What Is Coaching? Lessons Are Passed On EVERYWHERE…

From Mr Miyagi to Miyamoto Musashi — and from the snooker club to YouTube to Online — coaching may be less about instruction than the transfer of knowledge between generations and people – humanity.

We tend to think of coaching as one person standing beside another and telling them what to do.

Keep your head still.
Pause on the backswing.
Follow through

Try it again.

But perhaps that is only the most visible form of coaching.

The more I’ve thought about learning—both as a snooker player and through some rather unexpected influences in many arenas of life—the more I’ve started to see coaching differently.

Coaching is generational.

Someone learns something. They practise it. They test it. Experience changes their understanding of it. Eventually, somehow, they pass that knowledge to somebody else.

Sometimes that happens in a lesson.

Sometimes it happens in a book.

Sometimes it’s a video watched by somebody the author will never meet.

And sometimes, rather surprisingly, a fictional karate teacher explains the whole thing.

Mr Miyagi: the teacher who makes you discover the lesson

One of the enduring ideas in The Karate Kid is that Daniel LaRusso doesn’t initially understand that he’s being taught.

Wax the cars.

Sand the floor.

Paint the fence.

Daniel thinks he’s doing chores. Eventually his frustration boils over.

Then Mr Miyagi demonstrates that the repetitive movements Daniel has been performing have become defensive movements.

Daniel has been learning karate without realising it.

There is a wonderful coaching principle underneath the entertainment:

Sometimes telling someone the answer isn’t the best way of teaching it.

A coach can create an experience through which the student discovers the answer.

And there’s another famous Miyagi idea:

“No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher.”

We don’t need to take that as a literal rule that absolves every student of responsibility. As a coaching philosophy, however, there’s something valuable there.

If the student isn’t understanding, perhaps the teacher should consider whether there is another way to communicate the principle.

That takes us somewhere interesting.

The principle doesn’t belong to the teacher

Imagine Miyagi himself as a young student.

Someone must teach him.

Perhaps his teacher doesn’t use anything resembling wax on, wax off. He has his own exercises, language and methods.

Miyagi learns the principle.

Years of experience deepen his understanding.

Then, decades later, when faced with a frustrated American teenager, Miyagi finds his own method of communicating it.

The teaching method has changed.

The principle has survived.

That is coaching.

And it’s something I recognise immediately from snooker.

Different coach. Same straight cue.

Nobody owns the fundamentals of snooker.

A coach may have particular drills, phrases and methods that make their teaching distinctive, but the underlying requirements of striking a cue ball accurately don’t suddenly disappear when you change coaches.

Alignment matters.

Stillness matters.

Timing matters.

Cue delivery matters.

Observation matters.

A coach may tell you.

Another may demonstrate it.

Another may put a camera beside the table.

Another may devise a drill that makes you discover it yourself.

Same principle. Different teacher. Different method.

That’s why good coaching shouldn’t ultimately create dependency upon the coach.

It should gradually create a player capable of recognising things for themselves.

Miyamoto Musashi: when experience becomes something transferable

Then take somebody completely removed from modern snooker: the Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

Musashi lived centuries before video analysis, coaching apps or YouTube.

Yet late in his life he did something recognisable to anyone interested in coaching.

He wrote down what experience had taught him.

His The Book of Five Rings wasn’t simply about possessing physical technique. It dealt with ideas around strategy, timing, rhythm, observation and understanding one’s craft.

Think about the process behind that.

Learn.

Practise.

Experience.

Understand.

Pass it on.

The technology available to Musashi was writing.

Mr Miyagi’s fictional method was physical experience.

A snooker coach might use a practice table.

A modern creator might use a smartphone.

The mechanism changes.

The human impulse doesn’t.

The snooker book is a coach that never meets you

That brings us to something we perhaps don’t describe as coaching often enough.

Books.

A player can learn something from somebody who died before that player was even born.

That’s extraordinary when you think about it.

The writer captured an observation.

The book preserved it.

Another generation discovers it.

Knowledge has travelled through time without teacher and student ever meeting.

Today we’ve massively expanded that possibility.

A snooker player can watch an online coaching video at midnight.

They can film their cue action.

They can compare it with professional technique.

They can use training aids.

They can read articles.

They can attend an occasional lesson.

They can discuss something with another player at their club.

The next evening, they might show somebody else what they’ve learned.

At that moment the student becomes part of the teaching chain.

Coaching doesn’t only happen between coach and player

Perhaps that’s the interpretation worth expanding.

Coaching isn’t necessarily a job title.

It is a process through which useful knowledge is transferred.

The formal coach remains enormously important because they can observe the individual, diagnose problems and adapt their teaching accordingly.

But learning surrounds us.

A practice partner can make an observation.

An opponent can expose a weakness.

A match can teach patience.

A book can change your thinking.

A video can reveal something about your technique.

Failure can teach you something no lecture could.

And experience gradually allows you to distinguish between what works, what might work and what probably won’t.

Which leads to a progression I’ve become increasingly interested in:

BASICS → EXPERIENCE → INSTINCT → CREATIVITY

First you learn what to do.

Then you do it enough times to understand it.

Eventually you recognise situations without consciously analysing every component.

And finally you have enough understanding to experiment.

That’s when knowledge stops being something you’ve merely been given and becomes something you’ve genuinely absorbed.

The best coach may eventually make themselves unnecessary

There’s a paradox in great coaching.

The coach wants the student to listen.

But ultimately, the coach should also want the student to stop needing to ask them everything.

The player begins recognising their own mistakes.

They understand why a shot went wrong.

They know which fundamental to return to.

They begin experimenting intelligently.

Eventually, perhaps, somebody asks them for advice.

And the cycle starts again.

COACH → PLAYER → EXPERIENCE → KNOWLEDGE → NEXT PLAYER

Except it isn’t really a circle.

It’s a chain stretching backwards and forwards through generations.

The medium changes. The lesson survives.

Once upon a time knowledge might have been transferred almost entirely face-to-face.

Then came books.

Photography.

Film.

Television.

Coaching academies.

Digital video.

YouTube.

Apps.

Interactive analysis.

And whatever comes next.

None of those things makes the fundamental purpose of coaching obsolete.

They simply provide new vehicles for something human beings have always done.

We learn.

We understand.

We pass it on.

That’s why an old karate film, a seventeenth-century swordsman and somebody practising a straight blue at a snooker club can unexpectedly belong in the same conversation.

Their worlds are completely different.

The underlying principle isn’t.

Coaching is generational and transferable.

The same principles endure.

They’re simply taught by different people, in different ways.

And perhaps that’s one of the greatest measures of successful coaching.

Not simply what did the student learn?

But one day:

What will they pass on?