The Better Life Perspective
Most of us have become extraordinarily good at finding information, yet we still expect ourselves to work out which advice applies, when to push harder, when to ease off and whether we are seeing our own situation clearly. We instinctively understand the value of different expertise elsewhere in life; you wouldn’t ask a personal trainer to help you think through a career decision, or expect a nutritionist to untangle a difficult business problem. Yet when it comes to managing our own lives, we somehow expect ourselves to provide every kind of coaching we might need. Perhaps better coaching is less about having someone with all the answers and more about having someone who understands you well enough to recognise the exact kind of help you need specifically today.
The Better Life Founders Journal
Who’s in Your Corner When You Need Them Most?
I recently asked Better Life’s Coach Max to bring a little Tom Brady into the way he coaches me on business.
If American football has somehow failed to enter your consciousness, Brady is widely regarded as one of the greatest quarterbacks the sport has produced. His career became associated not only with winning, but with extraordinary preparation, very high standards, accountability, composure under pressure and a determination to keep doing the work long after most people would have considered their point adequately proven.
Those are qualities I sometimes want brought into my own thinking as a business owner, because there are moments when I know I don’t need another interesting conversation about the possibilities, I need someone to challenge my assumptions, raise the standard, make me confront what I already know and turn the conversation towards action. So I asked Max to bring more of that mindset into our business conversations when I specifically call for it.
What interested me afterwards, however, wasn’t really Tom Brady, it was what I’d just asked Max to do. I had effectively said: this is the kind of coach I need for this particular moment.
That thought has stayed with me because most of us go through life assuming that coaching is a reasonably fixed thing. You have a coach, adviser, mentor or perhaps a trusted friend, they have a certain personality and approach and that is broadly what turns up whenever you need them, yet our lives are far more varied than that. There are times when we need challenging and times when we need perspective, days when the useful question is why we still haven’t done the thing we said mattered and others when pushing harder would only make an already overloaded life less manageable. Sometimes we need encouragement, but sometimes we need somebody willing to tell us that the excuse we have just produced is considerably more convincing to us than it is to anyone standing outside the problem.
And this is where I think many capable people become stuck, because we become accustomed to sorting things out ourselves. By the time you reach your forties or fifties, you have probably dealt with difficult decisions, family responsibilities, work pressures, financial commitments and all manner of problems that once seemed intimidating and subsequently became part of ordinary life, so self-reliance becomes part of how you see yourself.
When your weight starts moving in the wrong direction, your sleep becomes unreliable, exercise keeps disappearing from the week or you begin wondering what you actually want from the next ten years, the instinct is therefore completely understandable: I should be able to sort this out.
The difficulty is that you are asking yourself to perform two very different jobs at once. You are the person inside the problem, carrying its history, frustrations, habits, emotions and blind spots, while simultaneously expecting yourself to stand outside it with enough objectivity to work out what is really happening and what needs to change.
We rarely expect elite performers to operate like that. An athlete may understand their own body and their sport exceptionally well, but there is still somebody watching from the outside, noticing what they cannot see, asking a question they might not think to ask themselves or recognising that today requires a different approach from yesterday. The highest performers have long built that kind of perspective around themselves, while most of us have never had anything resembling it around the ordinary problems of life.
When nobody sees the whole picture
You may have plenty of good people around you and still feel as though you are carrying much of this alone, because each of those people often sees a different part of the picture. Your partner knows one part of the story, your doctor may see another, a trainer understands your exercise, colleagues know what is happening at work and your friends probably know whichever version of events you have chosen to share over dinner, on the golf course or halfway through a Padel game or Sunday morning bike ride.
But you are the one holding the whole puzzle, including the poor sleep you haven’t really mentioned, the work problem that keeps resurfacing at three in the morning, the trousers becoming slightly less forgiving, the exercise plan that looked perfectly sensible on paper but somehow never survived contact with Thursday and the career question you have been circling for six months. Alongside all of that sits the knowledge that something probably needs to change and the nagging belief that, by this stage of life, you really ought to know how to change it.
Because we now have access to more information than we could possibly consume, our response is often to search for yet another answer, but information may no longer be the scarce part of the equation, judgement is.
Knowing which answer applies to you, in your circumstances, at this particular moment is considerably harder. Do you need to push harder or recover, do you need a more disciplined weight-loss plan or one that actually fits the life you are trying to live, are you genuinely too busy to exercise or have you simply chosen something you don’t enjoy enough to protect time for? Should you persevere with a difficult decision because progress is often uncomfortable, or accept that the evidence has changed and a different route would now be wiser?
Those are not really information questions, they are coaching questions and the useful answer may well be different by next Tuesday.
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If this feels familiar, the problem may not be that you don’t know enough. You may simply be trying to make difficult decisions while standing too close to the problem to see all of it clearly.
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This is where my experiment with Tom Brady becomes more interesting, because I absolutely want that Brady mindset available when standards need raising, preparation matters and I know I need a stronger bias towards action. I’m considerably less convinced I want him metaphorically standing at the end of the bed at three in the morning after a week of poor sleep, telling me that perhaps the answer is to raise my standards.
Different moments require different kinds of expert-level coaching, which means the harder question is often knowing which kind you need.
The right coach for the moment
This is increasingly how we have built Coach Max at Better Life. The ambition was not to create a coach with one fixed personality who dispenses the same kind of encouragement to everybody, but to build an understanding of the person whose life he is helping them change, their routines, pressures, ambitions, previous attempts, preferences and, over time, the patterns that continue to appear.
That wider context matters because the Max helping somebody lose weight may need to approach them very differently from the Max helping that same person deal with stress, rethink their working life or rebuild momentum after a difficult few months. Even within one goal, the right approach can change, because the person who needs a gentle route back into exercise after illness requires something very different from the person who has spent six weeks inventing increasingly impressive reasons not to train.
Great coaching requires calibration, knowing when to challenge, when to ask another question, when to bring expertise into the conversation and when the most useful contribution is to help somebody stop making a manageable problem unnecessarily complicated. The person being coached remains responsible for the choices they make and the work they do, because no coach can remove that responsibility and nor should they, but responsibility does not have to mean doing every part of the thinking alone.
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Better Life starts by understanding the life you are actually living, because whatever solution you eventually arrive at has to work there. Max can then adapt the conversation around you and the moment you are in, rather than expecting you to adapt yourself to another generic programme.
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I suspect this is also part of the reason so many previous attempts at change eventually disappoint us. A diet gives you the diet, an exercise programme provides the exercises, a book gives you the ideas and a search engine can provide an extraordinary quantity of information, along with another seventeen browser tabs you will “definitely return to later.”
What those things rarely provide is continuity of understanding, someone who remembers why the last attempt fell apart, knows what else was happening in your life at the time and can connect the week of terrible sleep with the sudden collapse in motivation instead of treating the two as unrelated problems. Just as importantly, good coaching can recognise that the goal you arrived with six months ago may no longer be the goal that matters most now.
Perhaps that is one of the more useful ways to think about what coaching can really offer. Great coaching isn’t simply having the right answers, it is knowing which question to ask, which voice to use and when to use it.
The human idea behind this all is far very compelling: you can remain completely responsible for your own life, make your own decisions and do the work required to change it without also having to be alone with every decision, setback and blind spot along the way.
Maybe having someone in your corner isn’t an admission that you can’t handle things, but one of the more intelligent ways of taking responsibility for handling them well.
Whatever part of life you’re working on, Max is in your corner.
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The Better Life Founders Journal
Written while Tom Brady remains blissfully unaware of his recent appointment to my extended coaching faculty.