One of the core beliefs in my athletic and coaching philosophy is the power of holding open space instead of rushing in to fill the vacuum.
In terms of training, this means holding open potential for creativity, imagination, curiosity, and adventure instead of always needing a structured plan that’s contingent upon hitting every single step in exact progression.
When it comes to coaching, this means holding open space for grace, understanding, compassion, and love instead of rushing towards judgement, condemnation, urgency, and immediate reactions.
Here’s a great example of how I’ve been practicing holding open space and how it’s value is often concealed until a surprise moment of inspiration presents the opportunity.
Then I’ll share how you too can begin to carve open space that seems counterintuitive but turns out to be exactly the right thing.
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One of the core practices I’ve been trying to turn into a habit and ritual is deep reading. The kind I used to do all the time as a professor.
But ever since leaving the Academy to focus on building an online business while taking on more and more domestic responsibilities, it’s been one area I’ve struggled to gain consistency it.
For the first few years of my business journey, I’d wake up early and pound out content and work on the backend operations of my business.
I was trying to find clients, figuring out how to best serve them, and learning how to attract more. All worthwhile and important aims I needed to establish myself.
Once we moved and I needed to hit the pause button on growing my business I decided to aim this energy towards becoming the BEST coach I could be to the people I was already serving.
One thing I preach to them is to start small and stack wins early on in any process that you’re trying to start up. Like a consistent fitness routine.
I felt the need to open space in my morning for detailed reading, difficult texts and intentional note taking. It was something I did on and off while building the business but now I wanted to make it stick for good.
That meant removing the need to ‘be overly productive’ in those early morning hours with holding open space for reading and deep contemplation.
On the outside, it’s a strange pivot.
I substituted solidly productive work blocks for open ended reading blocks that were not being used to directly market or communicate my coaching services to new and potential clients.
Now here’s the magical part.
One of the things that draws people to me as a fitness coach is my intellectual approach, the fact I used to be a professor in sport philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology, alongside the fact that I practice what I preach in my own fitness life.
In many of my early coaching calls I would create custom presentations based on deep historical and philosophical knowledge and turn that into actionable advice for my people. I got away from that a bit over time.
Now, when I created the open space in my mornings to simply enjoy reading in an intellectual manner, I began to see how that early morning reading would help me reach out and better communicate with my clients.
I would be reading a sentence or paragraph in a book and immediately connect it to a conversation I had with a client. I’d then send it off as fast as possible with a little note on why I thought of them and how they could use that to better implement what we discussed on our last call.
I also began having flashes of inspiration directly inside the coaching calls, recognizing that what I’d been reading that morning specifically applied to the issues me and my client were discussing in that exact moment.
Let me share a quick story from this week and then I’ll hit you with the takeaway lesson you can begin to apply yourself.
This week I finally got to the part in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” where the issue of Quality begins to appear as the bridge between the divide over object and subject, or put another way between the facts and the feel of a thing.
The author, Robert Pirsig, talks about the frustration so many feel when confronted with technical instructions on how to put something together, in his example a bicycle.
When people give up, frustrated, cursing the machine, he argues it’s because they determine that the manual shows the only way to put it together. The giving up signifies that the person just can’t follow that one track and thus is doomed to failure.
But he turns this around and says, correctly, that in the hands of a creative and experienced individual there are truly thousands of ways to correctly put the machine together.
"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you....If the machine produces tranquility than it's right."
The same day I read this I was in a coaching call with an athlete I’ve been guiding for a few years. He’s been excelling in training and has steadily increased his volume, talent, and desire to perform in endurance.
Yet recently he’s been dragging. Motivation is low. The allure of better performance is meeting the resistance of too much time training, and he’s viewing the tradeoffs and not worth it.
In the moment, it became clear that he had fallen into a bit of a trap inside his mind and the expectations were creating a prison around his actions.
He began his endurance training aimed at adventure but overtime substituted performance. Then in order to keep pushing towards better performances, a kind of rigidity entered into his training. He believed he was stuck on one track that he no longer felt motivated to move down.
Now, if I hadn’t opened up space in my morning to read and think deeply about what I’m reading, I’d lack the sensitivity to pick this out through our conversations.
But with a detailed history of years of coaching, the moment of inspiration hit and I began reading text off the page right in our call.
In this sense, the ‘machine’ is his training regimen and it was not giving him tranquility or satisfaction. So we had to recalibrate the aim and find the appropriate mark.
A few notes on the new aim:
More fun
Less volume
Dropping performance expectations
Opening up more adventure and exploration
Finding new and creative metrics for goal setting
Now the machine is tuned up and ready to fire.
And in helping this athlete with his ‘machine’ I found even more tranquility in my own morning ‘machine’ that holds open space for the same type of intellectual exploration and adventure.
Now let me offer you a quick guide on how to create this type of open space inside your own life.
The secret is to see how your physical training creates it’s own arena to experiment with open space and how inside that space your values come to fore front.
But there’s one important conceptual point you have to connect the emergent knowledge of self you generate through holding open a bit of space inside of your training in order to truly act on what you learn inside the training.
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