Coaching has evolved dramatically over recent decades and that includes the role coaches are expected to play.
The old school model sometimes looked (or appeared to look) like a coach yelling at their athletes, belittling them, and making sure every athlete—no matter how big or talented—was subjugated to their whim and will. Thankfully, that model has mostly become a relic of the past.
The newer apperoach is one where the athlete comes first. The coach serves as a partner who guides the athlete and helps them reach their potential. It’s a healthier model where the coach is not just a trainer, but often also a life coach.
But, even this newer coaching model still has its issues, and often it’s the coach who is subjugated to them. Now it’s often expected that the coach must push themselves completely aside for the athlete. The coach may be expected to be available at any hour of the day, and they may be fired if the athlete isn’t successful. And, when the athlete does win, the success and credit seem to belong solely to the athlete.
This has led many coaches to feel that in order to be a great coach, their own needs and health have to be sacrificed. Here to talk with us about why coaches should be doing the opposite is Lee Povey, CEO of Maximize Your Potential Coaching and a past USA Cycling Olympic coach.
Lee has seen what happens when coaches don’t take care of themselves including quitting at the height of their careers, unintentionally making choices that damage the athlete, and losing the ability to take satisfaction in what they are doing. He talks with us about ways coaches can find better balance both with themselves and their athletes, ultimately leading to a better relationship for both parties.
So, put on your coaching hat, and let’s make you fast!
RELATED: Povey’s Above/Below Instructions and Worksheet
Episode Transcript
Rob Pickels 00:04
Hello, and welcome to Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host Rob Pickels here with Coach Connor.
Rob Pickels 00:12
The role that coaches play has evolved dramatically. The old school model was clipboards whistles, and a coach who yelled at their athletes. They were the top of the food chain, and athletes had no choice but to follow their orders.
Rob Pickels 00:26
The newer model is where the athlete and coach are partners where the coach guides an athlete to reach their potential. It’s a healthier model where the coach doesn’t just focus on the physical but the mental and the emotional as well. Joe Friel said it best that coaches are mentors, teachers and role models. However, there are times when the pendulum swings too far, and the coach feels they must put themselves completely aside for their athletes. There’s pressure to be available every moment of the day, and a poor result could mean the athlete walks away from their relationship.
Rob Pickels 00:58
Many coaches feel that their own needs have to be sacrificed to be successful as a coach, and today Lee Povey is here to tell us that isn’t true. Lee is a former USA Cycling Olympic development coach who expanded his coaching to corporate leadership. He’s seen what happens when coaches don’t take care of themselves, they can unintentionally make poor trading decisions, or lose the ability to take satisfaction in what they’re doing and quit at the height of their career.
Rob Pickels 01:24
Today, he talks about ways coaches can find better balance within themselves and their athletes, which ultimately leads to a better relationship. So put on your coaching hat and let’s make you fast.
Rob Pickels 01:37
In the future of coaching, which is the last module release of the craft of coaching with Joe Friel, we envision what the future of coaching looks like in the years to come. While artificial intelligence will play a critical role, AI will never completely replace coaching. However, leveraging its attributes to find the right balance of personal connection with automated tasks will be vital to remaining relevant with future generations. Check out the craft of coaching module 14 at fast talk labs.com.
Trevor Connor 02:08
Well, welcome, Lee, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. This is the first time we’ve had you on fast Doc, I hope you’re excited.
Lee Povey 02:14
I had lovely to see you, Trevor. Nice to meet you, Graham.
Trevor Connor 02:17
So Lee, I actually really appreciate this, you reached out to us and felt there was a really important subject that we need to talk about. And we fully agreed and this is right up Grant’s alley. So grant is joining us today. But it’s this idea of coaches, their job is to take care of athletes, their mentors, they are teachers, they’re both mental and emotional support. But often coaches have to kind of put themselves aside. And there is something very important about focusing on the health of coaches as well. And I’ll just say, last week, I was down in Colorado Springs, and I was visiting USA Cycling and USA Triathlon. And this actually came up with both of those visits this fact that there are coaches that are really starting to struggle, and they don’t really know how to take care of themselves. So let’s dive into this notion of supporting coaches. And Lee, give us a quick little bit of background on you and why this is something that’s so important to you.
Lee Povey 03:20
Yeah, thanks, Trevor. 1718. I was on the GB national team as a junior my coach at that point was the National Education coach for Team GB. This was before lottery funding. So before there was a ton of money, he was the worst coach I’ve still experienced to this day. So my first gauge was not good. Unfortunately,
Trevor Connor 03:39
he doesn’t listen to the show.
