Coaching as a science, with John Lyle

John Lyle (: 00:00

models are not there to tell people what to do.

You don't say, this model says you should, or, you know, I'm basing my coaching on that model. Models are about understanding things. And if that helps you to understand what coaching is about, then my suggestion would be that this then influences coach education and development.

Mark Carroll (: 00:23

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 00:24

So it's coach education and development that should be looking at the models and saying, if we want to prepare people to be coaches and we've got some idea of what coaching is about because we've got some frameworks that help us to understand it, then this is what coach education and development should look like.

Mark Carroll (: 00:29

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mark Carroll (: 00:43

Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of Labours of Sports Coaching. Today I had the absolute privilege of being joined by Professor John Lyle of Leeds Beck University. John, the one who's maybe from a non-academic sphere and listening in. John was the very first person actually to establish a postgraduate programme in sports coaching in the UK. He has had a career in academia for 40 plus years.

and he has been an absolute pioneer in establishing coaching as a science. I generally would say that I don't think there's anyone I admire more than who I think has been in this game for as long as John, his knowledge is just incredible. we kind of reflect back on John's career and reflecting on John's career in some sense, reflect on coaching science and its evolution and we get where we've arrived.

and understanding coaching as a science. And we'd discussed some of the sort of core tenets of that conversation, at least in so far as what we could fit into the conversation. It could have went on forever. But around, you know, what the role of the coach is, what coaching means, the idea of domains within coaching, the idea of how we may or may not model the coaching process. Should we continue to? Why model the coaching process? What are some of the universal elements of the coaching process? Do they exist?

Is that a problematic question to ask? And we consider as well about who owns coaching. Is it the academic enterprise? Is it the professional coach? Is there a misalignment of power sharing in that conversation? We eventually go on to touch on the different ologies that exist within the coaching science sphere as well as part of that. And we consider where do we go next? What do we need to discover more about?

who is gonna give the answers to the problems that we ask? And this is very much a conversation for coach researchers to consider and reflect on. It really made me reflect and I was able to ask John some questions as well and I think that feeling is mutual. And only because I think I come from a place of a bit of not disillusionment but a real cynicism to a point around...

where I feel there is disconnect in so far as what we should do as academics versus what we do do. And I'm complicit in that as well, but we need to keep ourselves self-aware. So, academics within coaching really should listen to this conversation. People who aren't academics in coaching, you deserve to understand more about the evidence that at times tells you what to do. So, you need to actually also learn about coaching and this side of coaching, coaching research.

And you'll have your own thoughts on it and importantly it's your thoughts that are going to drive the science further because that's where it needs to go. I think it needs to go back out of the hands of coaches, the people that coach in science should ultimately serve and the athletes who are under our care. So honestly, it was such a fantastic conversation. I loved every minute of it. I hope you enjoy it too. Well, I've got you as well. Just please consider subscribing to the show, following the show. You've heard it from me before.

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we have different means in which you can reach out to me and again, please visit my website and maybe you'll be able to discover more about how we might be able to work together. But all those things will feed into the ambitions that I have for not just a podcast, but the mission that this podcast is trying to serve. The podcast sits within the labor of sports coach and mission is between the podcast and the newsletter, which again is continuing, it's a new thing, the self-determined coach.

Go and check it out and can discover more about that looking at motivation psychology and it is a more niche conversation But you know, they all sat within this this objective of trying to bring you guys and I'm part of that equation more insights more information more disruption More clarity as well. It can't constantly be a bit fragmentation

And I want to help to that and you can help me in that so please consider those Those links and yeah, enjoy the show. Let's get into it. It's a fantastic conversation. I can't wait for you to hear it. So let's

Mark Carroll (: 05:28

So, John, it's great to have you, how are you?

John Lyle (: 05:31

I'm in good fettle, thank you. Despite my advancing years, I'm still managing to get about. I'm still active and I'm still writing, probably more so in the last few years than I have for a long time. So yeah, it's good to still be engaged in the business.

Mark Carroll (: 05:33

Yeah.

Ha

Yeah, and that to me is just a testament of just how unbelievably fantastic you've been in your career as a real trendsetter in coaching. And certainly you established coaching science as its own sort of thing. We were even just talking there off air, John, around some different experiences that we've had. And when you mentioned around the last time we actually met, it was at Crick in Worcester.

I don't know if you remember this, but I think this was just a testament to how much you had people in the palm of your hand. You made a joke, you essentially described a scientific phenomenon, but it was a made up term that you'd done. And me being like, I was just a master's student at the time and I was so eager to learn, and I never strivel in this word down. And then you revealed that it was a laugh, it was a kiddo. I was so embarrassed at the time. And it was just because people were so hooked. And the reason for that is,

John and again, for anyone that isn't familiar with you, maybe from outside of academia, you were like the first person to establish a postgraduate program in sports coaching in the UK way back, what in the eighties with this being John, round about then and ever since then, your career has been about establishing coaching science, it's its own thing. So I want to kind of reflect on that with you and we'll kind of move through the years and maybe understand.

John Lyle (: 06:57

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Carroll (: 07:12

how you're currently thinking, where you've maybe seen improvements and maybe where you've seen stagnation even, I don't know. But let's think about point zero with that. When coaching was at a time where it just wasn't a science, it just wasn't a thing, why did you set about trying to change that? What was the real crux of your ambition across the last 30 years in this space?

John Lyle (: 07:36

it's kind of you to say 30 rather than what it actually is. I was a PE teacher for admittedly a very short period of time as my wife keeps reminding me, not really a teacher. I was only teaching for about three years. But then I started working in PE college and training PE teachers.

Mark Carroll (: 07:37

40 upwards.

Bye.

John Lyle (: 08:06

we kind of had a, I wouldn't say there was no antagonism, but there were certainly one or two people who were involved in PE at that time who kind of looked on PE and sport as two different things. As if sport was all bad because its values were wrong and it was too competitive and it was, the values, the ethics involved in it were not as they should be compared to education and where they felt the values are better.

And I was kind of caught in the middle as a performer in high performance sport in some ways. And also having just begun to become a coach. I'd always done some coaching and as a PE teacher you're in sports leadership situations all the time. But it gradually coalesced around this notion that there's something different about

coaching than there is teaching. And to begin with, and I am, and I wasn't there, I have to say, but in the 50s, even the late 40s, in the 50s, and then into the 60s, I don't know that it was seen as much of a difference between teaching and coaching.

Mark Carroll (: 09:06

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 09:23

Lots and lots of coaches were actually PE teachers who were working after school and then also worked in clubs and it was seen as the way in. And I was left with this notion that maybe there's more of a difference between the two. And we gradually came to the view that maybe we need to educate people not as coming from say teaching with

then a governing body first or second level award but maybe there's more to it maybe maybe we need to educate people in a different way so we started with a diploma course at Dunfermline College as it was at the time and we started with I think six or maybe six or eight national coaches and put them through a kind of preliminary version of the diploma that was in the

last year of 79 into 81 something like that and then gradually this we started recruiting people to the diploma. The diploma became a diploma in professional studies so was acknowledged as a if you like PUCCA diploma and then it gradually morphed into a postgraduate degree and was still going when I left there in the

Mark Carroll (: 10:35

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 10:50

in the mid 90s to come to go south to work somewhere else. And over that period of time I felt we were successful in separating coaching from other areas like teaching or instructing or fitness or other areas like that and gradually gradually finding its own feet if you like as something worthy of studying.

