Back to Moving Forwards
When I got down to Sydney a week ago, I was a bit nervous. I had a lot riding on this training block. I was very unhappy with the way that my training had gone over the last number of months that I had been working on my own, and so I had everything riding on the hope that when I reconnected with my coach, Brett, he would be able to work his magic, and get me back on track ASAP. To my great relief, that’s pretty much exactly how this first week of training has gone. Within the first 15 minutes of the first day of training, he was able to clearly identify the main things that I was doing wrong, and explain to me what I needed to do to fix it. Just like that, within the first day of training, I was already moving forward, and things were going in the right direction. This is why I value good coaching so highly, and why I am willing to go across the world to get it. (It’s also why coaching fees and expenses make up over half of my sailing expenses, and why despite a large amount of financial support from my family, I’m still $35,000 short of the funding that I need to cover the costs for this next year, but that’s another story…) Here is where it get’s interesting though. A lot of the things that I have been learning this week are things that I have already learned in the past, so effectively I am relearning certain skills that I already have some level of an understanding of. The result is very similar to when you read a book for the second time. When you read a book for the second time, because you already know the fundamental gist of what the book is saying, you will pick up on a lot of details that you missed the first time through. Making analogies was never a strength of mine (my last coach, Chris, was somewhat of a legend when it came to coming up with the right analogies for every situation, but that never really rubbed off on me), but basically, what I am saying is that I am not just relearning skills that I already had and getting back to where I was 5 months ago when I last worked with my coach, but I’m actually braking through old barriers and taking my skills to a whole new level. It’s like that saying “sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward.” The last 5 months were my painfully long “one step back,” and now, I’m back to moving forwards!
Thanks for reading!
Fillah