Lee Povey 03:42
Yeah, that had an impact on me, right. So he was training me as an endurance athlete. When I was clearly a sprinter. I hit 1500 watts at 15 years old, he didn’t understand that’s actually pretty good for a 15 year old. So I just wasn’t getting the support I needed. And the kind of the last straw for me was he went to the Junior World Championships came back from it and said, the Russians, the Germans, the Italians are much bigger than us. They’re all better than us. No English person is ever going to win anything. Now, this was early 90s. So imagine what happened, you know, 10 to 15 years after that, with GB becoming the strongest cycling nation in the world. And bear in mind. I mean, you guys can’t say I’m six foot two and 200 pounds. I wasn’t that much more than that. 16 I’m a pretty big boy. So it just made no sense. So I realized early that I wasn’t going to be quite well class. I’m good national class rider but not quite well class. So I went into real estate. So I had a different entry to sports coaching the most people was in real estate for 12 years worked for a large corporate company. And then I worked at my own company. So I got a ton of leadership training a ton of entrepreneur training, ton of leadership skills and in person practice. And then I sold my business the week before the property crash in UK got incredibly Lucky started cycling coach and even though I was still an athlete came mainly from a business background rather than go from an athletic background to coaching. And then that’s what we’re going to talk about is the difference in support I had in leadership in the corporate world, compared to what I see with coaches and what I experienced myself running the Olympic development program for USA Cycling, and what I would have liked to have seen for coaches, and now what I’m looking to create to help coaches
Trevor Connor 05:27
fantastic. And thank you for that. So when I was down in Colorado Springs last week, something that was brought up in one of those conversations, we’ve actually briefly talked about Larry Nasser, so for anybody who doesn’t know, this was this gymnastics doctor who’s now doing a whole lot of time in jail for the horrible things that he did to these gymnasts, I don’t really want to go into the details about that. But they made a really interesting point that well, he was truly a bad guy. He has made it harder for the good guys, meaning the coaches that are trying to help athletes. And a lot of these coaches, they don’t make a lot of money, they need to be spending their time coaching, they need to bring in as many athletes as they can. But now you have to do background checks, you have to do criminal checks, you have to do safe sport, you have to have the certifications. The governing bodies are constantly looking in on and watching these coaches. And that’s a stressor that’s tough on the coaches, when most of them are just good people trying to do something to help out some athletes. So I’ll throw this to both of you. Because this is more your expertise in mind. What has been the experience for coaches and where are we at,
Lee Povey 06:37
I can speak from personal experience on kind of both ends. So I’ve been involved in safe sport investigations against other coaches that please the coaches were not behaving properly, but didn’t actually lead to them being removed from coaching, which was very stressful for me and the athletes involved. And I was a subject of the safe sport investigation myself. So I got notification from USA Cycling, that was an investigation into me for sexism, bullying, and favoritism. That process took three months, I was the last person interviewed. I spoke to all the other coaches who had worked with me, everybody said, You’ve done nothing wrong, this is going to be okay. incredibly stressful. USA Cycling told me they couldn’t speak to me. So my boss at USA Cycling couldn’t speak to me why this was happening, I was going to the Junior World Championships, I had to send a chaperone with me to the Junior World Championships. And eventually, it became pretty clear that it was a rider that did not get selected to the Junior World Championships, basically, making false claims. All of the athletes that were investigated in their parents, luckily supported me. And at the end of it, you get sent the transcript of all the conversations. So the good thing to come from this was it’s very heartwarming to hear all the lovely things they said, like nobody said anything negative about me. But for three months, that was incredibly stressful. I’m racking my brain thinking, you know, my cheeky British humor? Did I say something that got mistaken? You know, I couldn’t think of anything. And the only thing that they said was I swore once in front of the athletes. And that’s just the difference between British people and American people. So yeah, I’ve been through it. And it’s incredibly stressful. I do think it’s incredibly important. My mum fostered 100 high risk kids in a 10 year period, I’ve seen how young individuals can be easily manipulated and taken advantage of so I think it’s incredibly important. I also think the system needs a lot of work still. So give you an example. In my instance, I would have really liked somebody USA Cycling to be an advocate for me, so you know, an independent person, so so I can who is an advocate for me until I was either found guilty or innocent. And I didn’t have that I was just told I am by myself. We can’t speak to you credibly scary. And you know, I didn’t call me and tell me about it. I just got an email saying there was an investigation into you. And even though, you know, I was completely exonerated, incredibly scary process to go through, because you think Well, that’s it. my coaching career is now over.
Grant Holicky 09:05
Yeah, I had a experience as a swim coach, where we got brought on investigation as a team for recruiting and what they were asking the punishment to be with banishment from USA Swimming for life. And you can stand there and the whole time and go, Whoa, I know, we didn’t recruit. And I know that wasn’t a reality. And I also know that that punishment for recruiting would be way off the reservation, but you’re still constantly thinking about it and you’re still constantly worried about it. And to Lee’s point, even when we’re talking about a doping violation, Ombudsman’s are available to do exactly what you’re talking about to help guide the athlete through the process until they’re found guilty or innocent. I will say that most of the research does point to the fact that false accusations are rare. And this is something that nine times out of 10 Especially if we’re going down the road of no accusation of sexual misconduct, those are almost always true. But we do live in a world now where what is being said, is open to interpretation by a lot of different parties. And there’s a game of telephone being played between the athlete and their parents, the athlete and other athletes as to what the coach said to the athlete, all of those things. So I would agree with you, Lee, that I think one of the big things that we need to do is really redirect what we’re doing in coach education, and in safe sport away from just find the monsters to Let’s educate coaches on how to balance their lives. And I’m guessing this is exactly what you want to speak to Lee but balance their lives and find that way to not be so wrapped up in the sport that they begin to make poor choices and go down this road. And and that’s always been my big thing. We can’t just look to find the monsters, because a lot of coaches that are entering our sports don’t yet have a background, a background checks not gonna work. Yeah. So I really think I’m excited to listen to some of what you have to say, because I think it’s gonna line up a lot. Yeah,
Lee Povey 11:11
I love that. If I may respond to that, Trevor, leave, I think if you take out the sociopath, and a psychopath, which is less than 5% of society, most people are trying to do the best they can with a toolset that they have. And it’s beholden on us as governing bodies, if we’re talking for USA Cycling or USA Triathlon, to give them the tool sets necessary to coach at high level. And for me, that’s one of the big lacking areas. For coaches, we’ve recognized athletes need more support, there’s much more in the way of supporting athletes processes for them, organizations for them, like safe sport, there’s not enough of that for coaches so that coaches know the correct way to do things are getting support, and the correct way to do things are getting support so they don’t get burnt out. So as you said, their hopes and dreams aren’t being projected and transferred on to athletes. And they know how to have correct boundaries between themselves and their desires and their athletes desires. You know, some people know that naturally, most of us find that out through practice. And we can really fast track that. And unfortunately, what we do is we put people often in high coaching positions, you know, after the last Olympic cycle, half the programs, took their retirement athletes and made them the national team coaches straight out of being an Olympic athlete. And I can tell you, not all of those programs are doing well, having done that some of them are really struggling. Because it’s such a different thing from being an elite athlete to be an athlete coach, and you need help you need support, and you need training.
Trevor Connor 12:46
But I think that segues really well on to my next question, which is that I think the days of a coach, just knowing the sport, and maybe knowing some of the physiology is all they need, it seems like a coach needs to be so much more than that. They have to know how to act with the athletes, they have to know how to be appropriate, we’re just talking about that. But on top of that, they have to be a good communicator, they have to provide support for the athletes, they have to look out for the athletes well being. There’s a whole lot that you have to do as a coach that goes beyond just providing a training plan. And that has to be challenging for coaches. I think you guys are starting to touch on that.
