Show Notes
Keith Sharpe is Head of Coaching and Leadership Development for the Great Britain Cycling Team, coach mentor for the Premier League, and someone who has spent over two decades supporting athletes and coaches across Olympic, Paralympic and professional sport, including time at Right to Dream in Ghana and Denmark, where he led their Character Development strategy. Outside of all of that, he volunteers as a Samaritans listener.
Three Key Messages 1. It's never about you Keith's game plan contribution lands in four words and it's one of the most important reframes any coach can make. The athletes you work with have dreams, goals and ambitions and your role is to support them in chasing those things down. That doesn't mean coaches can't have their own aspirations, but when you step into the coaching role, it needs to be about the person in front of you. Keith puts it simply: coaches are a contributor to what athletes want to achieve. Polishing talent, not producing it. A small but significant distinction.
2. Bring your normalness One of the most quietly powerful ideas in this conversation. Keith talks about what he calls the most me feeling: that moment when you are completely and utterly yourself. For him it's a Friday night, pizza on order, friends coming round, music on. The challenge he puts to coaches is to find that feeling and bring it into everything you do. Because consistency of character isn't just good for you, it's good for the people you coach. Athletes who don't know how their coach is going to turn up today carry an anxiety that gets in the way of performance. Being authentically, consistently yourself removes that.
3. Seek perspectives and really listen to them Keith's game-changing advice is rooted in something coaches ask of their athletes every single session: get comfortable being uncomfortable. His challenge is to regularly seek feedback from the people you coach. Not just once, not just when things go wrong, but as a normal, embedded part of your practice. Start simple. Ask what's going well. Ask what they'd like more of. And when the feedback feels prickly, get curious rather than defensive. As Keith says, if you can do that now, those conversations just become part of how you work together.
Other Things Worth Knowing Hurry slowly A theme that runs quietly through the whole conversation and one Keith writes about brilliantly on LinkedIn. Patience isn't passive. It's trusting that consistent effort over time is the thing that creates real development. Too many coaches and athletes want to rush the process. Keith's reminder is a good one: a butterfly can't be a butterfly without first being a caterpillar.
You don't coach at people, you coach with people Keith's nightclub analogy is one of those ideas that once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. If you start dancing at someone in a nightclub, you're going to get some strange looks. Dance with them and everything changes. Coaching is a partnership. The coaches who get the most from their athletes are the ones who genuinely invest in that relationship, building community, creating belonging, and getting people to contribute.
Language matters A brilliant thread in the conversation around the words we choose as coaches. Keith is thoughtful about this: coaches who over-communicate create confusion, not clarity. And the language of producing athletes versus polishing talent isn't just semantics. It reflects a fundamentally different mindset about whose journey this actually is. Worth sitting with.
Get in Touch Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ Keith's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-sharpe/
More from Game Plan Coaching Podcast
This is the final episode of series two, and it's a fitting way to close things out. Rather than a single coaching idea or a piece of research, this conversation zooms out to look at the systems and structures that sit behind coach learning and development. Tom Causer is National Coach Education Manager at Badminton Ireland, originally from High Wycombe and now based in Moira in Northern Ireland. He works across an all-island governing body covering everyone from volunteer grassroots coaches through to coaches working with Olympic players. He is currently leading a number of ambitious projects to transform how coaches in badminton learn, grow and feel supported, and the thinking behind it is well worth borrowing whatever sport you work in.
Stephen Maxwell is a man who wears a lot of hats, and wears them well. Coach and Match Official Education Manager at Cricket Ireland, director of coaching across four Gaelic Games codes, founder of No Other Game Around Performance Consultants, and a researcher whose MSc thesis at the University of Limerick was titled Do Coaches Fill Their Own Cups. He completed that degree with first-class honours, and his research on self-care in coaching is something he now shares with coaches and organisations across sport and business. He started coaching at 14, has worked across multiple sports and multiple countries, and brings a warmth and practicality to this topic that makes it feel useful rather than abstract.
Rob Gray is a Professor of Human Systems Engineering at Arizona State University and host of the brilliant Perception and Action Podcast. With over 25 years of experience he has worked with elite sports teams including MLB and NBA franchises, and is the author of How We Learn to Move, How to Be an Ecological Coach, and Learning to Optimize Movement. He's one of the biggest names going in ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach, and has this rare gift of taking genuinely dense science and making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world. His main applied sport is baseball, though his work spans golf, tennis, driving, cycling and even martial arts.
I came across Adam Nicholls on LinkedIn and his posts kept stopping me. Short clips of Klopp, Popovich, Steve Kerr - with Adam quietly unpacking the psychology of what they're actually doing. Not tactics, not systems. The human stuff. Care, compassion, what it looks like to genuinely back the people you coach. So I reached out and invited him on to the podcast. Professor of Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Hull, over 85 published papers, three books including Psychology in Sports Coaching. And outside of all that, a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu who competes at the British Open and uses his own experiences of standing in a competitive bullpen waiting to be called to the mat to test the psychology he researches.
Mark Cairns and Andy Muir are the co-founders of Coach Logic, calling in from their bothy in Edinburgh - which, for anyone not from Scotland, is a shelter in the mountains. They haven't climbed a literal mountain to get there, but the metaphor isn't a bad one for what they're trying to do. Both rugby. Mark is a coach educator for World Rugby across Europe and comes from a PE teaching background. Andy has lectured in sports science at Edinburgh College. They built Coach Logic because coaches have no consistent way of knowing what they actually do when they coach. This conversation is about finding a solution to that - and it's a really good one.