Weight Watchers Coach?

While fine-tuning my LinkedIn profile to make sure I’m as juicy as possible in a stupidly loud online meat market, I added ‘coach’ to my list of skills. Just ‘coach’. Not ‘creativity coach’, or ‘career coach’ or ‘business coach’. I mean, I’m not either of the latter two, even though there are certainly aspects of that, but only coach is asking for trouble.

I haven’t been approached to carry 60-odd people to London Victoria for a more affordable rate yet, but I’ve begun enjoying a certain dubious thrill of seeing what they do send me as suggested professional opportunities.

The first was a Weight Watchers coach in Wiltshire. What happens is, my imagination takes the title and quicker than an AI image generator, plays a HD video in my head of what that looks like. It gets silly very quickly. I’m like latter-day Diego Maradona – full tracksuit and whistle, shuffling around a church basement, telling people about my own reckless and recently addressed sweet tooth, before descending into the psychology side of creativity – the small gains, the manageable goals, the value in the dark and light and grey of our personality. But no. I have no place advising anyone how to drop pounds.

So, I don’t amend the skills settings and wait.

Southampton youth team football coach is next. I’m 14 again, the last years of the delusional professional football dream. I’ve interviewed Ben Ryan, the Olympic gold medal winner as Fiji men’s rugby 7s coach. That looks good on paper. I do adore sports psychology and I have strong people skills thanks to my storytelling-driven observation and empathy. And it’s the full tracksuit again. I’m in full red this time. Having watched Kaos with my wife, Laura, recently – a beautifully stylish retelling of Greek mythology starring Jeff Goldblum in several enriched tracksuits – I entered a minor mid-life crisis by doubling down on a previous threat to ‘treat myself’ to a tropical print Adidas number and thick gold chain like a Mafioso uncle, in which I’d march around Salisbury seeking peak respect based solely on it.

But something in all of this silliness stands out because I’ve come to learn that even the most whimsical trains of thought can pack value – there is something of a general ‘coach’ inherent to my personality. I take a lot of joy from helping, motivating, guiding, and refining people. Storytelling is my biggest thrill in life, and working out a person’s arc is becoming a total fascination, even if they don’t see it themselves. None of us do, not for decades at least. But coaching – the kind I’ve fallen in love with – is about becoming that hovering narrator, succinctly capturing the instinctive and natural behaviours and bottling it as trusted, actionable advice at the right times. Or something like that.

Next up, ‘gymnastics coach’. This time I’m in court, in a black tracksuit, representing myself against the lawyers of the people with legs where their ears should be.