Stay Connected/Get Connected

by Ryan Krzykowski

Two weeks ago I wrote a post called Coronavirus Really Stinks, when the sports world was in its initial stages of cancellations.  We knew there was much more to come, but we hadn’t really begun feeling the effects.  Here we are 14 days later, with pretty much everything shut down from a school and sports standpoint, and an enormous cloud of uncertainty hanging over us all.  I hear people in their 60s or 70s saying they’ve never experienced anything remotely like this, and have heard phrases like “in the abundance of caution” and “we’re all in this together” (which I used to wrap up my last post) more in the past two weeks than I have in the rest of my life.

At Community for Coaches, we certainly understand there are health and economic issues related to the pandemic that are more important than sports.  And yet, our calling is to serve coaches, women and men whose influence in the lives of our children is perhaps unparalleled.  We will do just that — serve these coaches, meeting needs as well as we possibly can.

When all this started and I began considering the current state of things, namely social distancing, my very first thoughts were that since the work we do is nearly always face to face, whether in groups or individually, our hands were fairly well tied and CFC’s impact in this time would be fairly minimal.  Within a couple days, my eyes began to be opened, realizing we can at least get coaches on the phone.  We can check on them, see how they are, pray for them and with them.  Eventually, prompted by solid advice from my team of co-workers, it became clear we can still meet with coaches.  We’ll do remote meeting on Zoom or Google Hangouts, keeping existing Coaching Life Groups together, and hopefully launching new ones as well.

It’s in the spirit of launching new Coaching Life Groups that the CFC team and I make this offer.  If you’d like to put together a book study for a group of coaches, no matter where you are or what you coach, we can help with that.  We have experience and resources to share with you.  Two solid recommendations for a book study (and these will come as no surprise if you’ve read much of anything on this site): InSideOut Coaching by Joe Ehrmann, an old classic, or Every Moment Matters by John O’Sullivan.  Either of these would be outstanding fodder for regular discussion.

One more idea — our CFC team uses a set of lessons called “Coaching With Purpose”, which are available on our site at the bottom of this page.  These lessons include selected passage from InSideOut Coaching, and we’d love to provide guidance or answer the questions of anyone who’d like to use them to build up coaches.

Bottom line — we were not created to be separate, but together.  CFC is here to help.  If you’re in a group, stay connected.  If you’re not in a group yet, consider getting one together.  If you need advice or assistance of any kind, contact us.  We love you and are here for you.

Let’s Coach With Purpose….

Ryan@communityforcoaches.org