how do you start a story knowing that you never want it to end? there are so many stories i could still tell from the International Coaching Conference hosted by CRiC in 2025, and now the 2026 iteration is already over.
In this liminal space, I wanted to play back some of the moments that resonated with me, a brief overview of the epic workshop we hosted as a group of friends and scholars in awe of each other, and a stark reminder that people are just people.
let us start at the end, the thank yous.
i have turned my photographs over the years into postcards, printed cheaply and tagged with little poems that i write for the receiver. as someone who has gifted felt and wooden flowers to the people i love across the world, this format allowed me to share more widely, to anyone who for a moment sparked hope, joy, wisdom, awe. i also find that this field, the sociologists and the pedagogues and the people who pour their hearts and souls into sports coaching, rarely receive such gratitude. or if they do, its half-hearted or transactional at best. the least i can do is leave them with a little photo and a couple of rhyming lines to show how much this space means to me.
that being said, it still comes as a surprise when that gratitude is reflected back at me. taking compliments has never been my strong suit but lately, i’ve found a real art in listening to what people highlight the most, what resonates with them. not so i can edit or rehearse what being or doing looks like for me, but rather just to find points of connection. this time, it was my tattoos haha! i spent most of my professional career covering them up, the notion that a customisable skin like i’m a video game character doesn’t sit well with some people, but i love the futility of it all. what is a bit of ink in the scheme of things when our existence as human beings is so fragile and finite.
but it was also my energy, my unconformity, my love for my friends, and my questions. i think the reason these things resonated so much this time around is because i’ve been learning to get out of my own way. i joke that when i give talks, i don’t really plan them because the moment i start speaking, something else comes out of my mouth than intended. the stories find their way out of me, still intentional, but never quite what i had planned. my questions, my conversations, my chaotic and boisterous way of being manifest from that level of acceptance i guess. i’ve stopped fighting it.
i also distinctly remember that a year ago, someone i admire said they ask questions because they want to show that they were listening intently, that they care. i hear it in every question they ask now, and normally i would never put my hand up in a room, but i love showing care in this way. taking one super intelligent point that was glossed over and asking someone to go back there and tell me about it, pondering about what it means or how did you find this way of doing, and what does that mean to you? we are kidding ourselves if we think our research is anything but autobiographical in some way, as the things we come to know and love and be curious about are borne from our dwelling in the world, the things we pay attention to and find along the way.
these reciprocal moments of gratitude, across varying levels of intellectual acuity, are calmly articulated in this lovely poem by Dan Whitlam, aptly titled ‘Awe’:
asking better questions
now for the nitty gritty nerdy shit.
who gets to decide what is worth knowing continues to haunt me. i ain’t playing 4D Chess anymore, we are now unfolding worlds. this iteration of my work with boccia was so satisfying to present, as i genuinely think out loud when i give these talks. at first, we had the quickfire presentations = 3 minutes to summarise your 20 minute talk. how on earth was i going to summarise the practicality of epistemology in that time?! and how many swear words could i accidentally drop because i forgot to not be australian for 3 damn minutes!?….
well. i took everyone back to my awkward first day on the job. wandering the halls, learning where all the fire exits are, and noticing that someone was training in the biomechanics lab, a decidedly not-designed-for-training space. after a few puns and creative embellishments which are actually just poetic versions of real events (like being told i’m not allowed to go in and help training but scanning in anyway – access granted, permission pending), i brought everyone to the fork in the road that i faced: if we’re asking what variables matter in boccia, who gets to decide what is worth knowing?
this was followed with “fuck i just learnt how to spell boccia”… read the room mate.
when practicing for this talk, i found that ‘the practicality of my epistemology’ had a lovely ring to it, so i used that as an anchor for the rest of the speech. i knew that growing knowledge together is fundamental to my practice, and the way we can turn our disparate sources of information into knowledge is by venturing out into the world (our definition of ‘good boccia’) together, and seeing how those pieces fit. borrowing from Gert Biesta’s cure to didactophobia (fear of being the teacher), we kept the world and our experiences of it as our authority, and paid attention to what did/n’t happen when we tried things.
