GAINcast Episode 144: Pillars of coaching (with Frank Dick)

After a career of coaching Olympic champions, Frank Dick has turned his attention to coaching coaches. Coaching is the foundation of sport. Athletes make excellence happen, but it is the coaches that make excellence possible. On this episode of the GAINcast, Dick joins us to talk about the pillars of coaching and how we can create better coaches.

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Notes and quotes

Frank Dick’s spent 15 years as the director of coaching for British Athletics, personally coaching Olympic champion Daley Thompson, as well as working with champions from a variety of other sports like Katarina Witt and Boris Becker. More recently he was the High Performance Director at SASCOC (South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee) leading into the 2012 Olympics. Since 2016 he has consulted with England Rugby in the lead up to the 2019 World Cup. He is also President of the European Athletics Coaches Association, Member of the IAAF Coaches Commission, as well as chair of the IAAF Academy.

• 5:30 – A look at Dick’s background and development as a coach.
• 16:00 – The 4 pillars of coaching: curiosity, courage, connections, and commitment.  “Coaches need the courage to be vulnerable and never stop asking questions and taking risks. Part of taking risks is knowing you will make mistakes. If you are not making mistakes, you are not pushing very hard. “
• 25:30 – The 4 Rs of learning: reason, reality, reflection, and response. Why are you doing it? How is it done? How will you learn from it? And what will you do differently?
• 29:30 – Never be satisfied: “I was told my problem was that I thought of 99% as a failure, where most people think that 51% is a win. But you can’t accept 51%. “
• 33:00 – Searching out knowledge. “You have to have the hunger to go out and find the knowledge yourself. If you are handed it all the time, you don’t respect what you’re learning. ” “There are some things in life you can be taught, but there are other things you can only learn. We have to create situations where coaches are not handed solution and obliged to work their way through it. “
• 42:00 – Comparing generations of coaches and advances in pedagogy. “Your body adapts to training during the recovery, not when the stimulus is being imposed. The same with the brain; you learn after a period of reflection. “
• 56:00 – Putting the concepts into practice at the International Festival of Athletics Coaching.

To hear more about these topics you can listen to the full episode above. If you like what you hear on the GAINcast, don’t forget to give us a review and subscribe on iTunes.

Further reading

The following links were referenced in the podcast or provide some additional reading material on the topic:

• Check out our latest book Training Talk: Conversations with a Dozen Master Coaches for more in-depth insights on training from some of the world’s top coaches and don’t forget to join HMMR Plus to get full access to our video, article, and podcast archive here on HMMR Media.
• The International Festival of Athletics Coaching will take place from January 4 to 6. Information and registration can be found here.
• You can reach out to Dick on Twitter at @frankdickcoach.
• We’ve also discussed how to improve coaches education with Troy Engle on GAINcast 143 and Kelvin Giles on GAINcast 105.
• Two books recommended by Dick on this podcast: The Courage to Be Disliked and The Obstacle Is the Way.