Grant Holicky 13:23
Yeah, go ahead. Lee, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Lee Povey 13:26
Thank you. I think for me, there’s a few big factors that have changed a lot recently, much of sport has become professional over a reasonably short time period. So a lot of sport was amateur, a lot of coaching was amateur and volunteer. Now we’re looking at professionals. You know, I was one of only two professional track cycling coaches in the UK when I first started doing it around 2006 2007. Now, there’s probably hundreds. So it’s changed rapidly. People are now looking at this as a career rather than their dad that just joins in cuz their kid is doing it or the mum that joins in because a kid is doing that. So the level of expectation is higher. When we look at elite coaching, the old model was the authoritarian approach of the coach knew everything. The coach was the one that had read the books, and then they are telling the athletes and they’re usually using their experience and they have more experience. They’ve been in the game for longer. And then they were the ones that were reading the books and coming and telling the assets if the books are even available. Well, now your athlete can go online, they can follow their favorite YouTuber or their favorite Instagram or they can read scientific studies. And they often have as much knowledge about the physiology or sometimes more than the coaches, especially if the coach is not University train doesn’t have the degree in sports science. The athletes know so much. So the model has moved to a partnership now. And that takes a lot of skill. It’s much easier to just say, do what I’ve told you to do. And the athletes just go okay, well, that’s not my experience of coaching now. And that’s not the model that I If you want to work in either, I personally love a very collaborative model, because I think it’s much more successful, the athletes are happier, and you’re happier. So and then add on top of it. Now we’ve gone from a coach that probably prescribed the strength training, if they did strength training, prescribed all of their bike workout, swim workouts, run workouts, to now having specialists in each department when we’re talking to elite sports. And you’re not only therefore the coach, you’re also now a manager of a team, which again, takes a different skill. And you might have a performance manager above you. But usually the head coach, the lead coach is collaborating everybody’s information, getting everybody to work as a cohesive unit. So the skill set needed for coaching now, it’s much more vast than it was, and the understanding from the athletes of what they want, and what they expect, is greatly increased from it was, and if you’re working in youth sports, the demand and expectation from parents, especially if they’re paying has gone through the roof, well,
Grant Holicky 16:00
man, I can take me in five different directions. Here, you got me excited about five different topics.
Trevor Connor 16:05
I’ll testify to that he’s writing notes,
Grant Holicky 16:08
taking furious notes. But one thing I think we really need to talk to is and you made a great point, that we’re moving from a model that is top down coaching to collaborative coaching, the research shows us that it’s more beneficial athletes well being and coaches well being. But what we’ve watched for generations is great athletes move directly from athletics, as you noted, to coaching, what they tend to do then is do what they did is athletes Coach, how they were coached. So we have this problem, and I see it in cycling, I saw it incredibly in swimming, that somehow the training methodologies and the mindsets from the 80s are perpetuated into the 2000 20s, that were still living 4050 years a generation in the past, because these athletes just brought that coaching model to now. And it doesn’t work in today’s age, for all the reasons you mentioned, the availability of information, the expectations, even how people are being raised now versus how they were raised in the 80s. And these are all benefits. But we need to see our coaching industry change. And the only way you’re going to allow an athlete to move to a different model than how they were coached is through education. And another thing that you brought up and furiously writing notes, teachers have to be educated to walk into the profession. 90% of the coaches that walk into profession, I would say started as volunteers, we see a very different percentage when we’re on the elite level. But most of them walked in just not knowing anything, they had no education. And maybe they got a handbook from USAC, on how to coach level one or level three, or however we enter into it here. But there’s not a whole lot of information, there’s not a whole lot of direction on how to engage with an individual, how to teach, how to encourage how to support and any education these coaches are getting maybe is purely on physiology, it’s purely on Well, this is what you do to make that athlete better. But as we’ve noted, those athletes might know a whole bunch already. And they may know what works for them. So when we talk about coming into the elite ranks, you better be willing to ask that athlete what works, because they’re the ones that know.
Trevor Connor 18:24
So you raise a really good point. And I’m going to have a follow up question to that. If you do a Google search on how to coach, my guess is you’re gonna get a whole lot about how to build a training plan, how to put together workouts, how to do a gym session, things like that, I don’t think you’re gonna get a lot of information of how to communicate with an athlete how to interact with an athlete. And I’m going to take it a step further and say, even if you find that something you can read about and learn as building a training plan, you can’t read about how to communicate and interact with a person and then be skilled at it. It’s something that takes practice. So how, and I’ll throw this to both of you, whoever wants to go first. How do you address that?
Grant Holicky 19:04
Well, I want to hop in because I want to direct this specifically to lead he came to this from the business world where you do get educated on how to manage and how to interact and how to do those things. So what did you take from that experience that has helped you in coaching?
Lee Povey 19:21
I love that I was very lucky. I had two advantages coming here as a coach from outside the USA coaching model one I worked as part of the GB program, and they were just way further ahead on understanding coaching. So not just understanding physiology, and they were way further ahead on that. You know, when I came here, you’re looking at track sprint, and as you said most of it was from the 80s. Still, yeah, I’m like, What are we doing? Why are we doing this? So I think I’m going to come at this slightly differently. And then I’ll get back to what you’re talking about. The first thing is you have to understand yourself. So to be really effective. This is why people can read books and still can’t implement and the coaching or the leadership or the communication in the way that you’d want them to, because there’s their own personal stuff. So there’s our own baggage from how they were coached. There’s our own baggage from their own family system, the insecurities that we have, you know, when you’re talking about people copying, what they were taught, a lot of that comes down to insecurity is what they know. And it takes some courage and self belief to move past are, this is what I know. And I can move to a model of I’m going to do the best I can with the information I have now. And if better information comes along, I’ll switch the way that I coach or lots of coaches have a training methodology. And it’s like, well, this is what I used to do. And I know it worked for me, well, it didn’t. Actually you would have been quicker if you’re doing modern training than what you did. You just believed it worked for you. Because that was when you went the fastest. But now we know that there’s plenty of ways for you to go quicker and have better repeatability, better recovery, whatever it is. So I think there needs to be one self evaluation of oneself. This is where somebody like myself comes in, we do that deep work to figure out what is it that makes you tick as a human being? What are the things that are going to get in the way of you being your best, healthiest self? acknowledge those, then the tool sets on top of it now? How can you apply toolsets feedback is a great one. I used to be terrible at given feedback, not because I’m not observant, I’m ridiculously observer, I can walk into any arena and tell everybody how they need to do it better. That was the handicap, because I would do that. And it came from a place of love from me. So I’d come in and I’d be like, Why are you doing this, if you did it like this, you would go faster. And here’s how you drop your CDI. And here’s how the track would work better for you. And oh, I can see your undergeared or you started your effort too early. People don’t want to be approached like that, or at least most people don’t want to be approached like that. They get defensive, that guard goes up. Now you’re not effectively sharing information. They’re just thinking, Who is this guy? And why is he having a go at me. So from doing it really poorly, I built a model on how to give feedback, because I had to learn as you said, I had to learn the hard way. Now in the business world and the British business world, we were much more direct with feedback in America, people aren’t used to that. And they will get defensive. So you have to try a different approach. So with this model for feedback, the first thing is just asking permission, Hey, I just saw you do this effort. I’m wondering if you’re open to some feedback, I saw something that might interest you. And then the second part is, how did it feel for you? Is there anything that you noticed before you give your feedback? And only give your feedback? If they answer the first question of Are you open to feedback? Or yes, if they say no, don’t force your feedback on somebody. And I would do that even as somebody’s coach, at least to begin with. So that I built that rapport of, they were saying, Yes, I want your feedback, not expecting as the coach that they’re going to want to hear everything or they’re going to be ready for everything.
