Co-Active for Sport Leaders
Why I’m writing this. And why it matters.
I’ve always believed that life lives in the nuance.
In conversations, in leadership, in coaching, I have never been satisfied with black-and-white answers. My instinct has always been to slow things down, turn an idea over, and look at it from every possible angle. For a long time, I believed this was simply my superpower.
Then my wife, and a few people close to me, gently named something else.
“You know you’re a bit of a contrarian, right?”
At first, I pushed back. I thought, no, I’m not trying to oppose or provoke. I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to find the truth that lives between extremes. That’s not being a contrarian, that’s having nuance.
Over time, I realized both things can be true.
There is a genuine curiosity in me, a real desire to sit with complexity. And there is also a tendency to judge a little too quickly, to move toward change before fully letting something breathe. I’d be naive to say that part of me is gone. Anyone who knows me will still spot it. The difference now is awareness. I see it. I smile at it. I work with it rather than letting it run me.
I share this because it matters for what comes next.
The system that stopped me from wanting to fix things.
I enter most systems with an urge to improve them. New job, new organization, new methodology, my brain is quickly scanning for what could be better.
Co-Active coaching was different.
From the very first training, something unfamiliar happened. Instead of looking for the gaps, I found myself feeling something I didn’t expect. Awe.
Awe at the clarity of the philosophy. Awe at how the content and the experience of learning it were completely aligned. Awe at a methodology that doesn’t rush to solve, but instead trusts the human in front of you to already hold the answers.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t want to change anything. I just wanted to go deeper. That feeling hasn’t left me.
Why I’m writing this.
After my certification, I noticed something happening in my coaching conversations with sport coaches. Co-Active concepts kept surfacing, not as theory, but as the missing piece they’d been searching for.
A coach struggling because his players weren’t following instructions. Another one, wondering how to rebuild trust after a difficult season. A third, trying to figure out how to lead a locker room where half the players were mentally somewhere else.
Every single time, the Co-Active lens opened something up.
I realized I wanted to write this down. Not to promote myself. Not to build a brand. But because writing is how I learn. Every time I sit down to translate one of these concepts into the language of sport, I understand it more deeply. I stay immersed. I keep growing.
And if that writing helps a coach somewhere see their athletes, and their leadership, differently, then this project is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
Over the next year, I’ll be sharing one Co-Active concept at a time, and exploring what it means specifically for sport leaders.
One truth that never changes.
Before I go any further, I need to name something that sits underneath all of this.
Whether you coach a group of nine-year-olds chasing a ball on a Saturday morning, a seventeen-year-old with professional dreams, a college athlete navigating performance and identity at the same time, or a professional whose livelihood depends on what happens on that field, you are coaching a human being.
Different contexts. Different pressures. Different stakes. Same nervous system. Same need for meaning. Same need to feel seen.
That is the foundation of everything here.
I’ll explore each concept through three lenses:
Youth sport: under 15. The primary job here is Play. Joy. Curiosity. Falling in love with the game. When that happens, everything else becomes possible later.
Elite and college sport: where performance starts to matter more. Identity is forming. Decisions carry weight. Ambition and pressure begin to coexist. The challenge is holding both, developing performance without losing the person.
Professional sport: this is livelihood. Everything revolves around it. And this is precisely where it becomes easiest to forget that behind the professional athlete is a human being who must flourish as a person to sustain excellence as a performer.
This is something Co-Active taught me clearly through working with executives and CEOs. The higher the level of performance and responsibility, the more tempting it becomes to focus only on results, and the more important it becomes not to.
Being before doing.
One last idea to plant before we begin. Most of us are taught that what we do defines who we are. If I win, I am confident. If I succeed, I am fulfilled. If I perform well, I am worthy.
Co-Active inverts this completely.
Who you are, your values, your presence, your way of showing up, is what shapes what you do. Not the other way around.
Take joy. If joy is a core value for your program, the way it is for coaches like Steve Kerr, what does that actually mean? It sounds simple when you’re winning. But what does joy look like after four consecutive losses? What does it mean to show up with that value when everything feels hard?
That is the real question. And it is a question of being, not doing.
When a coach knows who they are, they lead from that place regardless of the scoreboard. That’s where real leadership, and lasting performance, comes from.
What’s coming.
Each article in this series will take one Co-Active concept, ground it in what it actually means, and then explore what it looks like in practice for sport leaders across youth, elite, and professional contexts.
We start next week with one of the tools that has had the deepest impact on me personally, and that I have seen transform coaches the moment they truly understand it.
The three levels of listening.
That is where real connection begins.
M-A
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