A Coaching Story

There is no doubt that part of my enthusiasm and success as a coach is due to the valuable sounding board and advice I receive from my own mentor and instructor. Adults with alcoholism and mental illnesses were coming to the club in Spain and we began to see a steady increase in the number of children with disabilities and children from socially deprived backgrounds. There is little social care in Spain and Social Services had begun to send people to us because of the successful outcomes we were having in improving the quality of life for many people.

As we trained more coaches we ensured that this same ethos was spread from the top down through our coaching programme. My older son is autistic and we returned to the UK last year to assure his continued education.

During the summer, I taught at a ParAbility Day held at Blackbird Leys in Oxford, where I coached 55 children with mixed disabilities in small groups of between the ages of 6 and 10 for the whole day. I enjoyed it immensely. I took advice and opened a disability karate club. I soon discovered that it was to be the first karate club specifically for disabled people in England.

I was unable to identify any help or support from the English Karate Federation so after identifying a need to develop this work further I looked to engage with local sports partnerships.

Fortunately, Oxford Sports Council and Oxfordshire Sports Partnership were incredibly helpful, especially Margaret Stevens who helped launch the Pilot for our project, KickStart , which aimed to get people with disabilities into karate by the end of and continue with sustained training. Teaching wheelchair users with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties, some of whom have very few movement skills is challenging. Yet it is these students who often show the greatest improvements. They want to move because a movement such as punching a mitt is fun. Slowly and steadily they are encouraged to make different hand shapes to strike, and are encouraged to start kicking and even to count.

We completed our target in March and every single athlete that started is still in training to date. Ever since we went there we have been asking when we can do more karate. Even in the short time that our students have been having Karate lessons, there has been clear progress, both in behaviour and skills. Students are standing calmly, quietly and listening and following instructions Students who have needed one to one supervision are capable of doing the class independently, without prompts from a support assistant.

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Steady progress is now being made. To advance up the belt ranking system we have discussed replacing kicks with alternative techniques but adaptation is essential. We are also considering a classification system as a support for disabled students within the coloured belt grading syllabuses. In view of the lack of funding nationally I am in the process of creating a charitable organisation and a Sport Plan and looking for more committee members that can help with the roll out of the KickStart Projects.

Good governance is essential. The task in front of me and the new organisation is huge, but as Ron Cleere of the Judo Inclusion Commission told me: Stoke Mandeville have asked us to teach two sessions per week at the stadium. Mencap and Wheelpower have been very helpful offering advice and guidance. Four Special Schools have been extremely supportive. A disability syllabus has been written for wheelchair users and another has been written for people with learning difficulties based upon the syllabus for children which we used in Spain.

An artist has been commissioned to create a wordless pictorial version of the LD syllabus and a coaching course is in development. We'd love you to share a link to it. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. As a systemic business coach, it is quite confounding to witness how many individuals and professionals move from company to company, from team to team, from boss to boss, from partner to partner, etc.

This only to confirm a fundamentally similar, repetitious type of conclusion. This saying could indeed lead a hippy variation of the story! Luckily, there are known ways to counterbalance this type of self-confirming, circular process. Should the old man have been a future or solution-oriented coach, for example, he could have asked: When we ask ourselves this type of question , we can more precisely define our desired futures, envision different contexts within which we want to interact and grow. This can help us build different expectations , open ourselves to new experiences of reality and then go on to confirm that these are indeed possible to achieve.

So what is the ideal city within which you want to live and work? On a cathedral-building site, a visitor meets three master stone cutters intensely chiselling away. The visitor stops to look, and then asks them "may I ask what you are doing? It may seem obvious that the three stone cutters are one and the same person, especially if that person was a master craftsman. Indeed, if we want to be successful in our lives, our everyday tasks first need to be carried out with artful care and precision.

These solitary tasks are often humbling contributions, but they generally add up with other people's collaboration and fit into much more impressive achievements. Like cathedrals, these larger collective outcomes often stand the test of time. Some may even take a lifetime to achieve.

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And one way or another, the most beautiful and larger achievements of man are always celebrating the glory of God. Spearheading a worldwide movement for the development of social responsibility, the coaching profession is spreading worldwide. If this profession is now installed in mature markets, its growth is much slower in developing economies. Within these less mature business, political and social environments, coaching has not yet taken a firm foothold as a formal profession.