Grant Holicky 22:49
Yeah. And I love the second piece of that, which is, you know, do you want my feedback? Is that the second piece is how did you feel about that? How did you think that went? I think that’s such an important piece of modern coaching, modern communication, it involves the person you’re talking to, it doesn’t become top down. They don’t feel like they’re being lectured. They’re brought into the process. And then you as a coach are engaged in so much more information that you didn’t have an ability to get to before because you don’t know what’s going on in that athletes head.
Lee Povey 23:21
Plus, also, what you’re doing is you’re teaching them to self evaluate, yep. You know, how I looked at coaching, you know, take my sport track, sprint cycling, track cycling, very technically, and tactically heavy, is all happening in less than a minute, one false move, and you lose the race, even if you’re much faster sometimes, yeah. So there’s a lot of pressure to perform and make very good choices. And that’s something you just have to keep learning by repetition, and watching the videos and the athlete to be able to pick apart what they should have done or what they were thinking and why they did it and how they might need to change their approach next time. My ideal is, you know, so we go to the Olympics, and I get food poisoning or the last Olympics, we go to Olympics, I test positive for COVID. I can’t stand there with the athlete, I can’t prepare the athlete and attract center beforehand, they should be able to race, watch the video themselves, pick it apart, critique themselves go into the next race just as well as I can do it myself. And I know that’s scary for some coaches, because then they think well, what’s the point of me, right? But the point of view is, you’re still standing there with cannot underestimate just the value of standing next to somebody and being there for them emotionally, and being there and caring. That doesn’t mean you have no value if they understand how to do the sport better than you. Roger Federer understands how to hit a tennis ball better than any coach that could ever coach him. But he’s had a coach his entire career. So there must be value in having that other person and that person’s perspective of the things that you cannot see for yourself. That doesn’t mean that I need to be there and do it for you because if they That’s how it is. And if that’s how I feel as a coach, I’m actually letting my athlete down. I’m not letting him progress. Absolutely
Grant Holicky 25:04
good coaching is working your way to a place where you could be obsolete. But you’re never going to be because of that emotional connection. Yes.
Trevor Connor 25:12
Well, you’ve heard me say that a bunch of times I tell every athlete who hires me is that my job is to get you to understand yourself so well, and what training is effective for you to the point that you don’t need me anymore. And hopefully you keep paying me just because you like me. So let’s shift gears here, because there was a big question that was really the motivator for this episode that I really want to dive into, which is, I think one of the hardest things for coaches, particularly, and I’ll get to this in a second. Athletes turn coaches, because a coach, being a coach is a really selfless job. You are focused on that athlete, it is about them. You don’t go to an athletes race and have them get on the podium and go, Well, that’s okay. But what about me? It is all about the people. You hope you don’t. But that runs. And sorry, I said I was gonna mention this. A lot of athletes who turn into coaches, I think that can be a struggle for them, because particularly elite level athletes, they’re used to having everything taken care of for them, they are used to being pander to cater to, they are the focus of the attention, and suddenly they turn into a coach. And it’s the polar opposite. It’s no longer about them. So there is a challenge here or a danger where coaches stop taking care of themselves because they feel to be the best coach they can be, they should never be thinking about themselves. So again, throw this to you to YouTube and having a great conversation. But talk a little bit about this challenge. And some of the ways to address this and some of the good and bad of this.
Lee Povey 26:51
So let me talk about Carly McCulloch. So track sprinter for Australia, she then went from Australia to being the women’s sprint coach in GB, has completely turned the program around and done an incredibly good job yet she’s just left. So she’s turned them into qualifying first and second at the World Championships and winning the sprint at the World Championships, something they haven’t done in probably 10 years or close to 10 years. For the GB team on a female side, it was definitely struggling in comparison to the male side. And she wrote this long letter that she published on Instagram. And kind of the gist of it was I’m completely burnt out. The expectations of me have been ridiculous. Her partner is still in Australia, and that has obviously been very difficult couldn’t get a visa to go to the UK. You’re watching this woman has had unbelievable success, almost unprecedented success. So quickly in just the first year of running the program. Yeah, she’s been completely burnt out and felt like she didn’t have the support that she needed. And there was an expectation that she should be burnt out. So when she’s saying to people, I’m struggling, I am burnt out. This is too much. It was like Well, that’s the job.
