Recently, I was walking through an airport in Baltimore, Maryland trying to kill time during a lay over before my next flight took off to my final destination. I saw a book that immediately intrigued me, “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, by Matthew Crawford. The book is about how manual labor (working with one’s hands) has become a lost art only to be replaced by cubicle work and hours spent detached from life, staring at a computer screen; the former being intellectually stimulating and a gateway towards spiritual development and the latter resulting in apathetic and indifference to life in general. What caught my interest even more then the topic of the book was that word, SOULCRAFT and how it can directly be related to coaching and leading athletes towards peak performance.
The journey towards peak performance and individual excellence should, above all things, be soul-centered human development, soulcraft…Disguised by the hours of physical training, hidden underneath the hundreds of pounds of weights lifted, and long before the finish line is in sight you will find SOULCRAFT. It is betterment from the inside out. It is the invisible development that is mostly felt and not seen. Unfortunately it gets lost in the never ending effort to get bigger, faster, and stronger.
Whether your training of choice be strength training, speed training, cycling, swimming, yoga, tai-chi or any other movement-based training you are not only bettering your physical self but also your spiritual self, your soul. Most athletes, especially those younger athletes, have trouble getting past the tangible, comparatively obvious benefits of physical, movement-based training, the larger muscles and the faster movements. However, after years of training (at any craft) it becomes quite obvious that your soul is on that same path of development. It is a challenge for all coaches to instill an understanding and awareness that spiritual development might be the most important aspect of any athlete’s efforts toward optimizing performance. My rationale is this: If you are a sprinter and spend hours a day mastering the mechanics of your stride, both length and frequency and hours developing the appropriate musculature for an explosive start and a strong finish so that at the end of the day (career) when father-time creeps up and your muscles simply don’t fire as fast as they used to, what do you have left??? You have a body that was once fast but a mind and soul that will forever (as long as you are alive) be strong, resilient and poised, traits that can result from challenges of training and competition.
In my opinion it is essential for a coach to instill in his/her athletes that you are not only training for your sport you are training for your life.
Check out these books for interesting readings on the topic:
“Reinventing the body; Ressurecting the Soul”, by Deepak Chopra
“Shop Class as Soulcraft”, by Matthew Crawford
Stay believing,
e: pathans@goibelieve.com
Pete is a strength and conditioning coach at West Point Military Academy and director for Athletics programs for iB-LIEVE.
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