Mark Carroll (: 10:53

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 11:20

And the problem at the time was that there wasn't a great deal of academic material on which to base this. And we were actually sometimes still borrowing from teaching, if you like. But then we could gradually move into some of the Eastern European training theory stuff. And America, America had been looking at coach education for a bit longer.

but was very high school collegiate based, in which case these were really teachers and coaches at the same time. So they still weren't separating them as well as we wanted. So we had to start doing our own resources as well. We had to start publishing, we had to start doing, there were no PhD students around. For a while there weren't even master's students around. So all of that kind of had to be created.

Mark Carroll (: 11:49

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 12:19

And then, I mean, I don't know when the date was, but probably from the late 90s onwards and into the noughties, as they're called, we had an explosion of academic work. We had an explosion of undergraduate degrees and postgraduate degrees. And it's, I think it's kept exploding.

Mark Carroll (: 12:43

And is that did that kind of align with when to the first edition of when you published Sports Coaching Concepts, a framework for of coaching practice. And I don't think there's a coaching researcher or student today who hasn't read that textbook at some time. Was that not around about that time when it's first edition?

John Lyle (: 12:57

That was, that, it was

2002 that it was actually published. But it was probably based on a whole load of work from the 90s forward. And it was a way of just saying we need to bring this together into some kind of text, textbook, I suppose, simply because none existed. There were some, some of the training theory books, Frank Dick's book and,

Mark Carroll (: 13:01

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 13:24

bomb pan, the training theory type planning things. And there were some American texts which were a wee bit like how to coach in a high school environment. So, and then, this is beginning to sound like a bit history lesson, but in the late 70s and into the 80s, Canada and Australia both had

the kind of epiphany that we had later on when we didn't win any medals in several Olympics, but they didn't do particularly well in like 76 onwards. And so they decided they needed better coach education. And it was they who started producing some of what we would call general theory about coaching.

Mark Carroll (: 14:04

you

John Lyle (: 14:16

And it was on the back of that that we started to move into recognizing that maybe there was something about coaching itself that we could talk about instead of talking about it as teaching or psychology or philosophy or more likely physiology.

Mark Carroll (: 14:32

And

is that where we perhaps arrive at some of the sort of, when I look back at your work, John, and the work that you continue to publish, there was always the sense of sort of themes around the core questions of what a coach is, like the role of coach, even the definition of coaching, to then thinking about domains and does that play a role in it? And then we got into all the sort of stuff around modeling. So I wondered if you might work around some of those different elements, like what coaching is, because...

I know you've, want to firstly, I want to explore what's your definition of coaching. And I know that sounds like it's a very difficult question, or it seems like a difficult question to answer because nowadays it's like very domain specific, or is it? Or can I, it can I tie into there? Because I know sometimes you're, you come from quite a performance focused background and that's played a role often in how you've maybe conceptualized coaching if I'm correct, but there's a lot of nuance within that. So yeah, just start that off for us. What's your, how would you conceive of coaching?

and how has that fitted in perhaps into this ongoing academic enterprise as you will.

John Lyle (: 15:31

Yeah.

It's probably easier to talk about how I would conceive of it than how I would define it. If I'd known I was being asked the question directly, I would have looked at my latest writing and tried to find out what I'd actually said.

Mark Carroll (: 15:37

Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

John Lyle (: 15:51

When I first, the first few publications that I started on and even threw into the 2002 book, if you like, a lot of that was based around the notion that I think we were making assumptions about coaching rather than actually getting down to saying, well, coaching is actually about this. This is what coaching is. So the question I was always asking myself was,

What makes it different from other things? So if coaching is about leading and teaching people sport and whatever, treating people properly and developing them and also, well, other people do things like that too. So what makes us different was always the question that was underlying where I was going with this. And it's taken me an awful long time.

Mark Carroll (: 16:21

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 16:46

to try to come to an answer. And I'm not sure whether I'm at that answer yet. It's getting a bit late to come up with it. the final, it's easier to start from the end. I've come to the conclusion now that it's not a terribly helpful term. So that if I said to you, if you asked me what I did for a living and I said, I'm an engineer, you'd kind of go, yeah, well, tell me more.

Mark Carroll (: 16:54

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 17:13

Or if

I said I was an administrator, I'm a technician. Even if I said I'm a teacher, you'd kind of go, well, I'm not actually sure what you mean. Tell me bit more about what you mean. And I now feel that that's the same. If you say, well, I'm a sports coach. Well, actually, I don't like the term sports coach. I'm a sport coach. I coach sport, not sports.

Mark Carroll (: 17:19

What do you

Why do you make that distinction?

John Lyle (: 17:41

Because I think a long time ago we just thought that somebody who was coached gymnastics or coached any other sport that you can name and we just lazily used the term a sports coach because we thought that was a person who worked in all sorts of different sports. And it seems to me that there are

Mark Carroll (: 18:02

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 18:06

many kinds of coach. could be a vocal coach, can be a theatrical coach, you can be a business coach, you can be all sorts of coaches. And in which case, the ones we're talking about work in sport. They are sport coaches.

Mark Carroll (: 18:21

It definitely

stuck with me. Actually deliberately when I had like even the cover art for this podcast, I had to make sure I sent it back when I initially said sports on it. It was a lesson that stuck with me a way back when. And it was passed on to me from other people as well, John. I completely agree.

John Lyle (: 18:38

So I've now got to that point where what I'm saying is it's not terribly helpful to say that you're a sport coach. And I don't jump up and down anymore. If somebody says they're a sports coach, fine. But.

Because it's not enough to say that, then you do have to ask yourself, yes, which I think you hinted at before, is there a kernel of something that runs through everybody who calls themselves a sport coach?

And is it enough to define yourself that way? And you could bring it down to the very, very basics, which is that you prepare people for improved sports performance. I mean, I'm not deliberately picking those words, but it's something like that.

Mark Carroll (: 19:18

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you hear words like

goal directed at it. It becomes very fluffy, doesn't it? Because you're trying to capture everything. It's like, what's the point?

John Lyle (: 19:27

At that point you then say, OK, a bit like

Julian North's work, you could pick half a dozen things and say it's instrumental, it's goal-orientated, it's relational, it's social. Yes, but so are many other things as well, incidentally. So you can't just say it's goal-orientated. You have to then say, well, what kind of goals do we work towards? It's instrumental, certainly, so should all occupations be. It's relational, yes. We deal with people.

It's almost all interactional. You kind of have some coaching done over the telephone. you know, they're kind of giving people who are triathletes or long distance runners or something that you can, yeah, sometimes you can give them schedules over the phone or something, but even that's interactional, might argue. So.

Mark Carroll (: 20:09

Yeah, remote coaching.

John Lyle (: 20:18

You can spend some useful time deciding on what the essential elements are of coaching. But the point I'm trying to very badly get to is that until we start talking about domains or categories or just social context, then we don't truly begin to describe what we mean by a coach. So for me, a high performance sport coach

Mark Carroll (: 20:39

Mm.

John Lyle (: 20:46

is light years away from somebody who is teaching 10 year olds in a primary school after school club the rudiments of doesn't matter what it is hockey or football or or tennis or something but the two things are as far apart as being a telephone engineer and a nuclear scientist I'm not sure if those are well chosen but you know

Mark Carroll (: 20:59

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm

John Lyle (: 21:15

So for me it's taken an awful long time to come to the view that sport coaching is an umbrella term that should only be seen as an umbrella term.