This is also because coaching has a particular frame of reference, a defined ethical stance, a specific set of behavioral skills, a very particular type of client relationship, etc. During early phases of economic development, all these specific characteristics of coaching are very difficult to understand by local populations, whether they are beginning coaches or potential clients.

One can often find similarities between countries that are still on the growing edge of the coaching profession. This can be perceived as painfully slow, sometimes as hopelessly difficult. These first generations of coaches have to struggle to find clients and the first clients often have no inkling as to what they can expect from engaging in a coaching dialogue. In effect, the coaches are not really ready, and their clients are no better prepared. Having participated in a number of other developing markets such as Morocco, Mexico, etc; and accompanied numerous local coaches struggling to make a living, the process is quite familiar.

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When I work in such environments, an Egyptian story often comes to my mind as a relevant metaphor. So I wish to share this story, concerning how to grow trees in the desert:. In Egypt today, when driving in places where there once existed only sand and rocks, one can often see endless rows of strong, tall evergreen trees, for hundreds of hectares. If it were not for the sand under the pine needles, the scene could seem to be transplanted from much more hospitable regions, such as from Mediterranean and European landscapes.

Now, how did this miracle take place?

UK Coaching - My Coaching Story Karate for Disabled People

How were these trees grown in such unlikely drought-ridden areas where never falls a drop of rain? But that answer is very far from the truth. Any older local Bedouin can tell the real story. Decades ago, in the middle of the desert, people patiently planted very small trees, barely bigger than twigs, painstakingly, one by one, for miles on end. Knowingly, they were kept at survival level. Consequently, for years, these future trees didn't grow at all.

No apparent progress could support a strong motivation to continue the patient development program. For decades, the potential trees seemed to be doomed to remain small, the size of ornamental shrubs, burning under the scorching sun. But hidden from human eyes, these evergreens patiently grew deeper and deeper roots. Their apparent growth was almost inexistent, but underground they reached deeper and deeper, searching for an almost hypothetical water table. In time , over tens of years, they finally achieved their distant goal.

Only then could their growth shift directions, and they started to reach for the sky. Today, many years later, these shrubs have become trees. They are big, healthy and numerous. In some areas, the forests they constitute have completely transformed the landscape. For the unsuspecting, their story is unknown, and travelers probably think the success is due to industrial means , applied on a very large scale.

If that had been the case, the result would be very different. These trees would have much shorter roots, and would still be dependent on man for irrigation. It is not the case, for their success is durable and sustainable. It rests on their individual survival skills, their uncommonly deep and resilient roots.

The success runs even deeper, however, if one is to consider a major collateral outcome. Over the years, these trees have also participated in creating another miracle. In the areas where they stand, their exceptionally deep roots have succeeded in raising the water table much closer to the surface. In the areas that these trees have prepared, it is now possible to plant other trees and shrubs that can access underground water much more rapidly.

Numerous varieties of smaller, less sturdy plants almost naturally settle in the transformed environment and make it their home.

In time , the early struggle for survival, searching for that inaccessible water table may even be forgotten. In Romania and other such countries, an early generation of local trained coaches is growing roots. Daily, it is struggling to go deeper to find the local coaching market that seems almost inaccessible. Luckily, although each is barely aware of their individual contribution to a collective effort, numerous young professionals are undertaking this market development process.

Each is almost too busy surviving to notice they are part of a much larger collaborating community. And the market is slowly appearing. Managers, entrepreneurs and people in general are being educated, gradually understanding how they can work with coaches to achieve their life and work ambitions. The next coaching generations will have it much easier of course, but will they remember and be thankful to the first market developers? Will their roots run as strong and as deep? In begining markets, it is also advisable to avoid the temptation to implement shortcuts.

They find fast-track schools and mail-order diplomas. They claim they have been trained abroad when they only attended informational conferences. They may achieve quick marketing notoriety by quickly publishing copy-paste concepts or they may manoeuver to get visisble positions in local associations. Although these strategies may appear effective on the short term, they do not help to grow deep roots and lasting competencies.

These shortcuts could be perceived as the equivalent of artificially over-watering or boosting ornamental plants with chemical fertilizer to have them grow faster and display overnight size and beauty. Some clients also may take shortcuts and want a visible coach for short-term and status related motives, or just as a socially-accepted postponing strategy.