Is your Coaching aligned with what you want people to remember about their time with you?
Issue 154- Jason Payne, CMPC
Dolly Parton passed away this week, and I was amazed at the outpouring of tributes to an artist I did not know much about.
I am not a country music fan, and I have never really been one. So other than a brief time in the early 80's when 9 to 5 crossed over to mainstream radio, her career existed off my radar.
What blew me away this week was the wide variety of tributes I saw across social media from people whose lives she touched. Emimen posted a letter of congratulations that she had sent him after his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
She was one of the biggest names in America in the early 80's, wrote over 3000 songs, won Grammys, starred in movies and TV shows, and was barely mentioned. The tributes all focused on how wonderful, grateful, and giving a person she was. They focused on how she made others feel. I can't imagine a better tribute. She was world-class in her field, and it was the second paragraph of her eulogy. That's a life well lived.
There is one exercise in ALIGNED: The Inside Out Path To Coaching Excellence that I borrowed from Cognitive Behavioral Psychology. Writing your own eulogy. I included in the rough draft, removed in the second, and have decided to run in the final draft.
It is the most morbid prompt in the book. It asks you to write your eulogy as a coach. Not as a person. As a coach.
I hesitated because it sounds dramatic. Coaches have a lot on their plates, and telling them to imagine their own funeral is not the warm-up they think they signed up for.
But it is powerful.
Eulogy comes from the Greek word eulogia. It means "good word" or "praise." It has evolved to become something much more.
I listened to the tributes that came in from my father's athletes when he passed away in December of 2023. They talked about how he helped shape their lives. At his celebration of life, my sister delivered a beautiful eulogy that highlighted what his life had been about, pushing people to be their best without feeling like they were being pushed.
I wondered what he would have thought about all of it?
Knowing him, he would have hated the fuss and downplayed the praise. But would he have agreed with the version of himself that was painted? I thought about it a lot in the weeks after his funeral.
It also got me thinking about what I want my eulogy to sound like. I know I would love to have it be like Dolly's. But were my actions aligned with what I had written? That was harder to reconcile.
I included it in the book because it is the fastest way I know to find out what actually matters to you about this work. And an even better way to cross-reference that against who you are right now.
Not who you aspire to be, but who you are.
The prompt
Write your obituary as a coach. Focusing primarily on you as a coach. What do you want the eulogy to say about how your coaching impacted those around you?
Sit with three sub-questions before you start writing:
Who is speaking the eulogy? A former athlete? A colleague? Your own family?
What do they say first about you?
What is missing from your daily coaching that would need to be there for the eulogy to be true?
Why it works
Every coach I have watched sit with this prompt has done the same thing. They write the eulogy they want. They read it back. And then they get very quiet.
Because the eulogy they want is almost never a description of the coach they are in that moment.
The gap between the two is where the whole coaching career either drifts or finds its North Star.
In the specific gap between what you want your athletes to say about you when you are gone and how you actually make them feel in the present.
The gap is the direction.
What to do with what shows up
Do not make a five-year plan or overhaul your program. Do not have a career-changing conversation with your spouse tonight.
Take one thing from your written eulogy that is not currently true. Just one.
Bring it into your practices this week. Not as a project. As a small deliberate choice about how you show up when you walk through the door.
If your eulogy says you were known for noticing the athlete no one else noticed, make sure you notice one athlete next week.
If your eulogy says you were known for holding a high standard without ever making an athlete feel small, hold one standard without diminishing the athlete.
Small. Deliberate. Now.
Dolly Parton didn't start becoming a great human in her 70s; she went out of her way to make people feel seen her whole life. But it also started with one single action.
— Jason
P.S. The tributes to my father and his impact on their lives made his family cry. They would have meant much more to him, but he was no longer there to hear them. If there is a coach or mentor in your life whom you need to thank, reach out and let them know how they helped you out.
P.P.S. Two things
If you have not taken the Aligned Coach Scorecard yet, it is a four-minute diagnostic that maps to the four cornerstones that the eulogy prompt sits within. Seventy-two coaches have taken it. I will share the data shortly. It confirms the story I already knew to be true.
And if you want to be on the list for the book launch, ALIGNED: The Inside-Out Path to Coaching Excellence releases October 27. The eulogy prompt is one of about a hundred exercises like it. Launch-list readers get first access to a workbook companion I am building.
ALIGNED: The Inside-Out Path to Coaching Excellence, my first book, launches on Amazon on October 27. If you want the first chapter free and reader-only bonuses, join the launch list here.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great week.