Principle: Coaches Over-Invest in Craft and Under-Invest in Who They’re Becoming
At the start of this year, one of my mentors asked me to do something uncomfortable.
He suggested I go to the people closest to me — family, friends, colleagues — and ask them a simple question: what behaviours and actions should I continue, and which ones should I stop?
This wasn’t a performance review. It was a character audit.
It’s an exposing exercise. The people in your life who know you well enough to answer that question honestly are also the ones who see past the professional version of you. They’re not evaluating your methodology. They’re evaluating your integrity. Your patterns. The gap between who you say you are and how you actually show up.
What I got back was useful in ways that no credential or framework has ever been.
I’m going to do this at least yearly, one could do it more frequently. It should be standard practice for coaches.
We build feedback loops for our athletes. We track output, review performance, create structured opportunities for honest assessment — for everyone except ourselves.
The character audit flips that. It asks: who are you becoming, not just what are you producing? Are the people who know you best seeing the same person you believe yourself to be?
Most coaches I work with have never asked that question seriously. They’ve invested heavily in becoming technically excellent — and left the foundations of who they are largely unexamined.
Perspective: The Credential Trap
Here’s what the credential trap looks like:
A coach invests heavily in becoming technically excellent. They study the science. They understand load management, periodisation, recovery, cognitive performance. They’re sought after because of what they know.
And then pressure arrives — from a club, an athlete, a sponsor, an outcome — and the question they face isn’t a technical one.
It’s an ethical one.
Do you hold the line, or do you find a way to justify crossing it?
Technical mastery gives you nothing in that moment. What determines your answer is character — the accumulated weight of the person you’ve been becoming, quietly, in the decisions nobody was watching.
The coaches who end careers, damage athletes, and leave lasting harm in performance environments are rarely incompetent. Most are highly skilled. They know exactly what they’re doing.
What they lacked wasn’t knowledge. It was the integrity to use it well.
Story: Alberto Salazar and the Cost of Winning Without Character
Alberto Salazar was one of the most decorated distance coaches in modern sport. At the 2012 London Olympics, two of his athletes — Mo Farah and Galen Rupp — finished first and second in the 10,000 metres. He won the IAAF Coaching Achievement Award in 2013. By any conventional measure, he was at the peak of the profession.
Behind that record, something else was being built.
In 2019, the US Anti-Doping Agency found that Salazar had trafficked testosterone, administered a prohibited IV infusion, and attempted to tamper with doping controls, all while acting as head coach of the Nike Oregon Project. The programme was shut down. His ban was later made permanent.
But it was the testimony from his own athletes that cut deepest.
Former athlete Mary Cain alleged that she had suffered years of emotional and physical abuse — that she was pressured to take illegal diuretics and shamed about her weight to the point of self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Several former Oregon Project athletes came forward to validate her account.
USADA’s conclusion was direct: Salazar demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and wellbeing of the athletes he was sworn to protect.
This is what craft without character produces.
Not always this visibly. Not always this catastrophically. But the dynamic is the same at every level — a highly competent person who never did the work of interrogating their own values, their relationship with power, their willingness to protect the people in their care when it was inconvenient.
Salazar didn’t lack knowledge. He lacked the character to use it in service of others rather than outcomes.
Question
You’re investing in your craft. That’s good.
But when did you last seriously examine who you’re becoming as a person — not as a practitioner?
Closing Thought
The industry will keep rewarding credentials. That’s not changing.
But credentials don’t tell you what a coach does when the pressure is on and no one is watching. They don’t tell you how a coach treats an athlete who is struggling, inconvenient, or in the way of a result.
That’s a character question. And it’s the one that actually matters.
The coaches I respect most are not the most credentialed people in the room. They’re the ones who have done the harder, quieter work of figuring out who they are.
Build the craft. But don’t neglect the person doing the building.
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens