VII | No Word from “Coach”
An interstellar adventure about coaching
This is the seventh chapter of No Word from “Coach”. If you have not read it yet, I recommend starting with the first chapter:
13.19: A person asks whether they can help us with anything.
13.20: I address this person the way many “coaches” address their players: “Can you bring me all the books you have related to ‘coaches’ or training? Right noooooow!!!!! Move it!!!! What are you waiting for?” I start, with a voice volume elevated compared to the standard levels of the enclosure, a countdown.
13.22: Seeing that she is taking too long, I activate the function of blowing the whistle, imposing a punishment to correct behavior or maintain discipline, and I shout at her: “Quick, to the baseline: fifty burpees with sprint. If you take more than 2 minutes, you repeat.”
13.23: She shows no symptoms of obedience.
13.24: I begin to reduce the distance toward her while changing the color of my face to “angry reddish”, but before I arrive and say anything, the security guard hits me with a baton that sends me to a location I cannot situate.
13.29: The blow is such a major perturbation that it transforms the nature of my components, their organization and interaction, generating a random change of human appearance.
13.30: Forgotten words from “coach”.
13.31: I raise my head.
13.32: There is a sign above me that says Bookstore —must have been a worker from the competition infiltrated.
13.33: Citcat of Snorom tells me he is on his way but walking humanly very slowly: he wants to explore the idea of being a philosopher.
10.47: No word from Citcat of Snorom.
13.59: Citcat of Snorom arrives. We go back inside.
14.00: The worker of this bookstore, with an expression that shows her interest has been awakened, asks me if we know each other. I have never seen her in my terrestrial or optimian life, but since it seems that on planet Earth it is not permitted to confess that you do not know something, I answer her using a security technique described in the report: I close one of my two eyes for 0.5” and say “from something”, pretending I am sure of something I have absolutely no idea about.
14.02: We address the worker of this fuel shop with a different strategy than before: “Dear Sir/Madam, we would like to buy all the books that have any relation to ‘coaches’ or training. Thank you. Sincerely.”
14.03: She says that, for her, all books are related to the act of training or being a coach.
14.04: We are surprised that this worker does not fall into the human habit of creating categories and taking them as real and definitive without realizing the fuzziness of their boundaries.
14.05: Citcat of Snorom changes the direction of his gaze —he no longer looks into the eyes of the worker and instead looks into mine—, I penetrate his gaze and see that it says: “Not everything is lost yet.”
14.06: She, the worker, continues telling us that she assumes a coach must know about life: just as, when dealing with a husband treating his wife, sometimes the football forward must also give space and not crowd the teammate, trusting him to do what is best for the team. That a coach must know how to diversify the assets that depend on him, with the flexibility to change, adapt, and reinvent in response to uncertain competition, like an entrepreneur and markets. That, for this reason, a coach must know how to create empowering narratives like Cervantes, govern societies like Saint-Exupéry, address and manage conflict like Dostoyevsky, foster an environment that empowers and enables like Jullien or Catmull, design interventions thinking like Moholy-Nagy, and move you by filling you with the will to defend ideals as Sánchez Piñol explains.