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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone. Spencer here, founder of coach now, and former burnt out coach. Welcome to the connected coach podcast, where our goal is to help coaches, just like you unlock your time, your income and your location. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the importance of being selfish. So with that, let's get to it.
So recently I've been thinking a lot about my own experience with burnout as a high performance coach. You see once upon a time I was coaching 30 or 40 hours a week, and then emailing, texting YouTubeing and using a whole bunch of other coaching tools, another 30 to 40 hours a week, just to keep all the key people in.
And what I mean by that is the athlete, their parents, their other support, AK their other coaches, trying to make sure that everyone knew what to do, how to do it, and to just really stay accountable to each other. But as you can probably imagine, it was an absolute nightmare using all of these outdated and non dedicated services from that experience.
I, I really knew there had to be a better way. I looked for it, but it simply wasn't. Flash forward to today. The last thing I want for you is for coach now to become yet another communication channel that adds stress to your life. Honestly, if you want to use coach now, in addition to text, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, et cetera, I'd really rather you not use it at all.
It's just gonna cause more and more stress. You're not even gonna know what channels to be looking at, and you're always gonna be worrying that you missed a message. For all of us, but especially coaches in our current day and age, we aren't great at establishing boundaries between our personal and professional lives.
Remember, it's our job to help athletes realize their fullest potential, but not while sacrificing our own wellbeing. It has to be a win-win for all involved. Simply put, you need to take care of yourself. First, your business second, and your athletes slash clients. Reflecting on my 10 plus years of coaching.
I now firmly believe that I burned out because I wasn't being selfish enough. I know selfish. Isn't probably the perfect word to use here, but I've come to appreciate that. Being selfish doesn't need to be a negative. It all depends on context on how you act when being selfish, what your intention is when you're being selfish and when, where, and how often you act selfish.
Because to me being selfish simply means knowing your boundaries and enforcing them, it means being communicative, clear and deliberate. It means not sacrificing your morals, values and ethics. It means actively investing in your health and happiness. And it means knowing when to draw a line in the sand.
And I can tell you the coaches that draw the clearest lines are absolutely the happiest. Obviously there needs to be a limit I'm not advocating for you to disregard others. Let's be honest. If you're always selfish, you're kind of an asshole, but I think that if you're never selfish, you're incapable. If you never put yourself first, you're incapable of being your best self incapable of showing up recharged and reinvigorated.
And as a result, you won't be much use to anyone in work or in life. As the old adage goes, you need to fill your own cup before it can overflow to others. This is a lesson that took me a long time to. I always wanted to put everyone around me first, always putting my athletes need first, always putting their parents need before mine.
And it was a huge sacrifice that ultimately, as I've said, many times led to burnout, but it was all avoidable had. I just been more selfish since I had this aha moment about selfishness. I've been happier, more relaxed and overall much clearer with my thinking. I now know when I need to take a break and I actually.
To fill my cup, so to speak. I now make a concerted effort to focus on my mental health, my physical health, and my family. Maybe for you, that's taking an hour to go for a walk in nature, hitting the gym or playing a round of golf. I know those are all things that I enjoy at least, but obviously only you can know what you need to feel recharged, but as a coach, I want you to think about your relationship to the concept of selfishness in 2022.
Try thinking about your own unique balance of selfish and selflessness. because you can't be a good coach if you aren't happy. And I think you can't be sustainably happy if you aren't at least a little bit selfish.
With all that said, I hope you've enjoyed this mini episode as I'm sure you've noticed we haven't been updating the podcast as much recently, but this year that's going to change. In addition to our traditional interview format, I'm gonna be posting these quote unquote mini rants once a week, as a compliment to our blog.
We'll follow the same format as our blogs, but they'll never be identical. Yeah. So if you prefer to listen to our content on your commute to work or at the gym, I hope this format helps you stay engaged. Please consider subscribing.
And you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter@coachnow.io slash blog. I hope you have a great day talk soon. Yeah.