How Coaching Others Levelled Up My Driving ⏱️
Over the last few years, I have been spending more time behind the scenes, coaching and developing drivers privately and with various race teams. Although I had been driver coaching for many years prior, starting in 2022, I made a bigger shift to holding the stopwatch.
Before I began coaching more heavily, I often found myself knowing what I wanted to execute on track but not thinking critically about the steps I’d need to take to achieve my desired results, leading to inconsistent on-track performance. However, as a coach, I’m often forced to find not only the areas of growth for drivers but also the possible solutions associated with a given problem.
As the number of drivers I worked with grew, I more frequently noticed that certain issues stemmed from the same causes, and thus, the solution became more consistent and clear to me. As I continued to get back in the kart for my events, old weaknesses of mine became less of an obstacle, as I had seen and talked through the solutions to these problems hundreds of times before.
Suddenly I found myself executing on a higher level cognitively on and off track and the equation for speed became a simple task and my results on track began to stabilize and improve. Now I find that both driving and coaching complement each other as keeping current in the go-kart allows me to easily identify current problems my drivers are facing and coaching allows me to think more critically and consistently while driving.
Phoenix, Arizona, with Ava Cabral ☀️
