Principle 5: Everything is Everything

Of all the principles that we have, this one is definitely my favorite. Its a phrase I first heard about five or six years ago and it immediately made sense to me.

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Before we go further, this is the 5th and final in our 5-part series where we are looking closer at the principles that govern Two-Brain Coaching. You can look back at the previous articles here:

Principle 1: Enjoy the Process

Principle 2: Learn, Design, Deliver, Refine

Principle 3: Sleep, Eat, Move, Manage

Principle 4: Empower Through Education

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Its arguably the most important too – it encapsulates the others quite well and paints a clear picture of what it means to be a coach.

When you first become a coach, its important to get really good at the basics. Your development in the early stages, or even veteran coaches going through a remedial phase (what a blessing this kind of coach truly is!), can be thought of as a pyramid. The foundation is the social side of coaching and you should spend loads of time developing yourself there. After that, you should begin to understand what is going on within the six inches between people’s ears, the psychology of it all. Then you finish off by learning a bit of the biological side of coaching.

At this point, coaches with enough hours under their belt will point out that the separation of knowledge in this way no longer exists. They are right. The graphical representation of a coach morphs from a pyramid to a venn diagram. Here we begin to see overlap in the three sides of coaching. Deep dives into niche topics actually create the breadth of knowledge that we touched on in Principle #4. This is a phase of coaching where one typically finds out not just what they’re gifted at coaching, but whom they love serving.

And then we get to this final iteration. The way that we see this laid out graphically is through a chord diagram, which is just a way to display the inter-relationships between data in a matrix. The most basic versions of these have their birth in math and computer science. Everything is everything is meant as a phrase that captures the interconnectedness of all that we do. This is the realization that seemingly unrelated things are not only related, but they are also dependent on one another.

Huh?

If you’re a coach reading this, you’ve probably written many a great programs for clients only to throw your hands in the air when they don’t produce the results you were after (If this isn’t you, that time is coming…I promise). Or maybe you’ve seen the effects that a recent spat with a spouse can have on one’s training that day – for better or for worse. Here’s another situation that not many want to talk about – client gets injured (whether in or out of the gym) and opts to stop training for a temporary period of time. They come back before they are physically able to do much typical training, but they absolutely thrive in ways neither of you imagined. That’s because adaptations, good or bad, don’t happen in a vacuum.

We work in an industry that is dominated by the marketing of physical improvements, but if you’ve been at this long enough you know in your heart of hearts that the real change takes place in interpersonal relationships and mindset. It is for reasons like this that being in a community of their peers is better for recovery than any amount of prescribed rest could ever be.

So what does ‘everything is everything’ really mean? Coaching isn’t about movement, it’s not about nutrition or psychology. It’s not about handshakes and high fives, having fun and achieving goals. It’s about all of that. All of the time.

All of these things inform and influence each other and thus your role as a coach.

Are you ready to step behind the curtain a bit more? Because we’re ready to take this journey alongside you!