How To Be Your Own Coach

“Go to the ant, you sluggard!
Consider her ways and be wise,
Which, having no captain,
Overseer or ruler,
Provides her supplies in the summer,
And gathers her food in the harvest” (Proverbs 6:6-8 NKJV).

Solomon doesn’t ask us to go to the ant to learn to work hard. We go to the ant to learn to work without a captain, overseer, or ruler.

It’s a blessing to have teachers, advisors, coaches, captains, overseers, rulers, employers, etc. But if they were all taken away, could you be your own captain, overseer, or ruler?

Here are two tools I use to oversee my own work.

One tool is to learn from my mistakes. You can find a lot of growth in striving to never make the same mistake twice. The US Army developed something called an after-action review in the 1970s, and I’ve seen variations of it in different places. My simplified version is to 1) notice my mistake and then 2) decide what I would do if I could do it over again. If I miss a shot in basketball by shooting too far to the right, 1) I notice it was too far to the right, and 2) I note I should’ve shot more to the left. If I say something that didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, 1) I notice I didn’t communicate what I wanted to communicate, and 2) I think about what I could’ve said differently to make it work.

(By the way, I’m not talking about sins here. If I sin, I confess that sin to God and, if necessary, to my neighbor.)

The other tool is to avoid the downward spiral. A downward spiral is when you make a mistake and can’t stop thinking about it. Then that leads to another mistake, which leads to more bad feelings. And another mistake. Until you start saying silly things like, “I never do anything right.” Instead of dwelling on the mistake, simply notice it, decide what you’d do differently next time, and then move on.

These two tools work well together.

And while they won’t change your life after a day or a week, they do build on themselves over the long run.

What do you think?
Joseph