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.
That's not how this works, mostly because it wouldn't be honest. There's still an ongoing relationship with this body, these habits, and a tendency to avoid things by staying busy, one that hasn't resolved into some finished state to dispense from a position of arrival. It's still in progress, and will probably stay that way for a long time.
This gets said 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: 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.
Showing up as a fellow traveler rather than an authority changes the actual content of the coaching. It's not a plan already perfected and now being handed down. The same questions are still being worked through in real time — what does rest actually mean this week, what is being avoided by training harder than necessary, what does it look like to be honest about a habit that isn't serving anyone.
That shared uncertainty does something useful. It takes the shame out of not having it figured out, because the client doesn't have it figured out either, and isn't being asked to pretend otherwise. Coaching stops being a performance of expertise and starts being a joint effort to pay attention.
None of this means the expertise isn't real. It is — years as an athlete, training in biomechanics, a decade watching how bodies and habits actually behave under pressure, and it gets used. But expertise about mechanics is different from having personally finished the human part of the work. Nobody finishes that part. Anyone who claims to have finished it is either lying or hasn't looked closely enough yet.
So this isn't coaching from the finish line, because nobody's standing on one here. It's 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.
