Today’s episode features performance coach, author, and speaker, Brett Bartholomew.  Brett is the founder of “Art of Coaching™”, which works with corporations in the financial and tech sector, medical professionals, military, as well as professional sporting organizations to enhance their leadership ability through improved communication and understanding of human behavior.  Brett is the author of the best-selling book “Conscious Coaching”, and has spoken worldwide on performance and communication topics.  Brett has served as a performance coach for a diverse range of athletes, ranging from youth to Olympians, those in nearly every professional sport, as well as those in the U.S. Special Forces and Fortune 500 companies.

Coaching is a rapidly evolving field.  Strength coaches must grow in a multi-disciplinary manner on a variety of levels to stay competitive and serve athletes better.  Sport skill coaches cannot simply use the same rigid cues and drill sets and methods that their coach used on them.  Rather, a thorough understanding of human learning and psychology, a more holistic model must be found to facilitate the optimal technical and tactical development of the athlete.

Brett Bartholomew has evolved greatly in his time as a coach, and his diverse coaching background has given him the means to see a large problem in the field: A lack of education, skills, and emphasis in general on communication and understanding of human behavior.  Being a better communicator means acquiring better buy-in, more effort, and more enjoyment on the part of those we are coaching, and there are a lot of means by which we can improve in this arena as coaches.  On today’s show, Brett talks about why communication has been under-emphasized in coaching (despite its importance) how improving in this area can improve athlete outputs, as well as practices and exercises that coaches can utilize to improve their own leadership and communication abilities.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.



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Timestamps and Main Points

3:30 Key moments in Brett’s evolution as a coach, and his drive towards an emphasis on communication in learning

11:45 Why communication is under-emphasized in most coach education programs, and why coaches are often blind to their own coaching communication abilities

20:40 Concrete outcomes of better communication on the level of the coach and athlete

26:10 How improving one’s communication can help one’s evolution as a coach and leader

38:00 Impression management in life, as well as in the coaching profession

44:10 Types of activities that can make a coach better in a chaotic environment



“Most leaders at companies at high level organizations are making decisions with less than 70% of the information that they need”

“Athletes are people first… you have to show varying levels of yourself, building buy in requires you to get on the level of other people”

“Why do we think we are so good at communication when so few people get evaluated (in communication)”

“We think that just because we value getting information a certain way, that other people value that way as well”

“When the foundation of coaching is communicating with others, and knowing how to translate literally and metaphorically what you mean to broader audience, and you can’t do that, something has gone wrong”

“You need to be able to tune your message into different frequencies”

“If you are a better communicator, you are going to get more out of people”

“Success with high performance environments is not just about managing an athlete’s training, it’s about managing the athlete themselves, and their environment”

“There’s 5-6 forms of various impression management tactics people use, and once you know them,