You Can Be The Smartest Guy In The Room, But If You Can't Resonate With People...
You can't coach. You don't deserve to, either.
“You can be the smartest guy in the room. You can have all the degrees & certs.
You can even put the letters after your name on your socials & pretend like people care.
But if you don’t prioritize the human element, you can’t resonate.
If you can’t resonate, you can’t coach.”
-Ray Zingler on X
You want the truth?
Most coaches today couldn’t coach themselves out of a wet paper bag.
And the reason is because they focus on all the wrong things.
“What degrees should I get?”
“What about certs?”
“Have you seen that new tech?” (Something newer is out as soon as you buy the next “greatest” thing).
“As far as programming goes, have you considered this? That? Olympic lifts or no?”
Meanwhile these (often pencil neck or obese) nerds can’t even hold a conversation with a human in real life.
I have sales calls with parents of athletes every single day. Literally every day.
My first question is always “how elite is your kid at their sport?”
I’m joking.
I don’t care at all about how good they are that their sport.
I hardly care about what sport they play.
What I care about is getting to know about them.
What’s their background?
What else do they like/have going on?
Are they in/extrinsically motivated?
And I show the parents right off the bat, I care about their kids, not the jersey they’re wearing.
And then when they get to our gym we “evaluate” them with functional movement screens and a variety of other tech driven testing.
I’m kidding. We don’t do any of that shit that means NOTHING on day 1.
What we do is welcome the kids to our environment.
We communicate with them.
We get to know them.
We tangibly show them we care about them.
“Well how was his squat form!?”
Who the fuck cares?
Do you know how easy it is to fix squat form?
It’s stupid easy.
And the funny part is folks in our industry think “that’s the job”.
Nah, the job is improving human performance.
And do you want to know the first step in enhancing HUMAN performance?
It’s creating an emotional connection with your pupils. A real one.
That’s why these tough billy badasses walking around like they should be listened to because they squatted 600, 14 years ago never make it in this field.
Same with iPad Tommys, who believe storing & organizing data is what will “move the field forward”.
Nah, what will move the field forward is precisely what most overlook.
The PEOPLE.