Mark Carroll (: 21:24

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 21:31

coalesces a whole number of social occupations. And I don't mind if Sport England want to say that everybody who is leading in a sport context is a coach. I don't think that's helpful. In fact, it's a political thing because then you can count there's far more coaches around if you count everybody. And yes, we do need people to be less obese, more active.

Mark Carroll (: 21:36

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Hmm. Hmm.

Mmm. Mmm.

John Lyle (: 22:00

keep away some of the health deficits that are around.

Mark Carroll (: 22:05

Well, didn't

you start the Jubilee and we started with some of the terminology around participation coaching, high performance. And then you had even sort of bridging the gap there of like developmental coaching, where it's like, you know, still it's not about results, but we're coaching people towards, you know, being in a results based environment. So there was a wee bit of a help, I suppose, around trying to get into the particulars of coaching and maybe the context bounded elements to it.

John Lyle (: 22:33

Cough

Mark Carroll (: 22:35

I wanted to ask you, do we do a terribly good job at still recognizing there are shared properties of coaching? Because I do wonder when you know, sometimes there's rebound effects to this, just people have in the last 20, 30 years now, we've became very into the idea of coaching being contextualized and rightly so. But does it lead itself in your view or just an interesting opinion on this when I say it, does it lead it? What sometimes we're in a space where people think

can't appreciate that participation-based sport can be competitive, vice versa. We sometimes want to botch our thoughts into a particular thing and then it over brackets it where I wonder where there could be space to get back to the fundamental components that maybe are universal in coaching. I know some people say that doesn't exist, but I don't feel getting into the fluff of saying go on and take practice or this and that, but I always think about if I was to be contentious here and say, you know,

coaching's about getting better at a sport. There's a still based element of the sport that I think permeates the main specific orientations of that role, I don't know. But I just want to know your thoughts around domains have been a good thing. Do we sometimes go too into that or what's your feelings on it if you disagree such? I'm just curious just to get your ideas on some of that.

John Lyle (: 23:55

I don't think we can dismiss the domains because if you then look at some reasonable criteria that would define what domains would be defined as or what would be used to define domains, it becomes pretty obvious that there are distinct differences between them. So I don't think we can dismiss them.

On the other hand...

Are there some commonalities across the domains that might help us in coach education, for example, so that we... It may be that in high performance coaching, there are particular skills and functions that are very particular to that domain.

But that wouldn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't be preparing coaches for work in that area through coach education that's in the developmental domain or even starting further back if you like. So are there commonalities in...

Mark Carroll (: 24:49

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 25:02

I mean I would be contentious as well and say I think there are commonalities but if you reduce the commonalities too much it becomes meaningless so if you only say that coaching is about making people better at sport

Mark Carroll (: 25:14

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 25:19

It's probably not wrong. In fact, I don't think it is wrong, but it's not all that helpful. It's not really, it's not telling you, it's not telling you very much to say that it's about, I mean, an engineer's about fixing things.

Mark Carroll (: 25:20

And equally and equally. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. But equally, if you do that too much the other way, and this is kind of the idea, does it actually help us as a science develop a core basis and way of moving forward? I wonder if there's so much fragmentation that can occur through the main orientated thought that we never, this maybe is a bit of segue onto, I know you've had attempts at modeling the coaching process for coaching. I wonder if this is maybe a good time to get into.

John Lyle (: 26:01

Hmm.

Mark Carroll (: 26:01

the

rationale for why you've done that, I'd be really interested to explore that because that felt whenever I read that work, some of your work, Jon, I used to always feel like I really understood this was a means of pushing our practice forward through at least mapping out some degree of universality, or at least I don't know if maybe it's misunderstanding as such, but I wonder if we could chat around that to understand your work further.

John Lyle (: 26:06

Yeah.

Yeah, I...

probably going to argue against myself and say that the reason for starting down the, call it the model road, was that I was searching for something that was universal to all coaching and was it possible to find something that, excuse me.

that defined all coaches and I don't mean define us on a definition but the process that they were engaged in could be recognized in a model.

Mark Carroll (: 26:59

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 27:01

That model has been the one that I did way back in 2002. I think it was probably in the previous, the book before that. Was criticized a lot, still is, for being too linear, too system kind of based. But actually, if you read it, if you read what I actually said, what I actually said was, this is a model for coaching.

Mark Carroll (: 27:10

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 27:28

But

what we don't need to do is we need to go and look at coaching itself and apply this to the coaching context and come up with new models that actually reflect what coaches do. So we need models of coaching rather than for coaching. But it might be helpful to start with one that gives you a framework that you can apply.

Mark Carroll (: 27:43

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yeah.

John Lyle (: 27:55

And then you can go look at the coaches and come back and say, well, it's not like that at all. It's like this. And that'd go great because that's what we wanted all the time. We wanted to know what it was actually like. So.

Mark Carroll (: 28:04

Hmm.

See

the irony, John, as well, is that as much as that was criticized and it served its purpose as an experiment, a thought process, an experiment, it's kind of ironic in a sense that we now move to a space, feel, where we're trying to develop models of coaching, but most of academia, think, in the coaching space is still importing frameworks into coaching and telling coaches how to act in such a way that that's not necessarily a bit out of the practice because the reason why...

when you mentioned around the progress we've made so far as a coach in science, I often wonder why, for example, we still look at your model and other coaching process models out there. I see them as exhibits in the sense that we revisit them as academics, but I don't see models, coaching frameworks.

building research, still I still see coaching frameworks as being something we revisit every now and again and most of the papers are still frameworks, some outside of coaching or coaching trying to align with outside of coaching framework, I don't know, I I wonder if there's an irony there. It's disagree with me but.

John Lyle (: 29:14

I'm not sure, yeah, I hear what you're saying, Mark.

I'm not sure I agree that there are none. I think we've moved on from where I was and colleagues that I work with, particularly in Leeds, Julian North and Bob Muir, that I think have moved into different models.

Mark Carroll (: 29:20

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, orchestration and stuff.

John Lyle (: 29:44

that we just, Bob and I just brought a new book on coach development. And there are more models if you like in there. they are, Julian has what he calls the ERE model. And if I make a general point about models, models are not there to tell people what to do.

You don't say, this model says you should, or, you know, I'm basing my coaching on that model. Models are about understanding things. And if that helps you to understand what coaching is about, then my suggestion would be that this then influences coach education and development.

Mark Carroll (: 30:36

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 30:37

So it's coach education and development that should be looking at the models and saying, if we want to prepare people to be coaches and we've got some idea of what coaching is about because we've got some frameworks that help us to understand it, then this is what coach education and development should look like. But we don't go direct. I mean, I can remember a phrase that was used in some writing somewhere, not by me, that

Mark Carroll (: 30:42

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 31:04

The criticism was that coaches weren't using my model. I mean, I kind of was laughing at the time when it was said. Well, no, I didn't write it for the coaches. The coaches weren't supposed to be using it. It's not for them. It's meant to influence thinking. And the thinking influences coach education and development. And then it influences the coaches.

Mark Carroll (: 31:17

Yep.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's

probably more the point of it. There's a repurposing that has to be had, isn't there? I think that's the idea, isn't it? It's like there's frameworks that exist now and they tell coaches that they should do this, but the framework wasn't built out of coaching or if it has been, it's again, maybe not built out of the domain of coaching that we referred back to earlier on that we know is essential in understanding the particulars of coaching and what it requires and stuff like that.

that we need to pay attention to that, that coaches should be able to see, here's a model, it helps us understand this aspect of it, because coaches need to put on different hats at different times. But then coaching as its own process deserves to have its own leverage of how they use a module, when they use it, if they use it, yeah.

