There's a version of coaching that runs on the idea that the coach has arrived somewhere and the client hasn't yet. The coach has solved their relationship with their body, their habits, their discipline, and the job is to hand that solved state down to whoever's paying for the session.
I don't coach that way, mostly because it wouldn't be honest. I still have my own ongoing relationship with my body, my habits, and my own tendency to avoid things by staying busy. It hasn't resolved into some finished state I can now dispense from a position of arrival. It's still in progress, the way I suspect it will be for a long time.
I say this carefully, because it can sound like false modesty, a coach performing humility as a marketing angle. It isn't that. It's closer to a decision about what actually makes coaching useful. I think a person trying to change their relationship with their body is better served by someone walking alongside them than by someone standing ahead of them, gesturing back at how it's done.
When I present myself as a fellow traveler rather than an authority, it changes the actual content of the coaching. I'm not handing down a plan I've already perfected on myself and am now distributing. I'm working through the same questions in real time — what does rest actually mean this week, what am I avoiding by training harder than I need to, what does it look like to be honest with myself about a habit I know isn't serving me.
That shared uncertainty does something useful. It takes the shame out of not having it figured out, because the person across from me doesn't have it figured out either, and isn't pretending to. Coaching stops being a performance of expertise and starts being a joint effort to pay attention.
None of this means I don't bring real expertise to the table. I do — years as an athlete, training in biomechanics, a decade watching how bodies and habits actually behave under pressure. That expertise is real and I use it. But expertise about mechanics is different from having personally finished the human part of the work. Nobody finishes that part. I'm fairly convinced anyone who claims to have finished it is either lying or hasn't looked closely enough yet.
So I don't coach from the finish line, because I'm not standing on one. I'm somewhere in the middle of the same course, a bit further along on some parts and behind on others, and the honesty of that seems to matter more to people than any illusion of having arrived ever would.
