for coaching and also for teaching, but coaching for sure.

Um, you have to work really hard at establishing relationships with high performance athletes, um, You know, it's just not an overnight thing.

It's not like a high performance athlete signs up for a lesson and then you're going to have this amazing, you know, long relationship with them.

It doesn't usually work that way.

Sometimes it does, but usually it's more about, you know, getting to that level of trust and getting to that level of trust is, is so important.

And then when you do get there, that's the goal.

That's when you can really dig in and you can have honest conversations with, with your athletes.

You can have difficult, um, conversations with your athletes this works with their parents too when you establish a relationship with parents uh you can have really hard conversations it's very difficult if if not even possible at all to do that until you've gotten to that level of trust um so you have to work really hard at that and you have to give it more energy that's even more important early on than let's say any technical elements that you might want to work on with them

Yeah, for sure.

And you kind of touched on this in your first answer when you were talking about how teaching and coaching are different.

Outside of kind of like the relationship building and that trust factor, what else, because we get asked this all the time, why is there a stream for coaching and teaching? What's the difference? Like, what does that mean to you, the difference between those two?

I can really only comment on my own experience because I know that everyone's had a little bit of a different experience in how this has gone for their careers.

But I would say for me, coaching is more holistic.

And not that you can't do that in teaching as well, but you kind of have to go to the very next level with coaching.

And that could be, you know, engaging with strength and conditioning and trainers, mental performance coaches.

Their families, everybody that's in this athlete's team, their partners.