John Lyle (: 32:10

I'm not, I kind

of hear where you're going with this Mark and I find it interesting because I'm almost at the point now of saying I don't think it's possible to model the coaching process. We can provide lots of models for coaching which some of which might be like some I've done where it was

it's derived in a sense from experience and from the academic world. And some that, for example, Bob and Julie and my colleagues are doing now. But these are only still helping us to have some insight into what coaching is about. They are still not directing the way we behave because largely they are schematics.

you know, kind of tell you what all the important bits are, but they don't actually tell you how to put it together. They don't say, this is how you operationalize this module, this model rather. That's what coach education development is for, and experience, and trial and error, and all those other things that coaches do. So is it possible to have a model of coaching that would have... Yeah.

Mark Carroll (: 33:09

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Cushing spoke about that, didn't he? Even the two-dimensional

element that's on paper, you can't even see it, it's not understandable in that context.

John Lyle (: 33:30

I don't think

we can have, I don't think we can embrace usefully everything from...

just use a very simple term participation development through to performance. But if we call it high performance elite and we've got other domains. And if we were to take the UK sports, not UK sports, they have a different view, but sport England and UK coaching type view that everything that walks is a coach, then that would not makes it so doubly difficult to have a model of coaching. Because they actually said if you go down to the park,

with your kids and kick a ball around, you're a coach. And that kind of opening the scope of coaching is a political thing and it may have some advantages, but it makes it awful hard to, in conceptual terms, to pull it together. In fact, it doesn't hang together in conceptual terms. It's there for political reasons.

Mark Carroll (: 34:35

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 34:36

resource and political reasons. So where do I go with models? I'm kind of at the point where I'm not going to try because I don't think we can come up with useful frameworks.

Mark Carroll (: 34:54

Well, let's talk about that then, John. see you so framework. So there's all this, this is what something else I was quite curious to ask you about. There's now there's different modes of thinking around coaching is coaching a cognitive process is coaching, you know, relational, is it sociological? Is it, and I know that it is all these things, but I would be curious to know, or as coaching constructive and this, you know, in different views of learning, learning theories, that's me stealing some of the stuff that I tried to learn from you when you were my teacher.

way back when, but what has been your observation of what sort of way of thinking, and I forgot the psychology element of behaviorist, that sort of element, what's dominating the perspective space? Or does it even need to be a question of that? But I just wonder, have you observed, is there parity of thought or do you see a dominant thought or a dominant mode of thinking to solve coaching related issues?

Is there pros and cons to that? I'm quite curious to know because, yeah, if we can maybe explore that to start. I see a lot of psychology. I see lot of decision making elements as well, like Abraham stuff, like professional decision, decision making, that around the runway. And I wonder, is that okay? Just again, we're talking about building coaching as its own science. Can coaching own anything if it's seen as a...

John Lyle (: 35:51

No.

Mark Carroll (: 36:17

a byproduct of a mode of thinking that's owned in different disciplines and those sorts of things. We wouldn't tell a psychologist to unlike a psychologist or, you we wouldn't tell. Yet coaching has to because it's a multidisciplinary act. It feels like we have to constantly learn from different disciplines and modes of thinking. But I wonder, does that inhibit our development as a science or is it just that, is that just the nature of coaching that we must move with different modes of thought? don't, I don't, just, yeah.

John Lyle (: 36:28

Yeah.

Mark Carroll (: 36:47

I to get into that a little bit. I know it's a hard question they asked it's a wee bit of a strange one.

John Lyle (: 36:50

Yeah, you're... It's not... You're

making me... You're making me think about this.

One part of the answer, I'll come back in a second to what's dominant, but one part of the answer would be that if we take sport coaching, does it have a social, psychological, philosophical, physical dimension?

Mark Carroll (: 37:00

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 37:20

And within each of those dimensions, each of those, and we're almost talking about disciplines, academic disciplines there, do they have their predominant ontologies and epistemologies, i.e. what they think is important about the way the world works and how best to access that knowledge? Then, yes, they do. But so does everything else. So does teaching. So does nursing. So does, particularly,

anything else, medicine, counselling, anything that involves people, anything which I would call treatment occupations. Now I think I would happily classify coaching as a treatment occupation. We provide prescriptions to athletes and social, human athletes and therefore

Mark Carroll (: 38:15

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 38:16

It is social, is relational, because it's physical performance for the most part, you know, we can debate snooker and darts and things like that, but for the most part, and whether horses and motor cars count as, you know, that kind of thing. But for the most part, it's about humans and it's about physical performance.

Mark Carroll (: 38:35

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 38:41

And because it's about humans and what they've got inside here, then it's about emotions and it's about psychology and all sorts of other things as well. And it's about the technology of the sport. Whether that's about how to kick a ball or how to grease skis or how to set sails, there's a technology involved. So it's not surprising that there are all of these different perspectives on

Mark Carroll (: 39:09

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 39:10

this particular treatment occupation as there are for all other treatment occupations like medicine and nursing and psychiatry and teaching, school teaching and lots more that have social work and all sorts.

So should there be people who specialize in telling us about...

the cognitive aspects of coaching? Well, yes. And should there be some who want to talk about the philosophical underpinnings of the way that we approach what we call sport coaching? Yeah, why? We will have more insight if we have all of those perspectives and disciplines. But let me...

Mark Carroll (: 39:35

Hmm.

Does it leave something for...

Yeah, no, sorry, I don't want to interrupt your flow there, John. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

John Lyle (: 40:00

Let me finish that bit, because

what I'm going on to say is...

I would wish that each of those perspectives brings us back to a better picture of what coaches do and what they ought to do. Now when we say ought, we're in the realms of saying, well it should be like this or it should be like that.

Let's say what the options might be. Not that one is necessarily completely better than all the others, but at least what we're doing is saying, I think it should be like this, but I'm open to other people saying it should be like something else.

Mark Carroll (: 40:42

Well, is that not where we have this clashing between, think, professional knowledge and academic enterprise in a sense, because like what you've just alluded to there, if I've caught you that, that's higher order thinking, isn't it? It's like there's more than one solution to a problem. However, I sometimes feel like the commentary, and I know this is something, look, I'm guilty of this as well. I come from a motivational psychology lens of things, I see things, but we all believe as academics that our way of seeing the world is the correct way.

And the way in our writing at Salesmanship, we write in such a way that suggests, coaches need to do this. And sometimes I wonder if we need to temper the language a little bit because unless we're able, and this is partly my reason for asking that question, in itself is I wonder where, and embracing all the different modes of thinking and understanding the relationship to what coaches do, sometimes I feel the tacit element of coaching and the instinctive elements that come from professional.

experiential knowledge, I feel like it's turned down slightly or at the very least it's not understood as being a legitimate instinct that coaches can have for how they manage situations. Now obviously we become full circle that the evolution of coaching should be such that all these different modes of thinking create a base level of thought of coaches that in turn is fed into the instinct of stuff. But I just, that's where I wonder about where we blur the lines between

Coaching research in a way is a way of understanding coaching for coaches to use as they need to. And coaching research is being equivalent to coaching where I think there's a disconnect between practitioner and academic in some ways. And I don't think it's necessarily a conundrum that can be solved. Maybe it doesn't need to be solved, maybe that's me being too cynical.

