My 14-year old nephew (I’ll call him ‘Z’) is a great swimmer, and since the past few weeks he’s been teaching swimming lessons to kids. He had some interesting reflections on how he approaches teaching, and for Day 6 of 30 Days of Summer, I want to share some of his strategies.

These strategies might seem obvious, but try to think: how much of this did our school teachers do (or, to be fair, how much of this did the education system enable teachers to do)?

I’ll end with a quote from a weightlifting podcast I heard, in which a coach reflects on his experience training novice weightlifters.

“I am coaching a human being, and every human being is designed to failing… for some people when they get afraid I might need to push them, for some people I might need to create a bit of space, and that took time to realize. You need to be really good at coaching, you need to be really good at programming, and you need to be really good at measuring. But what you really need to be is an incredibly good ‘people person’. Have some empathy, and understand how people work. That’s my biggest lesson from the last 8 years” - Coach Blanco