notably, the word troublemaker felt like dropping a stone into the loch. the ripple effect that this reading had on the game, that your intention as a competitor is to cause trouble and seeing a ‘corridor of trouble’ around the jack, was life changing. that is not an exaggeration, there is now an epic boccia club called ‘the corridor of trouble’ – that’s how much it meant to this trio of beings. it signified so much more than just an anchor for self talk, it redirected a line of thinking that was crushing: that everything that is not perfectly ‘right’ is catastrophically wrong. I didn’t get to say this in the speech, but i don’t think i needed to – you could feel how much it meant.
while i did give a 20min version of this talk, i think the 3min version is more poignant, because it shows how being tethered to a definition of knowledge genuinely shapes what is possible in practice. through this version of what it means to know something (and to me, that is growing knowledge together), we found something that we never could have predicted. care, hope and curiosity carried us there, along with a fair share of frustration, messiness, and the nonlinearity of learning. this is never to say that value, meaning, progress or knowledge cannot be formed in other ways, just that this is the thread we followed and this is what we noticed along the way.
drawing attention, a labour of love between 4 friends.
in my bingo card for the last few years, i have written ‘do a project with people i love’ as a way to remind myself that collaborating with friends is one of the brilliant parts about academia. especially when those friends are fucking brilliant. last year, i co-hosted a workshop with someone i’d met once before but you’d never know. this year, a bunch of internet friends and karaoke partners turned workshop hosts, welcoming people into our chosen space of arts x science.
did we choose art, or did art choose us? i don’t think we’ll ever definitively answer that question.
i could give you the formal abstract and pitch but honestly, who cares. the heart of the matter is, we are constrained by language – enter endless citations from names i cannot spell here. the way we think is very difficult to disrupt, especially when thinking and/as writing is central to everything you do professionally. couple that with the need to produce things, often writing in a highly constrained and sometimes impenetrable way to jump through the flaming hoops of journal publication, and you find yourself, stuck.
a few of us have (re)turned to art as a way to disrupt knowing, thinking, doing, being. the various mediums we gravitate towards mean different things on different days, but ultimately it enables us to experience the world differently, to notice different things, and by extension, to think differently. drawing, sound, poetry, photography, things we take for granted when we sit down to write. in the workshop, we began with a flower, of course.
sidebar: i am so grateful that the coaching people in the room really stuck with us through these seemingly obscure references – it would have been sooooo easy to sit back, cross their arms and say “where is the damn coaching stuff”, but they didn’t. whether it was discomfort or uncertainty or curiosity, this workshop would not have worked without their wholehearted engagement. i guess that can be said for just about anything.
as Harley Jean Simpson walked us through the notion that we do not need to peel away the superfluous things about ourselves (or a phenomena), the eccentric and different and ‘weirder’ elements that we are often told to (or feel like we must) hide. we do not find the ‘core’ or the ‘truth’ by removing everything else, if anything, we have such a weak grasp on the complexity of the world because we’ve done exactly that for so long in pursuit of control and certainty. the world and what we can know becomes a different realm when we keep our petals on.
this led us to reconnect with drawing. if i hear one more person say ‘i cannot draw’, i might snap hahaha. not with that attitude, you cannot. but, if you question that belief for ten seconds, you may be surprised. As Becky Skeen reminds us, drawing is just lines, just shapes, even handwriting. we began small, drawing lines. a warm up of sorts, a simplification rather than deconstruction. a part of a bigger whole, a complexity that we will never be able to unsee once we find it again. we draw to see, not to recreate reality, is one of my favourite lines from her activity and way of thinking. inspired by Andrew Causey’s Drawn to See, we were then asked to use one continuous line to ‘see’ the room around us. i participated in every activity, in as much awe as the other participants (but maybe more so because seeing your people do what they love is a special thing to witness). i buffered, my pen wandering the page, trying to see almost a birds-eye view of the tables and windows and heads bent over paper and pens. i kept so many of those sketched pages, to make something with them but also just to remember this moment, that strangers-no-more made something together.