But I do wonder if there's still scope for it, it? And it kind of leads us onto the other question I had for you, John, about where we need to go next, because as both a science and maybe as a practice and coaching, recognizing that we are always going to wed these things, is it not just the, is it not being said for years and years? There's a gap between science and practice. Like people have told me that I've been here for much longer than me, that they've been saying that for 40 years. And I keep wondering, how do we, are we getting better?

Is the gap narrowing? Have you observed a narrowing? Or what's your thoughts on that? If anything I'm saying doesn't make any sense. Yeah, yeah.

John Lyle (: 43:08

Let me try to come to that by, in

a sense, by finishing what I was going to say before. No, no, because what I gave you was that notion of, to start with, of saying there are lots of different perspectives and

Mark Carroll (: 43:15

sorry, apologies, John. Yeah, too excited to talk to you.

John Lyle (: 43:27

The view I would take is that none are more important than others. Some may give, what they give us are different answers to what coaches are doing. In other words, we understand more, we have more insights into coaching and coaching practice by taking a philosophical, psychological, sociological, etc.

but they're just different perspectives because they ask different questions so they come up with different answers.

And that's an important little statement there that because those disciplines have favoured ways of doing things and ask different questions, of course they come up with different answers. The important thing to appreciate is that that's not the whole answer. And back to something that you alluded to, feel bursting into lecture mode, that yes, most academics could do with a little more humility.

recognizing that they provide a little bit of an answer to something, but theirs is not the only answer. And that you rather, I mean, there are some academic writings and there are some academics who in general start their papers by telling you how bad everybody else is and

why the way they're going to approach it is so much better. And really I'm not sure that's the best approach. They should just tell us what they're doing is valuable. And then let us make that judgment as to whether how valuable that is in comparison to other things. They don't need to tell us that everybody else is doing it wrong, wrong way. So to even go further back to what I was trying to say ages ago, in the

Mark Carroll (: 45:06

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 45:21

60s into the 70s probably, the behavioral approach was the one that predominated. But that was largely because this came from America, where the behavioral observation

Mark Carroll (: 45:30

you

John Lyle (: 45:39

program started and we adopted them and we've been using them ever since and we've changed them and we've come up with our own.

Where are we now? I would hazard a guess that in terms of publications, again, you have to always, you don't have to, but you can think of publications and journals and things as political entities and that knowledge is created partly through, in academic terms, through publications. So,

So I would say that from the: 2000

Mark Carroll (: 46:36

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 46:45

national approach. We should be doing a wee bit more than we're doing but the social relational approach has predominated to some extent. mean that's Robin Jones. I mean these are not criticisms, some of the work is very very good. This is Robin and bits of Chris and Paul Pottrack and Lee Nelson, Ryan Groom. You know can throw the names up.

Mark Carroll (: 46:56

Hmm. Yeah.

John Lyle (: 47:09

Their criticism sometimes is by saying those cognitive people keep telling us it's only about you know the decisions that coaches make and it's all well no it's not all about that but coaches do make decisions they make decisions every minute of the day but as does everybody else so it's important to understand the cognitive dimension but they operate

Mark Carroll (: 47:32

And when

you say Conor of John, then if you elaborate that, what do we mean by Conor to mention for those that maybe aren't as familiar with that? Is it in the planning? it in the...

John Lyle (: 47:39

Well, cognitive...

No, the cognitive... Well, the easiest is to put it in the context of what does it mean in practice? What it means in practice is making decisions. Decisions come from the way we internalize knowledge and the way we apply that knowledge to the decisions that we have to make on a day-to-day basis. Some of which will be deliberative, as in planning.

We can sit back and give ourselves a bit of time to think about what we're going to do as a plan for coaching or for improvement. And yet in the middle of a game of volleyball or basketball or ice hockey or something where we've got to make an immediate decision about what to do, that's a bit less deliberative because we haven't got as much time and we don't have as much knowledge and it's in an emotional context and etc.

So it's a different kind of decision making. So there's a different kind of cognitive organization going on. And that's back to the business of it looks a bit intuitive, but actually it's not. It's a learned process of making different kinds of decisions because we recognize the pattern. This is back to what we would call naturalistic decision making. That this is we recognize the pattern we see in front of us. The solutions are already stored in the mind.

and we can make an immediate match nearly. And if the match doesn't quite work, we maybe need to think a bit, a wee bit more so it becomes a bit more deliberative. And that's all that the, you know, the professional judgment decision-making is really just juxtaposing the deliberative, taking your time with the more intuitive, seemingly intuitive, not having much time.

Mark Carroll (: 49:29

So is that a bit of a fallacy, is intuition, like maybe I need to correct myself then and make me reflect an idea of instinctive stuff. Instinct's born out of repetition to a degree, it's born out of experience, so is it a bit of a false term perhaps in that sense?

John Lyle (: 49:42

It's all, it's,

I don't think it's instinctive. Some, there's very little, I'm not a qualified psychologist either, but I wouldn't have said that much of the behavior that we have is instinctive, it's more learned and it's experiential. The things that coaches do, the decisions that coaches make are experience based. And.

And obviously knowledge, because when we're planning things, we need to know what we're planning about. But we've got a bit of time to decide what we want to do. And then there's the less deliberative, where it relies more on we've been there before and we've seen it before. Which brings us back and it looks a wee bit like intuitive, like, suddenly we thought about doing that. Well, no, we've done it before. And it's been going around in here for quite a long time.

So we know what to do in that situation. that cognitive element of coaching to me, perhaps because I've written more about it, is important. But I would never ever say it's the only thing that's important because I would immediately recognize that we are operating in a social context. And therefore, the nature of the relationship between people does affect

the impact that that coaching relationship or process has. So we need to examine how we relate to each other. And that kind of brings you to a notion of perhaps how we should relate to each other. And then we get into a discussion or we can research into a more humanistic, a more person-centered approach to coaching. And

And then we become honest about it and say, is it person centered in high performance coaching? Well, it probably is. You know, work a colleague, Sergio Lara Berstiael and Cliff Mallett have been doing on serial winning coaches. They are actually quite, these are, these are multiple Olympic winning world performance coaches who they work with. These are caring coaches. They care about the people they work with, but they also have to make

decisions that are based on how do we win because if we don't win we lose our jobs.

Mark Carroll (: 52:09

So what's your thoughts on athlete-centered coaches? That word didn't get us sometimes, but I kind of wonder about what is that? Tempered in a...

John Lyle (: 52:13

You cannot not, well I get, originally I got upset about it as I get upset about lots of things,

mainly on the basis of saying you cannot not be athlete centered. Coaching is athlete centered because by definition that's what it's about. What they really mean is the opposite.

of athlete-centered, which is not taking into account the feelings, the needs, the wishes, the developmental best practice of how to deal with human beings. So it's not so much that it's athlete-centered than it has the potential to be non-athlete-centered. It's a little bit like ethics. We don't talk so much about how to treat people well.

Mark Carroll (: 52:41

Yeah.

John Lyle (: 53:08

as being sure that we don't treat them badly.

