What Kind of Coach Do I Want to Be?

What Kind of Coach Do I Want to Be?

The fitness and wellness industry has grown rapidly since the turn of the millennium, and competition is fierce. Coaching businesses often revolve around a strong personal brand. This makes the field both interesting and challenging. How do you stand out among so many coaches?

For me, finding my own identity eventually happened quite naturally—and partly by accident.

When I began studying to become a fitness coach and preparing for my first competitions, I was looking for a counterbalance to my work as a pastor. Sport had been important to me since childhood, but my career had taken me first into academia and then into ministry.

Years earlier, I had already begun imagining a way to bring sport together with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Training as a fitness coach gave me my first concrete opportunity to put that idea into practice. I wanted to help people with the challenges they faced—not only emotionally and spiritually, but physically as well.

At the same time, competitive fitness offered me a welcome form of escapism. I had spent much of my working life engaging with life's serious, profound, and sometimes painful questions. Fitness gave me permission to focus, at least occasionally, on something visible, tangible, and even a little superficial.

When my interest in the sport took me to Fitness Summer Camp in 2018, I met a wonderful group of people and was immediately impressed by the community. I did not even have to invent a brand for myself. When one participant heard that I was a pastor, they immediately suggested "Fitness Pastor" or "Fitness Priest."

The name stuck, but it also captured something essential about what I wanted to do. The idea of working solely as a pastor did not excite me, nor did the idea of working solely as a fitness coach. Combining these two worlds, however, felt right for me.

I wanted to build my approach to fitness coaching around my own strengths. An academic career in theology and my work as a pastor had taught me a great deal about being human, the limits of life, and connecting with people, especially in difficult circumstances. This kind of understanding does not develop overnight. It grows through years of education, work, successes, and mistakes of our own.

Over the years, my understanding of good coaching has gradually become clearer. The following principles describe the kind of coach I want to be.

Caring About the Person Is at the Heart of It All

The most important foundation of coaching is genuine care for the person.

If a coach does not genuinely care about the people they coach, an athlete can easily become a means to an end. A client's results, physique, and competitive success may become tools for building the coach's own visibility, reputation, or social media content.

When an athlete is seen primarily as an achievement on the coach's résumé, something fundamentally human is lost from coaching. The athlete's own interests can quietly give way to the coach's ambitions.

That is why a coach should strive, above all, to consider the athlete's best interests as a whole. This means more than securing the highest possible placing in a competition or making efficient physical progress. It also means considering how competitive sport or goal-oriented training fits into the rest of the person's life.

My own coaching philosophy begins with the belief that fitness should enrich the athlete's life beyond the sport. At its best, training strengthens our capacity to function, our confidence, our perseverance, and our sense of what we can achieve.

Fitness should not become a black hole that swallows up every bit of joy, every relationship, and our entire sense of well-being.

Always Remain a Student

Perhaps the most dangerous coach is one who believes they have nothing left to learn. A self-aware coach, by contrast, understands that even the best experts have blind spots and areas in which they can improve. Professional competence includes not only expertise but also the ability to recognise its limits.

The fitness industry is constantly changing, whether in research, training methods, competition practices, or posing. Many of the fundamentals of training and nutrition remain the same for a long time, but there is always more to learn. It is even harder to imagine anyone ever fully mastering interpersonal or psychological skills. These, too, are core coaching skills.

For me, recognising the mistakes and misjudgements I have made over the years has helped me remain a student. Facing our own mistakes can be painful, but without doing so, we cannot grow into better coaches.

At its best, the pain of making a mistake can become a driving force for change. It compels us to examine our actions critically, study further, and do better next time.

A good coach does not, then, need to cultivate the image of an all-powerful "master," even if such an image might sometimes bring commercial rewards. Admitting to having been wrong is unlikely to destroy a coach's credibility. If anything, it will probably strengthen trust—at least over time.

Coaching at Its Best Is a Dialogue

My most inspiring experiences as a coach have come when communication with an athlete has been open, natural, and honest.

Good communication requires both coach and athlete to listen to one another and make a genuine effort to understand what the other means. Clients often bring extremely valuable insights into exercises, training programmes, nutrition, recovery, and the overall demands of their daily lives.

A coach may have considerable expertise, but clients know their own bodies and lives in a way that no outsider fully can. Good coaching brings these two kinds of knowledge together.

My own best experiences, both in competitive success and in the progress of recreational fitness enthusiasts, have largely been made possible by effective communication.

Still, it is only honest to acknowledge that we connect more naturally with some people than with others. We are all different, and being on the same wavelength often makes working together easier.

I believe it is worth striving for good communication even with people who think or act differently from us. Sometimes, we can learn more from someone different from ourselves than from someone who simply reinforces our existing views.

That is why I also encourage the people I coach to challenge my thinking.

Talk About the Difficult Things Especially

In recent years, one of my most important coaching mantras has been this: talk about the difficult things especially.

