Manchester Festival of Coaching 2024

The power of spending time with people should never be underestimated.

Congratulations and well done to everybody who has put the Manchester Coaching Festival together, done with compassion, humility and self-awareness. I wish I could have been there every day, but I'll take the two impactful days that I was there for.

My highlights were:

Enhance your emotional competence: A workshop for sports coaches. Led by Dr Ben Ives (Manchester Metropolitan University)

This workshop was proof that the impact you can have with coaching is way beyond skill acquisition, development, tactics etc, its emphasis was on what students / players can learn from your emotional intelligence, competence and delivery.

·??????? Authentic or adaptive to the environment – As a coach it is important to be both, but the latter requires you sometimes not to be authentic and to “surface act”. The surface acting occurs when sports coaches purposely suppress, disguise or amplify feelings in order to convince others that they are experiencing a particular emotion… this can be approached through wording, tone of voice, facial expressions, bodily gestures and clothing.

·??????? Positive and negative effect through intended and unintended influence - An interaction with one participant / member of a group, if done well will have the intended influence on that individual it may also have a positive influence on another member of the group. Equally if delivered poorly (and maybe even if delivered well), it could have unintended influence on a different member of the group and potentially a negative one.

·??????? An overplayed strength can be a weakness - We spoke through an example where a coach had displayed his delight four times towards one participant / member of his group, during and after a session. Though there were a lot of unknowns about the circumstances, it was thought that the coach’s intention was for the young person to leave the session feeling 10 foot tall and for him to repeat the behaviours of that session in the future. It's probable that some of the ways he chose to praise may have been taken negatively by the person and others may have felt deflated as someone else was singled out for doing not much more than the norm. An option that we discussed was asking the player one way in which he could be recognised that would mean the most to him.

The magic of the day the session though, came from talking through an experience one of the other attendees shared from coaching grassroots football. Andy Heald spoke very passionately about coaching his diverse under-16 football team, highlighting the emotional challenges and the importance of inclusion versus competitive pressure. It emphasised how our emotional approaches can be tested, and reminded me of an experience I had coaching my 11 year old sons team last year, there were lots of layers but ultimately it came down to whether the right thing to do to try and win a game matched the right thing for a young person's / teams long term development.

Person-Centred Coaching. Led by Paul Garner (University of Birmingham) and Will Roberts oberts (University of Waikato)

The session considered 7 system shifts, ways to think about transforming the workforce development ecosystem in sport. The seven ways being:

1.????? Transformation not transaction

2.????? Change the paradigm

3.????? From qualifications to quality assured delivery

4.????? Fixing the leaky bucket

5.????? Diversity through decentralisation

6.????? Embrace complexity

7.????? Deconstructed delivery

Within the discussion I joined a group that was talking about number five, decentralisation… The main points of consideration were around whether we collectively are brave enough and willing to leave every logo / ego at the door to follow a collective approach. The blockers to such a system were thought to be governance, consistency and quality assurance and the enablers being trust, having a go (failing quickly and cheaply) and agile local and national governance.

Paul and Will then covered the characteristics of their POWA model; the characteristics of a person-centred coaching approach, The central point of which being balance:

·??????? Perspective - Rather than blinkered or unfocused

·??????? Other centred - Rather than self-serving or servile

·??????? Willingness to learn - Rather than closed minded or scatterbrain

·??????? Accurate self-assessment - Rather than self-denigrating or arrogant

Small Steps to a Diversified Workforce. Led by Paul Reddish OBE (Equity Coach) and Ashley Marshalleck (Sport England)

This session focused on “inclusion by design” decision making and the difference between ”anybody can access” and the active removal of practical barriers so that anyone actually can access. The four layers considered were:

1.????? Exclusive - By design this is only four a specified group it's restricted from the beginning for specific reasons.

2.????? Equality of opportunity - By design it's open, anybody can join

3.????? Quality of condition - By design it considered underrepresented groups and is attractive to attend.

4.????? Equality of outcome - By design it is specific an unequivocally focused on the marginalised and disenfranchised

Paul gave a brilliant description of this decision making in practice, with the example of a high-profile elite athlete visiting a sports club to connect with their community. In circumstance 1 (exclusive) this would be a master class with said athlete, closed and for members only within the sports club at a time which suits the schedule. In circumstance 4 (equality of outcome), this would be a master class with the said athlete, open for all and within a marginalised / disenfranchised community at a suitable time to them.

Through this session, Paul & Ashley covered a topic that I feel privileged to be currently involved in and working on with the BSA Group ( The Black Swimming Association (BSA) and Inclusive Aquatics). The BSA group are for disenfranchised and marginalised communities, who do not have equitable access to build trust and become aquatically active. Our work is to engage, build, and educate so that we can influence the aquatics sector to embed transformative change which addresses systemic & structural challenges within the water safety sector.

Unconventional is the new Conventional. Led by Born Barikor (Our Parks)

I feel lucky to have known Born for a number of years, and I think it's incredible how Our Parks has gone from “one park and nobody turning up”, to a “community of over 200,000 people”.

Within the journey of Our Parks and how their use of unconventional approaches inspire and reach diverse audiences, Born touched upon:

·??????? Tough reality backgrounds - our coaching agenda is to deploy individuals with lived experiences and diverse backgrounds. Our goal is to continually engage with community and support individuals from tough reality backgrounds

·??????? “Communities are formed when two or more people have mutual concern for each other's welfare”

·??????? You need resilience; the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties; toughness

·??????? Successful teams and organisation continually strive for growth within their product, brand and services, but also create measures to account for the value given against each metric. “You can't grow without resilience, and you can't harness resilience without good leadership”

Live Untapped Potential podcast recording. Led by Richard Husseiny (Men Behind Sport) and Ian Braid M.Sc. MCIMSPA (DOCIA Sport)

The most powerful session that I attended during the coaching festival was undoubtedly the last one, it was the live recording of a podcast on the nature of working in coaching and high performance, considering sacrifices and mental health.

I have the privilege of calling Ian a friend and look forward to working with Richard in the future. I know that the podcast will be available in the near future so I would encourage you to listen to what is a very rich, authentic, and honest conversation.

The things I took away personally though were

·??????? Try to deal with things when they happen rather than pre crafting, micromanaging or controlling things

·??????? Sport teachers us lessons…but only the lessons we purposefully craft.

·??????? Always understand and know who has your back.

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Well done Sporting People Ltd , MCRactive …. You were brilliant and I look forward to version 2.