Mark Carroll (: 53:13

And I

had a conversation, John, it was with Andrew Abraham, and we spoke a little bit about efforts in coaching, but beyond the legality element of it, because efforts probably is too, I tend to take the view of someone like Andrew, least in the way that I inferred his response to some of my questions, that we sometimes over bracket the word efforts. Efforts could actually be a really great starting point for conversations with coaches about how to sensibly.

push athletes and how to sensibly understand when not to and have a lot of nuance within that. But I wonder if that goes back to the theme that you've sort of identified there too, and going back to what we spoke about around the way in which a lot of academic papers are put forward. do, and we spoke a lot about this earlier on, but it does often feel a bit of an audit. It often feels like we're trying to look for the things coaches are doing that we don't want and the things that coaches can't do.

but we probably aren't, maybe that's a disservice sometimes. need to consider and we know that any one academic paper in order to actually be worth reading, because any academic paper that tries to assume everything at all at once, just, it won't be very good conversation. It's difficult to capture and it's better to have a bit of a siloed thought to a point. But in its conclusion, it needs to respect the other ways of seeing it. So I wonder if it just needs to be more of a capturing experience and then allowing the reader to then decide for how to use that.

you know, observational work, it could just be capturing, doesn't need to have a quota of things we need to see or, or, you know, those sort of elements.

John Lyle (: 54:49

Part of my response would be to two or three of the issues that we've discussed. It's going to be a bit like also what's the predominant focus of research at the minute.

We do need to have more research that is carried out in situ. We need an awful lot more research that is actually based on what coaches do rather than what they tell us they do. the number, we still have lots and lots, mean, having, as I said, you've worked on a couple of papers this week and been looking at literature at the same time.

Mark Carroll (: 55:09

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 55:31

We still got an awful lot of literature that's based on questionnaires and interviews, principally interviews. Much of which I've done as well. Everybody, I think, who's an academic has been in this area at some time. But we have to recognize that questionnaires and interviews tell us about reported behavior. They don't actually tell us what's going on. And we don't see it done in context.

So, in general, about whether ethics are doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or whether in philosophical terms, we're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, you know, in terms of social power and how we think the world should work. Or even just in straight terms of social relationships and what constitutes a good developmental relationship and what doesn't. We need to do more research

on what's actually happening out there. A bit like I've just said with the caring coaches that Sergio and Cliff Mallett found, that we just make this assumption that high level coaches are not interested in their athletes because they're only interested in results. But that's simply not the case. And some of us have been there. We know at both ends of giving and receiving, if you like, that by and large coaches are caring.

Mark Carroll (: 56:44

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 56:53

about their athletes. So what we do is we tend to be holding them to a higher standard of some kind of mythical model that's come out of a paper somewhere. And then we say, well, coaching is not very good because they're not doing what this paper says they should be doing. And no, I just don't, I just can't go with that. It needs to

Mark Carroll (: 56:55

Mm-hmm.

John, you cut off just for a wee moment there, John. Just I lost you

just for a few seconds there.

John Lyle (: 57:20

Sorry,

you went, you froze on my screen as well. I think I'm just simply making the point that we do need more coaching research that's actually based on what coaches are doing in the context that they're doing it. And if we then want to take a social, cognitive, philosophical perspective, then fine.

Mark Carroll (: 57:24

you're frozen man. Yep, you're back. If you can just repeat that, just sorry.

John Lyle (: 57:47

that helps us understand a little bit better, but we need to take all of them, one predominating over the others. And there's another one which Julian has used in some of his writing, Julian North, where he calls it pragmatic. And that's kind of where I am with my research, is that it's based an awful lot on pragmatism. And pragmatism, again,

has as much of an ontology and epistemology as all of the other isms. But the essence is that knowledge is only useful if it can be applied. That if you're going to find something, it's not worth finding unless you can actually use it. And that for me would be really a useful, simple

Mark Carroll (: 58:34

Yeah, yeah.

John Lyle (: 58:39

Axiom that we could use when we look at academic papers. Have you found something that we can use? And that's the bit you should be telling us about at the end of your paper. You should be telling us at the end of the paper that this is really important because this is what we can do with it. So you should be, you should be

Mark Carroll (: 58:44

Yeah, there's so much to abstract this.

Hmm.

Hmm. So maybe I have less words for

strengthening limitations, have a bit more in the practical implications.

John Lyle (: 59:07

you should be seeking for knowledge that is

useful and can be applied and you should be finding knowledge that's useful that you can apply. If you're going to, I mean, by all means, write other papers as I often do, which are conceptual, which talk about how important things are and how important terminology is or how we best interpret something. But when we're doing empirical work, then let's find things that are useful.

Let's actually go into the situation. Let's find what coaches need to know rather than what we what they tell us they need to know rather than what we think they need to know.

Mark Carroll (: 59:47

I think what you

see that resonates so much with you, John, like even, I I had to start this through my PhD, being around influences on behavior. And actually when I was in with coaches and I had to, I would observe them for a month or two months, but even before we finished the interview process, and what the observations provided was just a reminder that coaching's bloody hard, like coaching's difficult.

John Lyle (: 59:50

Cough

Mark Carroll (: 1:00:13

And I think if there's something researchers can do, it's about having more empathy in their writing. when we were speaking a little bit about the cognitive versus social element, it's interesting because even being someone who's based within a psychology sphere, I've actually now grown to appreciate a lot of the sociological texts now because I think they deal better with paradox and I think they deal better with tensions and certain unexplained answers. I think they do a good job. I orchestration has a lot of merit.

Psychology has a limitation and that is often dealing with the individual and that works to a point but then if you don't understand the individual doesn't operate in a vacuum that you can go into these dead ends. I think you've done a great job explaining around just creating problems out of things that never will be answered. So it's like, what are you getting to? The other point I wanted to raise with that, John. Yeah, yeah, sorry, absolutely. Please tell me what you're thinking. Yeah.

John Lyle (: 1:01:06

Can I just respond to that? Remember, remember,

I often say remember what you were going to say. But I do think that's important. I think you came up with a really important phrase statement there, which is that coaching is bloody difficult. Because it's a treatment orientated occupation.

Mark Carroll (: 1:01:13

Hi.

John Lyle (: 1:01:31

and process, well lots of processes that are part of that, then

And because the problem is not necessarily easily dealt with, other than you want usually to get better, but you can then start to explore what that means. What it eventually means...

it's not that much different sometimes in medicine and teaching and counseling and other things is that we don't know what the problem is quite often and we don't know what the solutions are so that we are doing our best as professionals with expertise to come up with the solution which is our training and preparation and all the other things we do the solution that best fits the needs of the athlete that we have in front of us the needs of the athlete

we can find out by asking the athlete and being knowledgeable ourselves but we are slightly different as a and this I know this is me going on at length here but this this we are slightly different as a treatment occupation

Mark Carroll (: 1:02:34

Mm, no, no.

John Lyle (: 1:02:40

I put it this way, because you can make me better as a doctor if you know what's wrong with me and you give me the treatment, we don't have the next person coming into the surgery trying to stop me from getting better. But what we do in sport is we kind of know what the problem is we want to get better at and we want to try and win or we want to try and do well, whatever.

But there's other people who want to try and win the same things that we want to try and win. And so what that does is it clouds the notion of doing the right thing. So actually, it's very difficult to ever say that the coach is doing the right thing. Because someone is always trying to stop you and defining the problem there for this difficult. So is coaching difficult? And you have problem athletes and you have contractual disputes and you have

Mark Carroll (: 1:03:10

Hmm.

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:03:36

organisations to deal with and you have media and... well... coaching is difficult. So that's the bit that... sorry, but that's the bit that we... I'm interested in. Because the bit I'm most interested in is to say, is it difficult? Yes. Could we write about how difficult it is? Yes. But the question is, how do coaches cope with it? Because coaches do...

