Creativity & Coaching

This interesting and stimulating article in today’s NY Times Arts section on creativity. It got me thinking about coaching as a creative processhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/books/08creative.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th  It would be interesting to see these scientists study coaching as a creative process. In a trite manner we talk about the art and science of coaching, and then lean toward the science. I love the science of coaching, but I absolutely embrace the art. That is where the passion is, the fire in the belly, that joy of enhancing the dance of athletic movement. Too much science and we begin to view movement too mechanistically. We lock ourselves into artificial methods, numbers, modes of exercise and prescriptions unrelated to the big dance – the game, the match, the race. The creative coach will look at the same movement and see it with different eyes. I will never forget presenting a movement analysis of the javelin in one of my graduate classes at Stanford. I presented the analysis in a very segmented mechanistic manner, broken into parts, a detailed analysis of each segment. I analyzed the film frame by frame, no connection of one frame to the next. That is how I coached, frame by frame. When I finished, the dance masters students in the class asked me to play the film loop again without stopping. I did. They asked me to play it again and then another time. On the forth time I played it they started clapping the rhythm. They saw the throw as a dance. What an aha moment! I honestly have to say a whole new world opened up for me that day. Movement is a dance; a jazz riff and coaches are creative artists. It changed the way I looked at movement, it changed the way I coached.