Grant Holicky 28:04
Right? Right, suck it up,
Lee Povey 28:06
exactly suck it up. It’s such a silly way to look at it. You know, we tell our athletes or we hopefully we tell our athletes, the number one most important thing is sleep. Nothing comes if you cannot sleep properly good, you just can’t recover. And then don’t know how hard your training session is. If you don’t recover from it, the training session is pointless. So you got to be able to sleep. And then we tell coaches, you should be working 80 hours a week, you’ll be the first person there you will be the last person to leave, the back emotionally stops with you. You are responsible for your athletes performances, but you don’t get rewards based on their performances. In many programs, athletes get sponsorship money, athletes get financial rewards and the governing body. You know, in the UK, the better you do, the higher funding you get, yet the coaches don’t get rewarded in the same way. And if the athletes don’t perform, the coaches get fired, right? If you explained that job to somebody and said, You’re gonna work unbelievably hard, you’re gonna get told you’re not working hard enough. Even when you’re working unbelievably hard, you’re gonna get told to suck it up. When you ask for support. If the athlete wins, you don’t really get a lot of recognition, especially not as a cycling coach, you know, who knows the cycling coaches of most of the elite athletes outside the people that are in heavily in the sport. And if your athletes don’t do well, you’re gonna get fired. If we explain that as a career, most people go, Why the hell would I do that? That’s what we take on all the time. And I think there’s one more thing to mention here, Trevor and grant, and that is a lot of cyclists or a lot of sports people become coaches because they don’t know what else to do. And absolutely, then they fall into coaching because they love the sport, or at least they know the sport and they feel comfortable in the sport. So they’re not always look into that and going. I need to learn how to do this very well. They’re just like, oh, I’ll just do what my coach did for me without even necessarily understanding everything that their coach did for them and that guy Happiness, as you said, terrific the gap between that everybody’s doing everything for me, I might not even be aware of what it is to suddenly everything is on me. It’s an immense difference. And it’s unbelievably stressful if you don’t know how to look after yourself, and especially if you don’t know how to ask for help, and there’s no help for you, when you do ask for
Grant Holicky 30:19
- Yeah. And I think that’s a great point, they go into it, they don’t know what else to do. I mean, total sidenote, probably a complete episode that we’re not giving those athletes skills to move on in life to do something else that maybe they’re interested in. But you know, one of the big things that jumps out at me, and again, I go back to a lot of the swimming stuff, because I spent so long on a pool deck, and you’re immersed in it, and you would go to these needs, like Olympic trials. And there’s so much pressure on these coaches for these athletes to perform. These are older college age athletes, they’d go to bed, the coaches would go out to the bar, they destress at the bar until one or two in the morning, then they’d wake up in the morning, after four hours asleep to get to the pool at six, they’re a little bit worried about what they did. So they over coach like crazy. And this pattern just kind of repeats itself. And we are not doing a great job of teaching coaches to disassociate their success from the success of their athletes, right? We’re actively teaching coaches that if your athletes succeed, result based success, you are a good coach, if your athletes fail in a results based success model, you are a bad coach, and you’re going to get fired. And there’s so much more going on to the profession, right? We talked about it recently, on this show, when I transitioned from coaching junior athletes to adult pro cyclists and masters athletes, I was almost worried that I wasn’t going to get anything out of it. I was like, oh, you know, before I was teaching these kids how to present themselves in the world to become adults to mature and realize that when I was coaching adults, you’re doing the same thing. If you’re doing it well, you’re helping on so many different layers. And I think understanding that you can have an immense amount of success when your athletes don’t succeed, results was in it’s worth it. And that’s the support that you’re talking about Lee, that’s the education that you’re talking about. And word these coaches turn when they’re stressed out. And right now, the only place they can turn is another coach. But coaches don’t really want to talk to each other about that, because they don’t want to give up a secret or they don’t want anybody to know there’s stress, because then somebody might come after their job is a really hard profession in that regard. And again, I’ve noticed it before. And it’s almost like hinting to some of this, that level of stress puts coaches in situations where they make bad choices. Yeah, this in a lot of ways is what can lead to the abuse. And especially as we go forward, we’re going to see more and more cases where emotional abuse is happening at a high level and should be punished at a high level because it’s pretty brutal. But a lot of coaches are being driven to this, for lack of a better way to put it.
Lee Povey 33:02
And I would place the responsibility of that the governing bodies, as much as I would at the coaches, I’ve got a couple of stories to share with you from what you talked about their ground. So the first one was I broke my shoulder in 2010 in the crash on the Velodrome broke it really badly. And it was a stressful period in my life. It was while I was coaching, but what it did was it made me evaluate everything in my life and realize cycling was actually a gift. It wasn’t a chore. It wasn’t something I had to do. It’s something I was choosing to do. Coaching was something Congress choosing to do. And it really made me focus on the process and every day, and realizing I just needed to enjoy every day the results would take care of themselves if the processes were good. So every time I worked on being better at the processes, the results would take care of themselves. And then the other thing when I started the Olympic development program, I invited endurance coach called Ben Sharpe, you guys might know of him coached Olympic champion Jennifer Valenti, we know the first thing we wrote down as to what we wanted to achieve with the ODP, the athletes left does better human beings. So I just agree with you so much. And he is were working on yourself. Understanding yourself understanding your insecurities, your own desires, your own aims is so important, because you need to get to the place that you can trust if you work on them as human beings. If you work on creating experiences that allow them to become better human beings and challenge them in the right ways. They will get the athletic results they deserve. I personally think that it is more important than the training programs. And you know, I’m really fussy about training programs guys like Well, I’m very particular. But I think you can see that so many different training programs can get very similar results. It really is how you can refer these people as human beings. Are you giving them opportunities to fail to learn resilient without a rating them crowding them? When it comes to feedback, one thing we didn’t mention there was you got to give them as much positive feedback as negative. And that’s not good job. Like if you if you say good job in front of me, we’re gonna have a discussion because I’m going to be like, Okay, good job for what, what specifically was good about it. But if you give people specific, positive, reinforcing feedback at the same level that you give them the opportunity feedback, people absolutely thrive. If you give them too much opportunity, feedback, and not enough critical feedback, I like to think of it like a cookie jar, you just take all the cookies out of the jar, each time you give them critical feedback, you’re taking a handful of cookies, when they have no cookies left, they have no room for feedback anymore. So this is why you see athletes that just cannot receive feedback. And if you give them too much praise, I’ve never seen somebody do that. So I’m still waiting for a coach or a leader. Most of my work is working with staff founders, I’m yet to find somebody that gives too much positive praise, or at least specific property price.
Trevor Connor 36:06
Listeners, this is a great time of year to expand your training knowledge going fast talk laboratories now for the best knowledge base of training signs on topics like polarized training, intervals, data analysis, sports, nutrition, physiology, and more. Join fast talk labs today and push your thinking and your training to all new heights. See more at fast talk labs.com/join. So let’s flip this around, though, going back to the challenge of coaches putting themselves aside when I was down in Colorado Springs last week, they were talking about this, and they were talking about it in pretty strong terms. I mean, at one point, I heard somebody say, we are worried and we think at some point something bad is going to happen. And just to give you an idea of how bad they’re talking about, they were bringing up things like a coach committing suicide at the Olympics.
