I recently spent five days in a mentorship role with a national team — observing, asking questions, sitting on the edge of an environment that was not mine to run.
Not designing sessions. Not making decisions. Not contributing in any of the visible ways I have spent years learning to contribute.
Just being present. Watching. Waiting for the right moment.
And somewhere in the first 48 hours, a very familiar feeling arrived.
Am I doing enough? Am I adding value? Where do I fit here?
I recognised it immediately — because I have heard it from coaches in almost every environment I have ever worked in. The assistant who feels invisible when the head coach takes over. The performance staff member who wonders if anyone actually reads their reports. The new signing who cannot find their place in a group that already knows itself.
I have sat with those coaches. Reflected with them. Helped them understand that their value is not in how much they do, but in when and how they choose to contribute.
And then I found myself in that exact space and felt every bit of it.
The attachment we do not talk about
There is something coaches rarely examine honestly — the degree to which we have attached our sense of worth to our output.
Not consciously. Nobody sits down and decides that their value as a person depends on how many sessions they run or how visible their contribution is. But the attachment builds quietly, over years of environments that reward doing. Where the person running the most sessions is seen as the most committed. Where being busy signals importance. Where slowing down feels like falling behind.
And so when the doing disappears — even temporarily, even deliberately — something underneath it gets unsettled.
The signals I had always used to measure my contribution were not there. No session to point to. No output to present. No moment where I could say — I did that.
What was left was much quieter. A conversation at the right time. An observation shared. A question that opened something up. And the longer I sat with the discomfort of that, the more I understood something I had only ever understood intellectually before.
The doing was never really the thing. It was always the thinking behind the doing. The seeing. The knowing when to step in and when to hold back.
But when you strip away the doing, you have to face that directly. And that is uncomfortable in a way that no amount of intellectual understanding prepares you for.
Belonging takes longer than you think
Being in a role where you are not running the environment also gave me a lived understanding of what it feels like to be on the outside — present, but not yet part of the rhythm of something.
I have worked with players who describe this. New staff members arriving into established cultures. Anyone who has had to earn their place in a space rather than having it assumed.
I knew the theory. Stay consistent. Do not force it. Choose the right moments. Trust that if the work is genuine, the relationship will build in its own time.
But knowing it and feeling it are two entirely different things.
And the reminder that stayed with me most came from a player I had worked with years ago — who told me she still uses things we had worked on together, that she did not fully understand the value at the time, but that now, with more experience, she sees it clearly.
Plant the seed. Trust the ground.
Not everything lands when it is offered. And that is not a failure of the work — it is just how this process moves.
What this kind of discomfort is actually for
I think there is a version of coach development that stays almost entirely in the intellectual. We read, reflect, discuss, understand. And that has real value.
But there is another layer that only arrives when you put yourself in situations that genuinely challenge what you believe about yourself. Where the uncertainty is real and the discomfort has no predetermined resolution.
That is what this kind of experience gave me.
It reminded me that the coaches I most want to work with are not the ones who have removed all the uncertainty from their practice. They are the ones who have learned to stay grounded inside it. Who can sit with am I doing enough? without immediately answering it with more activity.
That is a different kind of strength. And it transfers — to players going through something similar, to environments under pressure, to the moments that actually matter when everything gets tested.
You cannot give what you have not felt.
And sometimes the most important development you can do is not in the sessions you design or the frameworks you build, but in the quiet, uncomfortable business of learning to sit with your own uncertainty — and not letting it make your decisions for you.
When did you last put yourself in a situation where your usual ways of measuring your value just weren’t there anymore — and what did you find underneath?