Often, during our very first meeting or phone call, I tell clients that they are welcome to speak frankly, including about things I might not find comfortable to hear. I encourage them to tell me if something about their training, nutrition, everyday life, programming, or my own conduct as a coach does not feel good or seem right.

Silence rarely makes a problem disappear. It postpones it and allows it to grow.

One of the most important qualities of a good coach is therefore the ability to receive constructive criticism. This does not mean that every piece of feedback is automatically correct. It means being willing to listen, reflect, and adjust one's own actions when necessary.

An atmosphere like this reflects the emotional strength and trustworthiness of the coaching relationship.

Perfectionism Is Not Optimal

I have sometimes seriously considered having this sentence printed on a T-shirt.

Many competitive fitness athletes and committed recreational exercisers struggle with perfectionism: the belief that reality can be controlled if only everything is done precisely enough. Every meal, workout, repetition, step, and night's sleep must be perfect.

There are at least two illusions involved here.

The first is the belief that our resources are unlimited. In reality, our time, energy, and capacity to concentrate are finite. We cannot do everything perfectly, nor can we devote equal attention to everything.

We therefore have to choose our everyday battles. Some things deserve very close attention, but in many cases, good enough really is enough. Wisdom lies in recognising which category each thing belongs to.

Perfectionism does not, then, always improve the outcome. It can also mean spending time, energy, and emotional resources on things that make very little difference to the bigger picture.

The second illusion is the idea that life can be fully controlled. Conscientious effort, good choices, and sustained work often bring considerable physical, material, psychological, and sometimes even spiritual rewards. Yet none of these eliminates the possibility of chaos or catastrophe.

Sometimes, even the most conscientious person encounters suffering that they have done nothing to bring upon themselves. This question is also explored in the biblical Book of Job.

We cannot fully control the world, other people, or even, at times, ourselves. Good coaching does not promise an impossible degree of control. It helps us act wisely amid imperfection and uncertainty.

Celebrate and Encourage

A coach's job is not simply to spot mistakes and correct them. Coaches must also be able to recognise successes and draw attention to them.

As both a coach and a pastor, I have noticed how astonishingly many people speak to themselves in ways they would never speak to a friend—or even a complete stranger. Their inner dialogue can be unforgiving, belittling, and sometimes outright cruel.

I sometimes ask: would you speak that way to someone you care about? If not, what justifies treating yourself that way?

To counter overly negative self-talk, I encourage athletes to record their successes alongside their training. Progress is not just about shortcomings that need to be corrected. It also grows out of everything that is already going well and can serve as a foundation for further development.

Through my feedback, I try to strengthen the athlete's belief in their own abilities. The aim is not empty praise but balance: we need to be able to examine mistakes honestly without calling the person's entire worth into question. At the same time, it is important to help athletes celebrate their successes and look to the future with hope.

This often works best when the focus is primarily on the person's own progress. Comparing ourselves with others is not always—or even particularly often—helpful. Comparing ourselves with an earlier version of ourselves, on the other hand, very often brings the most rewarding sense of achievement.

I also encourage athletes to recognise their teammates' successes. Nor do I see anything wrong with a coach occasionally receiving positive feedback from their athletes. I accept it with gratitude, just as I do constructive criticism.

It is hard to overstate the importance of joy and encouragement in sport or in life. They are especially needed in Finnish culture, where kind and encouraging words are sometimes withheld for no good reason.

Reliability Shows in Actions

Reliability usually grows out of small, repeated actions rather than grand statements.

A good coach responds to messages within the agreed time, does what they have promised, and communicates openly if something is delayed or does not go as planned. They do not promise results they cannot guarantee.

Confidentiality is an essential part of professional ethics. A coach often learns deeply personal things about an athlete's health, body, eating habits, relationships, and life circumstances. This information is not entrusted to the coach for entertainment, gossip, or personal brand-building. Coaches must therefore treat information about their athletes with particular care and discretion.

A client's results, photographs, or training videos may be shared, but only with their permission. That permission must be genuinely voluntary, and clients must never feel that agreeing to publicity is a condition of being coached.

So, What Kind of Coach Do I Want to Be?

I do not want to be a "master" living under the illusion of infallibility. Instead, I want always to remain a student, striving to assess my strengths and areas for improvement as honestly as possible.

I want to be a coach who genuinely cares about athletes as people, too.

I want to be a coach with whom people can share their failures, doubts, and even things I might not find comfortable to hear.

I also want to work together with the athlete towards good, tangible results. Yet good coaching means more to me than helping someone look better, lift heavier weights, or succeed in competitions. At its best, coaching also helps people understand themselves, relate to themselves more constructively, and make wise choices even when life does not go according to plan.

As a coach, I also want to share knowledge and expertise in a way that deepens the athlete's understanding of training and everything connected with it. Ideally, coaching gives athletes tools for training and life that continue to serve them long after the coaching relationship has ended.

In other words, I also want to coach people towards a good life, if that is what they themselves wish. Alongside tangible results, I aim, where needed, to help the people I coach become physically and psychologically stronger in facing life's setbacks—but also better able to recognise their successes and enjoy their lives.