Grant Holicky 36:59
Yeah, I’m gonna jump right in years ago when I was helping develop some of the instructional stuff for USA Swimming. And now a little bit of that with USA Cycling, people were asking, they said, Okay, what’s the most important skill a coach can have when they first entered a profession? My answer was work life balance. They said, What’s the most important skill a coach can have as their a five to 10 year veteran work life balance, what’s the most important skill a coach can have on the elite level work life balance, and I said, I’m really sorry, guys, I’m pretty boring here. But if we don’t have those things, these coaches are doomed. And leave noted it. But in the States, especially we talk about coaches in these honorific terms when they’re over workers, when we talk about NFL football coaches while they live and sleep in their office. That’s not a good thing. If you’re sleeping in your office, that’s a terrible thing. And we’re watching marriages fall apart, we’re watching families fall apart for coaches, because they aren’t able to separate the stress and the pressure of their job from the rest of their lives. And there’s stress and pressure in the rest of our lives to so how we work that and that balance is just critical to the success of coaches. And we know that’s true for athletes. But if the coach isn’t setting the example, the athletes not going to follow that example.
Lee Povey 38:21
Yeah, that’s a great, you know, we value what we believe to be hard work over smart work. We value hard work over looking after ourselves. And yeah, balance is an interesting word, there will be times we’re going to work really hard as a track cycling coach. If I’m at a national championships, I could be working from seven o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night for 10 days in a row. Right? That stuff happened. Absolutely. But then I better be taken two weeks off after that I can’t recover. Yep. Right and leaving the athlete and maybe they need to train, maybe somebody else needs to step in and support me, you know, a personal share here. The most stressful period of my life was the last part of the Olympic development program working for USA Cycling, you talk about suicide. I had thoughts that weren’t quite suicide, but they were How the hell do I stopped from feeling this bad. And there was almost nobody for me to turn to. I was fighting a battle with USA Cycling with the funder of our program that I was losing to help those athletes and support those athletes in what they needed and not getting that support for them and not getting the emotional support for myself. And weirdly, you know, what actually ended up happening for me was I befriended the two best track cycling coaches in the world at that time from other nations because they were going through exactly the same thing. And when I stopped cycling coaching, I actually ended up coaching one of them as their mentor, because of how much they were struggling themselves. And you wouldn’t believe it for the success that they’ve had at World Championship. trips in the Olympics. But they were suffering exactly the same thing. There was nobody for them to talk to, it can be incredibly lonely. The other coaches in your country might want your position. Or as you said, you know, the funny thing for me is always when coaches don’t want to share secrets, I never get that. I had the best coaches in the world wanting to talk to me to just bash ideas about about how we could all be faster, and they didn’t care that it might make my athletes faster. They just love the sport, and they’re like, let’s all see how we can be faster. And then I have coaches that their athletes probably weren’t quite as fast as the athletes, I was coaching, I’d want to talk to you about coaching, because you might take my secret is that I go out, does that make any sense? Guys?
Grant Holicky 40:39
It’s wild. And
Lee Povey 40:40
you know, again, I think it’s possibly because in America, there’s not many paid positions. So a lot of us have worked in self business entrepreneurs, trying to create our own businesses. And then there’s these rivalries, where you work in countries where there’s funding for Olympic programs, you actually have a job from the governing body. So you’re not necessarily competing against other people in the coaching structure so much. So in the UK, we were much more open about what we were doing training, because we just want you to push the sport forward, because we love there. And that has been a change for me here. And I think that needs to be led by the governing body where you get people together who say, right, let’s talk about track sprinter. Let’s talk about how to transition quicker from a bike onto the rug, you know, let’s talk about these things and help each other push our sport forwards. If the information is out there, why are we trying to hold it as though we’re the gatekeepers of it, especially these days where there’s so much information available if you want to look for it.
Trevor Connor 41:38
So what are other ways that coaches can make sure they’re taking care of themselves while still being good coaches and Leo, throw this to you, you had sent a couple notes ahead of the podcast talked about setting boundaries, you have this above below the line workshop, can you tell us a little bit about these things and other things that coaches can be doing to make sure that they’re taking care of their own mental and emotional health here?
Lee Povey 42:01
Yeah. So this goes back to knowing yourself. And I think it’s very hard. If you don’t really understand yourself, well, you don’t understand how you show up in relationships, you don’t understand what you need to show up healthily in relationships. And this is where we can see teaching people the skills stuff. But without the self knowledge can backfire, because then they can’t apply the skills because they’ve still got their own stuff going on. So the above and below the line model I got from the conscious leadership group, the simplest way to describe it is you are locating the emotional experience we’re having right now. And then you’re giving yourself choice. So the below the line experience is what I call our survival system. So this is the emotive, instinctive system that has a reaction to any situation or trigger. If I use the example, somebody texts you and says, We need to talk, what’s your initial response to that girl? I’m in trouble. Okay. Pretty human response to that somebody texts you, I need to talk, our emotive system, our survival system says there’s a threat here, I need to get prepared for it. Right? Yep. Now, in my experience, actually, most of the time, somebody’s texting me, we need to talk. It’s about them. It’s got nothing to do with me, they want
Trevor Connor 43:12
to do with us to say I have none of those fears. When somebody says I want to talk, my usual experience. They have something they want to get off their chest, and they’re looking burned here.
Grant Holicky 43:21
I think you’ve had good coaching, and I really do.
Lee Povey 43:27
But typically, when I asked that question, especially when asked her, you know, two groups of coaches or two groups of leaders, the responses, I don’t know, what have I done wrong? Like, I’m in trouble, I’ve done something wrong, a fear of they’ve let somebody down or they’re going to be in trouble. Yeah, you know, that’s not what tends to happen. As Trevor said, you know, most of the time, it’s not what’s happening. So it’s to feel those feelings and go, Okay, what I’m feeling is fear. That’s fear. I’m feeling anxiety, I’m feeling fear, what might happen to note that fear and then go, how would I like to be instead, so to move above the line to kind of locate ourselves in a healthier pattern? It would to be what Trevor said, which is, I’m going to be curious here. I’m now looking forward to the conversation. Oh, I’m interested to see what they’re going to say. And for that to happen, there also needs to be some kind of self confidence and resilience of you know, that even if it’s going to be the initial panic response of Oh, god, they’re going to be angry me about something, I will still be okay. Yeah. So it’s knowing whatever happens, you’ll be okay. And does letting go have that first emotive reaction. And it’s just a really good tool to use with people, especially leaders, although I actually did this with my athletes on the ODP. So I did this with the SPRINT program, and we use this in training all the time. I’d say to an athlete, where are you right now? Are you below the line or above the line? You know, the athletes come in and they’ve got a bit of a foul mood and they’re not ready for training that day. Okay, where are you on below the line? Okay, what’s going on? Getting them to be able to express themselves, right? How would you like to be now like, do you want to be here? And if you do want to be here, what mindset change do you need to make for being here to be valuable? Or are you not ready to be here today and you’re not ready to be here today, it’s better to know that and then you go home, yeah, I’d rather an athlete choose to go home, then have a training session, they don’t want to do or have a training session, they’re not mentally prepared to
Grant Holicky 45:16
do right and have that as a discussion and have that as a positive, right, like, come back later. Yeah, come back, when you’re in the right space. It’s not they’re getting thrown out of practice, it’s that they’re being supported to be able to come back to practice and be great, because that’s what we want. That’s what we’re looking for. And coaches need the exact same thing, right?