with our pens down, Jess Bunyard reminded us to listen to the world, a sense that we definitely do not give enough credit. i love it when this idea settles in for the participants, a reawakening of sorts that opens up so many possibilities. in their talk later that week, Jess asked us to close our eyes and just notice. we joked earlier that morning that the birds would probably all disappear at that exact moment, but they really played their part. it was a perfect reminder that there is no such thing as silence, and our perception is enriched when we listen. i know i’m doing a bit of time-travelling in this recount, but as we wandered the worn paths around the campus, a football coach mentioned that he had never ‘listened’ to training before. sure, we hear things, and something we use that information to make a decision such as when not/to intervene, but to genuinely stop and tune into sound was not treated in the same way as looking or seeing was.
and of course, after we’d just shat on the constraints of words for the last 30 minutes, it was my turn to reintroduce everyone to them, taking a familiar tool and using it differently. again, the insistence that ‘i am not a poet’ quietly reverberates around the room and you guessed it, they were terribly incorrect. poetry has a nebulous definition at best but it often comes down to making people feel something with your words and i would argue some of the best academic writers are poetic, or at least have a signature prose that we love to come back to. our prompt was to write about a colour without ever naming it, and the most classic coaching scenario happened: the instruction was misheard or misunderstood, and someone wrote an entire poem where every line contained the word ‘green’. i laughed so hard at this brilliant little poem because it was such a poetic circumstance: to aim for something, and for the opposite to emerge.
again, how does this come back to coaching? well i find the emotion i can include in poems, and the constraints of rhyming lines because i love that kinda poetry, helps me channel what i’m thinking and feeling in ways that go beyond a description of the moment. in the same way fiction writers sometimes don’t know where their story emerges from until it is written, the connections between ideas and emotions become apparent to me as the lines tumble out. yes, i think in rhyme when i write these, weaving the threads together as i type them. when i practiced this workshop with some friends before i left, they picked this poem for me to read out as an example:
the games we play
what do you do when your perspective shifts / you feel the ground swell and world drift / nothing will ever be the same and it never was / like crossing the same/different river as man does / i thought maybe in time i could come to reconcile / that theres a version of this where we’re not just docile / but an active participant in the games we play / so who’s getting played when you cant walk away / unscathed, unbearable weight that you carry / thinking theres no reason to bother moving your body / of course you’d believe that and take it to heart / when the odds were stacked against you from the start / and yet the globe spins and a new game begins / one thats better designed to hide all our sins / maybe we forgot that milestones dont make us bloom / is your talent really growing or just digging a tomb.
a thought after realising im thinking differently than before 04-07-25
to ground this whole workshop experience, the star of the show was an unplanned wander around campus. participants had 45 minutes to just, directly experience the world. notice what you notice, capture it any way you want to, and bring it back to us. the final piece was a living gallery, where we invited people to anonymously share their works of art, sound, photography and poetry in the corner of the room, with empty “labels” that people could comment on or title the pieces. this is just a sneak peek of the multimedia mayhem we want to create to make sure that living gallery exists beyond the constraints of that monday afternoon in june:
https://canva.link/cwych5colyfaf2m
everything included in this video was created by the participants and creatively collaged by the workshop facilitators. i cannot wait to see what else these brilliant thinkers and feelers and doers come up with next. not just in their coaching practice and research, but beyond. the opportunity to do work like this, to help people venture out into their worlds in different ways, is such a rare occurrence when people want pre-determined learning outcomes they can put on funding requests. i hope this gives you a little hope that doing, being, thinking, feeling differently is exactly what we need to imagine a future that we all want to (and get to) be a part of.
finally i’ll leave you with this plaque from outside the writer’s museum in Edinburgh, snapped days before the workshop:
butterfly affect 
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