How to know if it’s time to scream in your coach’s face
For a start it’s not, so I’m going to need you off that particular ledge and back inside the building. However…
You’ve wanted to, haven’t you?
You don’t need to admit it to anyone. But the chances are you’ve hit a wall and instead of a coach sweeping in with the answer and putting you out of your misery, they’ve given you the barest minimum of an intervention that MAYBE was just enough to make you try something that worked.
Painful, wasn’t it.
Made you wonder what you paid them all that money for, didn’t it.
Makers doesn’t use an academic paradigm for its teaching model, which for you as a new student is going to be something of a problem. The academic model is very probably all you’re used to, and in that paradigm a teacher supplies all the answers because there are very few expectations on you as a student. To be a student is to not know anything, after all. Else you wouldn’t be a student.
Those expectations of you will translate into expectations of yourself, one of which is that if you don’t know the answer to something you need to be told it. You’ll have held those expectations of yourself for more time than you know, because your schooling potentially lasts for up to 14 years. You come to Makers, and they very breezily tell you that that’s not how things work here and you’re going to have to adjust.
Righto, gents. I’ll just do that, shall I.
There’s an acclimatisation period when you start, which is going to feel more like a friction zone. A tectonic plate-level friction zone. The worst point that this is going to manifest is during your engagement with the coaches in the first couple of weeks. You’ll find out rather quickly that they JUST WON’T TELL YOU THE ANSWER. This can hurt, especially if you’ve already been a diligent student and struggled with it by yourself for an hour.
Coaching and teaching are not the same thing. Lessons that you learn by yourself tend to get very learnt, because the process is so often really, really bad. A coach is there to facilitate that process, but the process still has to happen. If you just get given the answer to every question, there’s a real risk you’ll develop a nasty dependency on your teacher whilst at the same time absolving yourself of any responsibility for sorting your own issues out. This wouldn’t prepare you for the work place at all, which I’m guessing was why you signed up for the course in the first place.
If you find yourself getting coach rage, just stop for a second. That rolling boil you’re feeling in your stomach is actually a useful indicator that something beneficial is happening. Many years ago I was a personal trainer, and very quickly worked out that people don’t like two things:
1.) Not putting things in their mouths that they like to put in their mouths, and
2.) Working hard
Your body doesn’t like to do anything it doesn’t need to, and it doesn’t like maintaining energy-costly states that it’s not using. This is why things like strength and fitness fall off if you stop training. Your body was expending resources to preserve them, and like a particularly vicious accountant in an offensively-aggressive finance department, things that don’t get used get cut from the budget.
On the flip side, your body will only make adjustments if it really has to. This is why training has to bite so hard; you have to give your body no choice but to adapt if it doesn’t want to suffer again in the way it’s just suffered. And given that your brain and your body are essentially the same thing, it follows that intellectual training has to tax you in much the same way.
Therefore, if you really want to make a difference to your strength, fitness or mind, the training constantly has to be hard. You’ll be capable of more, for longer, than you were last time for sure, but you have to chase the feeling that what you’re currently doing is killing you a little bit. Slightly more than you can handle is ALWAYS slightly more than you can handle. If it’s comfortable, you aren’t making gains.
At Makers, the curriculum is designed to press you constantly in a way that you wouldn’t press yourself. Face it, you probably give up on things the second they get a little rough. You take more time than you can really justify. You put things off until tomorrow, or next week. So the next time you’re wondering if it’s time to hang one on your coach, remember:
If you could have made this much progress by yourself, you’d already have done it. But you didn’t. This coaching is exactly what you need right now.