Lee Povey 45:33
Love that distinction. Ground, that’s a very, I just want to hold you there. Because I think it’s a really important distinction, that there’s a belief we have to be a certain way, the greatest gift I can give to other human beings is choice. So self understanding, and from that self understanding choice, if I can give you choice, you can do anything you want.
Grant Holicky 45:52
And you can make the choice to go out there and try to perform when you’re not your best. That’s a choice. And you get a lot out of that you get resilience, get all these things, and you can make a choice that I can’t be my best today. I’m can’t put out the effort that I need to put out. And that’s the distinction. I think so many athletes and coaches need to understand. Can I put out my best effort today? All right, and then let’s, you know, maybe tough it out today not to use that term. But can I put my best effort out? Okay, let’s do that the effort might not translate to an incredible result. That’s okay. But if you get to that point, and you’re saying, I might not be able to put out my best effort today. That’s when we need to shift that’s when we maybe need a break. That’s when we might need to come back to the table.
Trevor Connor 46:33
Yeah. So to interrupt really quickly here, Lee, you’ve put together a fantastic worksheet on this above and below the line, which you just explained to us. So we’ll put that in the show notes for this episode. And so anybody who’s interested and wants to give that a try, please go and download that sheet. And Lee, I think it has information about what you do on there. So if anybody out there is interested more and Lee’s business and what he does, you can get that off with a sheet as well. Okay, thank
Lee Povey 47:01
you, Trevor.
Trevor Connor 47:02
So the two last things on the outline are talking about the self care. So first question, is there anything left there? And then the last thing is just talking about leading as a coach booth. So before we move into leading any last things on self care?
Grant Holicky 47:15
Yeah, one more piece that I’d like to throw out there on self care with coaches. And this comes directly from my education, in my experience, a mental performance consultant, and we talk a lot in the profession, that it’s obvious that athletes are going to seek out mental performance consulting, but unfortunately, there’s not a lot of coaches that are seeking out mental performance coaching, we don’t have that support, as you’ve been saying leave from the national governing bodies. And what we’re not understanding is that those coaches, a needed in their lives and to reduce their stress and to perform because they are performers, right? We’re in high stress environments, and you talk about national championships or the higher levels. It’s an incredibly high stress environment. But you know, what, your kids soccer game that you’re coaching for fun can be a high stress environment, because there’s parents in the stance that it’s a high stress environment, that is
Trevor Connor 48:05
the highest.
Grant Holicky 48:09
Side note here, my wife said, You should help coach your kids Little League team. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, you don’t understand. That’s my profession. I don’t want to do it on the side. That’s not fun. For me, I just want to throw that out that that there are resources out there for coaches, there are people that like lead, like myself that are doing this and really believe that more of this should be done. There are those resources available? I do think we need to get national governing bodies and sports associations and the leaders in the sport to recognize that and provide those opportunities.
Lee Povey 48:43
Yeah, there needs to be a stigma change. Yes, I think you know, going back to the heroism of hard work and coaching. So what happens here is, we give somebody the title of coach, we immediately expect them to be a natural leader, and there’s a reverence to them. Now, you’re the coach, you’re in charge when we’ve given them the skill sets to step into that title, often. And that’s a dangerous mix to give somebody a lot of authority and a lot of reverence without the skill set to back it up. And if somebody is a little insecure, or somebody’s just afraid or scared, and they can’t share that, you know, I also run men’s groups. And one of the reasons I’ve run men’s groups and most coaches are men, is because young men and boys get told, Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. If they come through the sporting channel, they get that reflected to them even more. So when they’re an adult, and they’re stepping into things that scare them. It’s very difficult for them to ask for help. So you know, that’s why I want to share here how important it is. It’s okay for you to ask for help. I’ve helped some of the best coaches in the world, and they all have felt afraid. I felt afraid plenty of times I’m going to fail. This is not going to work. What if I let the athletes down? What if I let myself After, what if I let my country down? Well, if I let my new country down, I felt all of those things. And that’s a normal part of human experience, the way I look at emotions, there is no good or bad emotion, there might be some negative experiences that can come from feeling the emotion. But the emotion itself is just data. Fear tells you something that tells you something that something’s coming up, that could be important to you that you need to be prepared for. And you’re not sure how it’s going to go. That’s what fear is telling you. You might need support. Anger is telling you that we come to boundaries, anger is usually around boundaries. So somebody’s doing something I don’t like to me, if we talk about, you know, I coach and team sports coaches, and the amount of problems that they have with parents. So much of that is boundary setting. You know, one of the things I like to do with them is get them to set office hours where they have a set time or once a week, that is when they will talk to parents, that is when they will take questions from parents. So they train the parents that are not going to respond to Texas at nine o’clock at night before the game. Because otherwise if they don’t, because people who tend to be coaches tend to have a helpful and supportive nature. They can’t stop themselves. So the boundaries aren’t just for the parents, the boundaries are for them to go, Okay, this is to stop me from over function. And this is to stop me from depleting myself. And this stuff is all trainable, right. It’s all trainable. Learn from grants, experiences, learn from my experiences, have somebody that’s going to sit there and be in your corner that you can share everything. The first thing I say to people, when they come through my door is everything that you share with me, is completely private, and I will never share it with somebody else without your permission. So the only things I’ll talk about were coaches, athletes, or you don’t leaders have given me testimonials. And I know I’m able to talk about that particular thing, for example, everything else is completely private. And this is your one space to share whatever it is you need to share to be the healthiest version of you. You know how many coaches eat junk food, they’re telling their athletes to eat healthfully, they’re eating junk food, they’re drinking, the drinking, what’s the biggest way, especially men deal with their emotions, they do it through alcohol, because men are terrible at sharing with other men. So there’s a massive benefit in being able to vent and share on two sides when you actually exercise those thoughts, which is part of de stressing yourself is to exercise the emotion and talk it through you kind of basically wear it out. And the second is our survival system is usually the thing that’s expressing there. But our human system, so I kind of cognitive system is the system that hears it, and we hear it we go, oh, it’s not really that bad. But oh, I have some choice here. Oh, I want to do this instead, as we’re venting. But we need to have the process to vent. So if you don’t have someone or somewhere that you can helpful event to that isn’t trying to fix you that isn’t saying you need to do this before you’re even ready to hear solutions that just sits there and goes, tell me about it. Tell me more about it. Tell me a bit more about that. So you get to be fully hear, heard and also process your own emotions.
