The Role of Coaching in Reaching Mastery of Your Craft

0:07 The problem is with the word. There's no other problem. It's the problem with the word of coaching. Everyone requires prompts from the outside environment to be able to discover the mastery that lies within. So it is both fair to say that whatever mastery is, it lies in you. And it is also fair to say that it is not going to manifest itself fully without prompts from the outside environment. You can do a simple thought experiment to prove this. Say you were born on a remote island and abandoned there.

0:55 You have never encountered another living being. Maybe except animals and trees. Okay, cool. Maybe you were born with the leadership DNA i.e. you are going to be the world's greatest leader. All right, cool. Now you left there for 40 years. Tell me is that DNA going to develop to its fullest extent? Yes or no? Then the answer is no. Right? Say you were born with the basketball or cricket DNA that you would literally be the greatest cricketer or basketball player ever.

1:30 Okay, tell me if you were left on this island, are you going to develop into the greatest basketball player on the planet? 110% no. Let's assume you get all the nutrition and everything, right? So hopefully so far it is fairly logical. again does not require any kind of faith being put in me and in any authority I may or may not have. So if that is the case that in order to express to the fullest extent whatever mastery that we have been designed for like worldly pursuits.

2:13 Now the question is okay so where do those prompts come from? So again, we've established very logically that in order to express the complete extent of our mastery, there need to be some external prompts. This is not to say that there aren't internal prompts. There are also internal prompts. What I'm saying is external prompts are a necessary condition. So now to the extent that external prompts are a necessary condition, where do they come from? Well, they take two forms, right? There is explicit external prompts and implicit ones. So what are implicit ones? Let's tackle that first.

2:49 Well, it's all the reading you do and all the research and discovery you do, all the things that the great masters of the world have written in the past in whatever your domain is, those are nothing but training data and prompts for us. So that doesn't require active participation by another human being. Now if one wants to accelerate this journey and maybe you do, maybe you don't, doesn't matter. One challenge with the implicit prompts is that you have to go out and discover them and then you have to go out and make meaning out of them and you have to go out and do trial and error to figure out which prompts are more correct than other prompts etc etc and obviously it can be again logically concluded that this is an inefficient process.

3:42 So that's where the external prompts come in which is external explicit prompts now can perhaps accelerate that process by just providing pointers to you. It's not giving you the destination cuz giving the destination doesn't matter anyway because if I describe the destination of what like world class product sense looks like cool you'll find it impressive but that doesn't mean that you can do it right the only way you can do it is you have to train your own LLM on it you have to take that journey yourself I can show you what it looks like but me showing you is only proof and inspiration it is not content in that sense So that is where this coach but again the right coach these are very rare coaches if there are 100 coaches the kind of coach I'm talking about is not one of those 100 you take the top 1,000 coaches in the world there's probably one that qualifies in that domain whatever that domain is the right coach understands that his job or her job is to provide those points ers and the right coach also understands very quickly and very deeply what your situation is, who you are, what you are about, what your superpowers are, what your abilities are. The right coach gets it very quickly and then the right coach merely prompts you to get there faster.

5:25 That's all. But the right coach prompts in a way that nobody else will. So that's why I say you could spend a lifetime otherwise and not be prompted in the manner that the right coach would. So now if we get to the technicalities of like if someone says whether it's Dr. Capil Gupta or somebody else says like well you know coaching is useless. Well, we have to use a word. So, we use the word coaching. You could substitute master. You could substitute teacher.

6:00 You could substitute student. You could substitute disciple for the recipient side of things. Like these are just words, right? So, I wouldn't pay as much attention to the words or to the specific choice of a word cuz you have to choose some word. I would pay more attention to this observation of what truly works and what doesn't. So when we look at the observation of what truly works and what doesn't, I would say that what you probably heard and whatever Dr.

6:35 Kapil Gupta said it's not a huge departure from some of the things that we've talked about and that's not a surprise too because I myself have been influenced by Dr. Dr. Kapil Gupta's words like personally right the only reason I began to get influenced by his words again they acted as pointers for me me to pursue but the only reason that that even happened is because I had independently concluded some things concluded meaning final conclusion not one of those convictions or strong opinions we held like no I had independently concluded certain things which I found at some point that Dr.

7:14 Kabal Gupta had figured out like decades ago. So it's like wait this is very interesting. This is a very unique rare conclusion that I only reached through my own life experience. He's written about it 10 years ago or 5 years ago whatever the case might be. Maybe this is worth pursuing further cuz maybe I can accelerate my own journey and find more pointers. So that's kind of how this all comes together. There is no contradiction here in my view. But yes, the specific use of words can make things confusing. So there is a lesson there of yes, the word is important. The label is important. You have to use words. But don't get wedded too much to the word itself.

8:00 Try to understand like Dr. Gupta would say the truth that lies beneath.