Mark Carroll (: 1:03:40

That's it yeah

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:04:04

cope with it. We don't have hundreds of thousands of coaches out there tearing their hair out because they don't know what to do. They're doing it. So somehow they are coping with this huge difficulty of being a coach. And that's the bit that I find the most interesting. That's the bit we should be we should be investigating much more how we are dealing with this problem. Orchestration is a great idea. have fully

Mark Carroll (: 1:04:21

And

Yeah, yeah, so stop looking at research and a deficit view.

John Lyle (: 1:04:34

agree with it, mean there's other ways of saying it but fully agree with it. But then you have to say but how do we do it? Not just come back to the social aspects of orchestration but how do we deal with the physical aspects and the social and the institutional and the interpersonal and the opponent based in the day that you may get. So it's how do coaches cope with all of it because they clearly do. Otherwise

None of them would be somehow obviously being successful. And that was why it was really interesting to do that work with Sergio and Cliff going, let's investigate the serial winning people. And we're just hopefully about to publish, haven't got the feedback yet, so I hope the reviewer's not listening. But Sergio and I have just written a paper looking at an individual coach who is hugely serial winning. So I won't say just what it's about at the minute.

Mark Carroll (: 1:05:05

Am I, am I?

John Lyle (: 1:05:28

but hugely serial winning and trying to get inside him to say, how do you do this? How do you cope with the problems that this is very high level professional career coaching for big bucks with big names. How do you cope with all of that? How do you actually manage to live from day to day with that? And for me,

Mark Carroll (: 1:05:54

you

John Lyle (: 1:05:56

It's a very, very underexplored set of questions that should actually probably be directing much of our research.

Mark Carroll (: 1:06:07

Is that going to be an easier question to answer perhaps in performance sport where experts are easier to identify? By the same principle that we understand that coaching is domain specific, it's oftentimes actually where you see in a developmental context people trying to mirror what elite performance coaches do. It actually isn't always the solution because how you train an elite performer or how you train whatever type of athlete in that.

performance context might not always be as easy as reverse engineering that and diluting that to some other component. So I would wonder if that question's like, is it by coincidence that you are discovering that within an elite performance sphere, John? Or is that a by-product of just it being easier to sample in an elite performance as you would need to go and figure out a way of.

John Lyle (: 1:06:50

I mean that

think we were,

it was opportunistic, we're interested in it, it was in a sport that one of us knows particularly well. I mean, it's one of these things where it fitted. But could we ask the same question of a participation coach operating with under tens or under 12s or something like that? Well, the answer is yes.

Mark Carroll (: 1:06:58

Bye.

John Lyle (: 1:07:23

But we would be asking a different kind of coping question. What is it they're having to cope with? Well, they're not having to cope with the media pressure of trying to win. They're not having to cope with the notion of being sacked if they don't win the next whatever. And their outcomes are not measured in terms of winning and medals and whatever. It's probably measured in terms of athlete. Now athlete here is under tens.

Mark Carroll (: 1:07:39

Yeah.

John Lyle (: 1:07:51

it's our athlete satisfaction, probably measured by whether they keep coming back and whether they're enjoying it and whether they're smiling. And if they're smiling and enjoying it and coming back, we want to know how you cope with that because they'll not all come back and they'll not all be smiling. So if you are being successful by those measures, you're doing something right.

Mark Carroll (: 1:07:58

Well, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. I wonder if there's... Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what I mean. I wonder if there's an exercise in itself about how we can better establish the criteria for what makes a successful coach without it becoming again entrenched within all the different ideologies. Using a motivational lens, I could say a kid coming back isn't always associated with them enjoying the sport. It could be that they're controlled in their emotions and that's not, I know there's some laughing that we don't need to get into. Aye. So.

John Lyle (: 1:08:39

Well, it could be because the parents, it could be simply because the parents said,

we want to get rid of them for an hour.

Mark Carroll (: 1:08:44

So the thing I was wanting to ask you, and so see when we spoke about the trend that you're noticing in lot of interview-based studies, and a lot of questionnaires. Is higher education, is higher education, can we be critical of the system, I suppose, that we operate as academics within higher education? And there is a bit of a publisher peril thing happening there. Now, what I say to that is that we are, and I fully agree, I believe that

more ethnographic methods, more slow work is going to produce probably better measures of the realities of coaching as far as capturing what coaches do, how they get around things. But that requires time and resource and always think about the pressures on academics to publish. And it probably lends itself all inside just the idea of juggling teaching with research. There's a dive bomb approach, I think. We go into an environment as quickly as we can do.

We don't really enjoy it. don't actually feel like academics enjoy the data collection process. They enjoy analyzing it. But there's always this lead towards efficiencies in there. And I think what I feel you're getting at, if I've understood it correctly, I wonder if... Because by the same margin, we understand there's coaching domains, However, academics within coaching all fit within the same one bubble of academia.

And the reason why we act in the way we do and the reason why we're rushed is because we're also prisoners to the same evaluative measures. If it's REF, if it's different things like that, if we're talking about what might create for better, ultimately better coaching practice, if we know that coaching practice is influenced so much by the academic medium, do we maybe need to have a conversation about how we evaluate the academic enterprise in that respect? Because if we're evaluating it in the same way that we evaluate loads of other disciplines, we could be guilty of not

contextualizing our own job enough in the way that we approach it in order to capture better the domain specific difficult pragmatic realities of coaching. I know that there's a lot of strands to that but I just want to know you're a researcher you've been in this space I don't know how many publications you've got John more than I can count. How is that resonating with your experience and is that always a

a good thing getting more publications out because it's easy for us to say don't publish as much but you know it's not an easy thing and you'd recognise as well the job we have to try to work in coaches best interest when their own work isn't maybe coinciding with that if that makes sense you know.

John Lyle (: 1:11:17

No, I mean, you're... I agree... would be easier just to say I agree with a lot of what you're saying. The sentiment behind a lot of what you're saying.

Mark Carroll (: 1:11:28

It doesn't really get us anywhere to be fair, it's just a comment.

John Lyle (: 1:11:28

Well, no, the question,

because it does make a difference to, it would make a difference in practical terms as to how much we publish and what we publish.

I would suggest that...

We ought to be writing more that's of interest to coaches. But you also have to say that that's by and large not what academic journals are for. Academic journals are to share knowledge between academics. What we then have to say is how do we get from that corpus of knowledge

Mark Carroll (: 1:12:03

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:12:08

and understanding to applied knowledge and understanding which coach educators, developers, governing bodies and coach leaders can then translate into practice for coaches. So are we publishing too much stuff? If that's a non jargon word.

Mark Carroll (: 1:12:31

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:12:34

Yes. Is there a whole load of stuff out there that's not worth publishing? Yes. We probably have to distinguish, which sounds a little bit elitist, between those journals that will publish for no fee and the journals that have sprung up, hundreds and hundreds of them, that will publish for a large fee. So if you want to be published, you can be published.

but it will cost you money. And yes, we would be elitist about it and say, yes, but that's that journal. That doesn't really count because you can pay to get your paper in there. And in fact, though, they guarantee to turn it around in a month and publish it. So the notion of publishing ethics and policy is really quite important to our professional area. And we are beginning to go down that

Mark Carroll (: 1:13:21

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:13:34

route of you can get something published if you go to the right journal. Do we still publish? Let me, this again sounds a bit remote, but the tricky bit we have in comparison to let's say the sports scientists and I've used, I think I probably used this in lecture with you at some point, is if you want an easy paper then you run somebody on a treadmill

Mark Carroll (: 1:13:45

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:14:00

you jab them in the backside with something and you run them again and you see whether they get better or not and then you publish it or you do a test on some kind of ergonometer we do a couple of weeks training and then we do it again and they get better and we publish it so we get tons of biomechanics and physiology type papers that don't actually tell us how it's possible to jab them in the backside

Mark Carroll (: 1:14:08

Mm

John Lyle (: 1:14:28

in an actual club context and decide whether they're actually doing anything that's any better or not. So there's a whole area there of talking about the kind of policies and the kind of publications that we're... The problem with coaching, it's not a problem, the issue with coaching is that we don't have what the academic world calls representative tasks.