Trevor Connor 53:12
You also touched on something earlier that I think is really important to reemphasize, which is that setting boundaries, as you said, Every coach wants to feel they’re a great coach. And you get that call at 930 on a Friday night and you take it and you go, Oh, I’m such a good coach. I’m making sacrifices for athletes. I went down that road a lot. And I ended up with an athlete who yelled at me because she sent me an email at 11 o’clock on a Friday night about a group ride happening at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. And I didn’t reply. And at one point you can go, that’s completely unreasonable of her. But I had to look at and go, I set that expectation. I always always made myself available so that she thought that was a completely reasonable. Yeah. And so as a coach, you have to set those boundaries.
Lee Povey 54:03
Yeah. Thanks, Trevor. I think it’s important just to describe what a boundary is, often we have expectations in life. And the thing that comes when the expectation is the both parties aren’t exactly sure what it is. So your athlete there had an expectation that you were going to respond after an email at 11 o’clock at night because a clear agreement with a boundary attached to him hadn’t necessarily been made. So I think what’s really important for us is as leaders is to make clear agreement. So here’s my coaching contract, I will take up to 48 hours to get back to you from any email set. If you want to ask me a question about a ride on Saturday, you better be sent in an email to me on Thursday. He’ll send it to me on Friday evening. I can’t guarantee that I will see it. So you’re creating a clear agreement and then the boundary part of it is holding an athlete to that and saying well, I explained what our agreement is. I’m not going to break the boundary on that. because it negatively harms me emotionally, and being clear about that. And when I work with groups, I like the groups to do it. So I got the ODP to actually set their own agreements, and then enforce their own agreement. And then the group does that collectively. And I only needed to come in very occasionally in the group and held themselves to high standards.
Trevor Connor 55:22
That’s such The important point. I had that in my contract. I just never enforced it. You have to you feel like a jerk. But you just have to communicate that to the athlete. Yeah. Well, we’re at or our mark. So I hate to say it, because it’s been a really good conversation, it’s time for us to shift to our take home. So Lee, you’re new to the show, we wrap up our shows by giving everybody one minute to explain what they think is the most salient thing that we want the listeners to take away from the show. So if you’re ready, why don’t we start with you
Lee Povey 55:58
on the spot, it’s okay to ask for help. Please, it is okay to ask for help. Doesn’t devalue as a human as a man, as a woman, as a leader. The most impressive people I’ve worked with are the ones to ask for help the most, and are the most curious and have the least ego about being wrong, asking for help, trying things or making mistakes. So please ask for help. Please don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Just be curious. Rather than give yourself a hard time.
Trevor Connor 56:30
Good answer grant.
Grant Holicky 56:31
I want to lead this with a little story from my background. I this twice in my career, and I put so much pressure on myself to succeed. And it was gonna be all about what the athletes did. And I had a woman win national championships for open water and swimming. And guess what, nothing changed. There wasn’t an influx of athletes to my team. There weren’t accolades. There weren’t any of this. And I learned really quickly that you know what I coach because I love to coach. And not because of the success of the athletes, I made better boundaries for myself, I lead a better work life balance, I became a better coach, because nothing changed. And then I did it again. I got into cycling, and I started heroin, heroin and heroin. I had this kid and he won type cross national champions, and everything’s gonna change, and nothing changed. And here I am back to reestablishing my work life balance. So I almost want to echo what Lisa said, and understand that there is help, there are people out there that have been through the same things, we’re talking about being the ones that can educate and help coaches, and we’ve made all these same mistakes, and you’re gonna make them you’re gonna go down that road, please, please, please find those support structures in your life. And yeah, just help yourself to help other people.
Trevor Connor 57:50
So I think both of you hit on probably the most important points here. So the only thing I’m going to add, which I’m still thinking about from how we ended the show is, this doesn’t just apply to coaches, I think this applies to everybody, which is a relationship where one person is always just sacrificing never ends up being a healthy relationship. And I actually think of a coaching relationship earlier on in my coaching career where I had a woman who was very demanding, and I was always trying to give her what she wanted. And it just got crazier and crazier to where the last year and a half of coaching her I was coaching her for free. She was contacting me at all times a day, I was trying everything to be there for her. And she finally fired me and said I was just not being in any way acceptable for her and learned if you’re just always sacrificing if you’re always putting that person first, you might be surprised you might not get appreciation for it, you might actually get the exact opposite. So I think the healthiest relationships are a given take even in a coaching athlete relationship where you are supposed to be there for them. I think you need to set those boundaries and make sure that there is a mutual respect both ways.
Lee Povey 59:00
I love that distinction, Trevor. And to add to that, or just to clarify that it’s okay to fire athletes. Yes, I fired athletes. I realized as I got better, didn’t negotiate on my face. Here’s my face. Here’s my boundaries. If that works for you, we’re gonna have a great relationship. If it doesn’t work for you. I am not the right type for you.
Trevor Connor 59:19
Absolutely agree. Well, Lee, it was a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much.
Lee Povey 59:23
My pleasure, guys. Great to chat with you.
Rob Pickels 59:25
That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and review. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual. As always we love your feedback, tweeted us @fasttalklabs or join the conversation at forums.fasttalklabs.com. Learn from our experts at fasttalklabs.com or help keep us independent by supporting us on Patreon. For Lee Povey, Grant Holicky, and Trevor Connor. I’m Rob Pickels. Thanks for listening!
