What I have learnt being a coach to a professional athlete.
Firstly, I must say it is an utmost pleasure and thrill to be able to work with anyone who is committed to improvement, and progressing themselves be it in a sporting contest or corporate one.
I'm actually a mentor more than a coach helping craft this athletes mindset to be one from a fixed position to a position of continual growth.
I’m learning as much or more from my "mentee" (yes it is a real word, I swear) in today's age of social media and influencers, I’m learning a lot, very quickly may I add. If you can impart some wisdom and receive wisdom that is learning.
Give more than you receive: You are only here providing a service for a short period of time so be prepared to lay it all out like a smorgasbord and eat the crumbs, for a while.
Practice what I preach: if I require my mentee to be at the gym or session at 5:30am I show up at 5:00am, if I require him to be practicing the daily activities we discussed I do the same.
We are a team: An invisible line between the two of us exists, so how I feel, behave and conduct myself rubs off, I am his leader and visual representation of such.
Fact 6: have fun: this journey has its highs and lows so make sure you have a good sense of humour and fill it with fun!
Dimi Papadatos and I met after he had many years in the golfing world wilderness, after a blistering professional debut in 2012 and winning tournaments he was failing and felt he was exhausted and burned out by 2016.
I began working with Dimi in late 2016 when he was ranked above 1000 in the world! I told him that my methods are different and we will use science namely neuroscience principles to help build his resilience, he blankly looked at me to say what is resilience! He replied "I’ve been told my mental game needs work", I mentioned to him that we as a team will work through the challenges together and very quickly struck up a friendship and results started to roll in, Dimi quickly rose to be ranked in the top 200 and performing more consistently catching the attention of sporting media, and top management groups in Europe, at the time of writing this he is ranked in the top 400 in the world.
As human beings foremost (i think we forget that we are not robots) we have 4 pillars of health: Mental, Physical, Emotional & Spiritual. These pillars comprise of our resilience to life’s stressors, if a pillar is weakened and not strengthened then our foundations to health are compromised.
I'm not going to step through all the details of our exact methods, however what we managed to do was to identify the areas of improvement via our resilience index. We essentially linked data with measurable actions and not to forget (some magic pixie dust! hahaha) had a lot of fun along the way!
I have the utmost respect for Dimi as the journey is a long one and he gave me his time and effort and we as a team managed to help him discover himself once again.
Amit Oberoi