Mark Carroll (: 1:14:33

Mm, mhm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:14:56

So if

you want to know whether someone is relatively expert in an area, and it's usually hands on things. So if it was something like plumbing or electricity or engineering or technology of some kind, you give them a representative problem and you see if they can solve it. And the expert can solve it better than the person who's not an expert. And that's how...

in some areas, expertise is measured against what you call a representative task. But we don't have a representative task. What would it be? We could think of loads and we could think of loads and loads of problems. Which one? Yeah. And that's that's a wee bit the same as when we say to people, we're going to measure how good your planning is.

Mark Carroll (: 1:15:35

And how do you control a coaching space to the point where you can show cause and effect? It just doesn't happen.

John Lyle (: 1:15:51

because you're on a coach education course. So we want you to give us your plan for the next six months. And you go, well, but I'm going to need another 15,000 words to tell you all about the person who I'm planning for. Because if I don't tell you that, you have no idea whether my plan's any use or not. So we come back to this notion of it's so particular, so contextual, so domain specific.

that we don't have any representative tasks. you can think of you've been there. You can think of what you do in your coach education programs when you put somebody in front of half a dozen people who are on the same course as you and you tell them to teach them X, Y or Z. And then you decide whether they do it well enough and you give them a certificate.

Mark Carroll (: 1:16:41

And I think that, and I just think, and while we aren't necessarily arriving at solutions here, because it's just, that's for the next 40 years, I suppose, to see where they get to. It's still important, I think, just to raise the point. maybe if I can briefly, jump in there as well. I think that's why I've always been an advocate for coaches exploring different sources of information. I appreciate that that comes with elements of rest around authenticity of expert and where you can go.

I think about podcast as being a means in which that we can start to communicate messages with more nuance to a degree. There could be other types of, I think there needs to be probably be more of a allowance for informal learning and maybe cred in that is recognizing what coaches can learn from each other without our interference. It's not to replace the need for the academic, but I think what we raise here, John, is just appreciating that the...

the conundrums that we can fall into. And I think that why this conversation has been brilliant is to understand that coaching as a science and becoming an expert in coaching research isn't the same as becoming an expert in coaching. And I think we need to learn from one another. So I just think it's about not chastising academics, but at least balancing a little bit because they certainly chastise coaches. And I'm complicit to it. We're all complicit to it. If coaches were to implement everything we told them to do.

I would stop, I wouldn't have what I in a day but I wouldn't do it. So yeah. Yeah.

John Lyle (: 1:18:11

But that's back to my question Mark that

I raised was, given all of those things that you could possibly tell the coach, how do they cope with that? Because they actually know an awful lot of that. They know that they're supposed to be doing this, this, this, this, this, this. So how do they cope with that? And yes, it's not so much, well, I think we can, we, if I'm now going to put myself in the coach's hat, we can criticize academics for saying,

you're not giving us the answers we need. I wonder if probably quite a lot of the answers are out there, but the way to access them is not to read academic papers. Academic papers need to be distilled over time and over broader collections of them to find what the answers are.

That would be helpful if the academics did more of their work in situ with real problems and over time and more of that might allow us to synthesize better the answers that we need to help the coach to cope with the situations they find themselves in gradually over time.

So that yes, the high performance coach is dealing with a different set of problems from the participation coach. So, but we can help both. And it's not necessarily a, I think we need, this another debate, maybe we need another podcast. That coach education has not helped us by assuming that it.

Mark Carroll (: 1:19:52

It's a part two, think, yep.

John Lyle (: 1:20:02

needs to go one, two, three, four. It used to be five. And this notion of being what you would call an assistant coach and then a nearly coach and then an almost nearly coach and then a senior coach and then a really, really good coach or words to that effect that this notion that we've never really come to.

and this is the bigger why we need to spend more time on it. When you come out of medical school, you're considered to be a doctor, you're actually considered to be a junior doctor, and you're supposed to put time in before you, et cetera. When you come out of teacher training college, you're considered to be a teacher. You need to do a couple of years probation, but you're a teacher. You're not a nearly teacher, you're not an assistant teacher.

You're not working, you're not that kind of, you're not a, we just got you off the street for two days, teacher. yet we are putting up with that. Now what we do actually need is that kind of coach education system that actually just says, when you get to that stage, you're a coach. You're not a senior coach, you're just a coach. If you want to be a specialist in high performance areas, become a specialist.

But you're a coach. There's a bottom line that says you're a coach. And that might apply to a participation coach the same as anybody else. But that requires a whole different thinking about coach education. And remember, it's not a thinking that politically would rest easily on shoulders. Because we need to have level ones and twos in governing bodies.

Mark Carroll (: 1:21:40

you

Hmm.

John Lyle (: 1:21:54

because one, in some sports they bring in lots of money but two, they actually are the people who go out there and do the work you know, our gymnastics clubs and our swimming clubs and our football clubs are all full of level ones and level two coaches but do we think they've at the same level as saying this person's a teacher or a doctor or an architect or something else?

Mark Carroll (: 1:22:02

Mm-hmm.

Well, I think

that's a great way to maybe cap off the conversation. I need to convince you to come back. Sometimes I think, John, we'll need to chat about coach education in its own thing in terms of the NGB dilemma. John, honestly, I can't thank you enough. I think that's been so interesting for me and really reflective just if I was being selfish just to put the spotlight on myself. But for those that are listening, we have a lot within the audiences that are listening to this podcast that are...

or student coaches, people that are trying to learn about coaching as an academic discipline in the near future. It's just incredible to get your insight. I really can't stress it enough, sounded like an absolute sook, but you are like a hero in the sense of, I'll need to put subtitles on it. I'll annotate that one, but what you've done for the science of coaching is just incredible, John.

John Lyle (: 1:22:58

That's a Scottish word, that is.

Mark Carroll (: 1:23:10

I can only just take my hat off to you. You're a massive inspiration to me and for anyone else that has any interest in coaching. They really should know your name if they don't already. Thanks so much, John, for coming along. I just really appreciate it.

John Lyle (: 1:23:20

It's

a pleasure. I'm delighted to talk about coaching at any time with anybody. It's the kind of, know, if you're so steeped in it then you just, you know, and I actually found it very helpful. I found that interesting. And I will be actually going back over it myself to think, well, some of the things you said there actually are quite, when I say talk to myself, I say some of the things you came up with there actually I think that's quite interesting.

Mark Carroll (: 1:23:34

Thank you. That's good.

Good.

John Lyle (: 1:23:47

but I hadn't really put it that way before. I need to think about that. And of course, that's what podcasts and other things are for.

Mark Carroll (: 1:23:50

One strand.

Ah,

one strength of being daft, John, is I can just ask questions and put, you know, enough about what I'm saying that something lands eventually. So, no, thanks, John. And for those that are listening, guys, thank you so much for listening. I hope this conversation has been as helpful to you as it has been for me. And we will see you next time. Thanks, John.

John Lyle (: 1:24:15

My pleasure.