Conscious Coaching: The Art and Science of Building Buy-In

If you are a strength and conditioning coach, you should buy this book. The information Brett Bartholomew provides is an insightful look into the wide variety of athlete personalities and mindsets. From the beginning, Brett provides applicable information to help you start becoming a better coach today. Athlete Archetypes Brett’s book helps you find yourself by giving a 3-step self-discovery process, so you can better help your athletes. Once you know what drives you, understanding that your athletes have their own drives will guide your future interactions with them. By far the most helpful section of the book is where the different athlete archetypes are introduced. Understanding that not all athletes are the same will open your eyes to new ways of communicating with them. A style of communication that works for “the Soldier” might not get the best results from “the Wolverine.” Building Trust After the athlete archetypes, Brett explains some common mistakes coaches make and ways to improve trust with your athletes. Many of these mistakes are common issues seen in weight rooms all over the country. He offers simple corrections and food for thought when these mistakes pop up. Through his “Trust Tenets,” you can start creating buy-in right away. Without this trust, athletes will just see you as another authority figure trying to control their lives. You must become what a coach is meant to be: a mentor to build them up and guide them down the right path. Refer to This Book Often Read and highlight sections of this book. Look back on the “Trust Tenets” often. Always be looking to apply aspects of this book whenever possible. If you find yourself becoming complacent, look back to the section on common mistakes and double check that you are not falling into any of those traps. From finding your inner drive, to how to interact with different athletes, this book will guide you in building better relations with not only your athletes but also with other people in your life. Treat athletes as people with complex personalities and their own unique feelings. This book will help bring out the “Conscious Coach” in you.

I'll preface my review by saying that this is the first 'coaching' book I've read cover to cover. Although coaching is my profession I've all too often found coaching books to be rather superficial, platitudinal, and lacking depth. When it comes to coaching, the personal/communicational/relational side of things is arguably (maybe inarguably) the most important part of it all but I just have never found anything that seems to have gotten that right. I've mostly relied on works of philosophy and theology to work through these deeper issues in terms of ethics, leadership. care for the individual, and so on, but I can sincerely say that in my estimation Brett's new book really gets it right. There's plenty of good stuff in chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5, but the place where the book truly shines is in chapter 3. Brett does a good job revealing his own background early on in the book and makes a concerted effort to get us coaches to truly work on knowing ourselves to better know our athletes. That's a mantra I've had my whole life and really connected with. Overall though, chapter 3 is unlike anything I've read before in any sports related book. The section on archetypes I found intellectually stimulating, creative, thoughtful, genuine, and very original. I found it exceptionally helpful and even found it very entertaining. Reading it not only gave me some great insight's, it also served as a waltz through my coaching career and sometimes laughed at how accurate the descriptions were of some particular individuals. Overall Conscious Coaching is an integral work of a new wave of sports science books that have come out this year. I do believe the profession is entering a new era, a renaissance of sorts....actually maybe more like a revolution, and this work is a centerpiece in it. I couldn't recommend it more, and coaches of all walks of life would benefit greatly from it.

This book is not a reps and sets sports book. It’s an easy to read (more art than science) treatise on Brett’s extensive hands on experience thus far in the coaching world. Experience backed by education. One thankfully he’s chosen to share with us. The identification of character and behavioral traits (archetypes) athletes we’ve all worked with, (while not always labelling), and the advice about how to work in with each of them is enlightening, and when blended in with the guidelines (tenets) Brett outlines as part of his best practice coaching model, it undoubtedly informs the reader of how to become much more aware of who you are and your role in the athlete coach relationship. Brett advocates for strong inter-personal relationship’s between the coach and the athlete, while at the same time reinforcing how important it is when trying to create trust to be authentic. Reading books alone will not make you a good coach, but reading this one will definitely make you a better one. Brett uses other authors, mentors, and coaches to provide the reader with quotes you can use, and also shared experience (case studies) regarding real life applications of how, when, what and most importantly why to learn, adopt and implement the strategies he believes make a more conscious coach. This book will inform, encourage and illuminate your journey as a coach while positively reinforcing the progress you may have already made. It makes you contemplate your own journey and confront your mistakes, giving constructive solutions or options. Keep it in your kit bag, highlight it, dog-ear it, underline, annotate and refer back to time and time again. It’s a tomb of wisdom. Use it as a resource. That’s what this guy wrote it for! It’s a good one! Wez Ivarifit.com

We've all read plenty of books on coaching, S&C and sports science... The theory heavy manuals that have without doubt done the industry a great service and are always great to dip back into as a frame of reference. Conscious Coaching by Brett Bartholomew however offers something different. Never before has the art of managing personalities and dealing with these in a practical setting been so prominent. This is were Conscious Coaching excels. Everyone will have encountered many different players/athletes during their coaching or teaching career, all with differing personality traits. Being able to identify and relate to these athletes is essential for building what is now commonly referred to as 'buy-in'. You can design the greatest program in the world but if your ability to build quality relationships is lacking than the program becomes flawed. Coaching Coaching categorises certain athlete personality types, and through real world examples (given by multiple guest speakers throughout the book) describes how best to approach these athletes in order to achieve an end goal. Throughout the book Brett Bartholomew guides you to look at the person behind the athlete, why do they do what they do and what makes them tick as a human being. This is preceded by Brett giving you his own personal history and background which I found fascinating. Even after all of Brett's achievements within the industry you really get the sense that he started at the bottom just like the rest of us. I can't praise this book highly enough, I enjoyed every single page and I have no doubt that it will go down as one of the 'go-to' texts in S&C, sports science and throughout the coaching industry.

Was the best choice I could ever do to make this lecture in this time of quarantine(lockdown). Extremely useful to reflect about everything I did and conquered in my career and the directions from now on.

The way Brett put things along the way is just excellent, it goes direct to the point. The referencing and book recommendations are right on point, you can notice he did a great research work and linked the data perfectly. I recommend this book not only for any kind of Coach but also to everyone. Thank you.

If you build a house you need bricks and cement. Books on bricks are many on the market, books on the cement not so much. And this is the one I recommend to read about building the house of Performance Coaching. Brett Bartholomew gives great insights into the industry and its particularities via intense personal stories. The part that will let you grab the book more than once is the description of the archetypes, the suggestions how to handle them plus the many Coaching views on models of best practice on these athletes. It's an entertaining book, that can help you becoming a conscious coach.

se sei un allenatore di un qualsiasi sport o un preparatore atletico o un personal trainer questo libro ti cambierà il modo di approcciarti con le persone con ciu lavori. è scritto in un inglese molto facile e si legge molto facilmente. stra-consigliato per chiunque abbia a che fare con il pubblico. da avere assolutamente nella propria collezione di libri. If you train people or work with people in general, this is a must have. Brett changed the game with this book giving us a method on how to interact with others. coaching is an art, and everyone should be aware that must be developt eveyr day, and building true relationships and buy-in with our athletes is the most important thing.