The Considerably Longer Version

What ultimately matters in coaching is emotional and intellectual skill and the nature of the coach’s intent, and not all skills will be reflected, or predicted, in a coach’s background.  However, because we know a coach’s background is nevertheless of interest to our clients, who want to know of their coach’s successes and failures, independence and conformity, intellectual influences, and even of their more direct experience with life events such as career transitions, this is the slightly longer version.

Note: there is one brief instance of PG-rated, non-corporate language, but it’s not mine. It’s my grandmother’s.  When I was nine, she predicted this would happen.

Portrait of the Coach as a Young Man
You Can Sail a Long Way in the Wrong Direction
     Engineering and Business – Why Not?
     Conflict:  Helping People, or the Achievement Treadmill?
     How to Avoid a True Love
More Law and Business
A Good Place to Be

Portrait of the Coach as a Young Man

Let’s just say I was a reader of books in a family of survivalists. The Powells of Western Colorado are like the Hatfields, but probably are better shots, and those who aren’t like the Hatfields are like the McCoys.  You remember how they got along, don't you?

I was born in Rangely, Colorado, oil and coal and cowboy country, to a German mother, Inge, who loved opera and travel (now a private chef with Gourmet du Jour), and a father, Cork, who was in Vietnam with the Green Beret at the time. I was still gazing at my toes when my mother and I moved to Germany, where I learned to speak the German that I later forgot and only badly relearned. After a few years there, my mother married an American GI who looked like Elvis to me and we left for the American South. A sister joined us when I was five. But the southern days ended as things do and we returned to Rangely, to the high desert, to tumbling Russian thistle and to rain-starved earth that, as Gramma Powell admitted of her two-day-old biscuits, was harder than the back of God’s head.

My grandfather, who in roundabout fashion had given me my last name, had died in the meantime, of emphysema. “The doctor told that man,” Gramma Powell would say to us, “‘Mister, you don’t stop smoking them goddamn cigarettes they’ll kill you.’ But that son of a bitch never could listen.” Like my grandfather, who’d played cowboys and Indians on horseback in the ruins of Mesa Verde, she was one of the first settlers of Western Colorado. She was a quarter Cherokee and a quarter gristle. She bore ten children and presided over dozens of in-laws and grandchildren. They worked on ranches and in the oilfield that pumped the town’s lifeblood, and they hunted every animal in every season. To them I was a distinctly alien life form. I had a vaguely formulated plan of sorts, and it involved being the first on either side of my family to go to a university.

I mostly grew up (ambiguity intended) in Rangely, raised by my mother. In Western Colorado there are six dialects in the language of men – hunting and fishing, four-wheeling and fighting, drinking and sports – and of those I spoke only sports. Late-blooming, small, lacking the killer instinct that comes from a sense of righteous entitlement, I nevertheless excelled at tailback, wrestling, hurdles.

There was a particular urgency to clearing hurdles. Early on, it seems to me now, there began the divergence between who I was and who I thought I should be.

I had a strong dislike of the sorts of boxes that people always want, presumably in order to save time, to put us in. As a pup I seemed to run right down the middle of every skills, aptitudes, or personality test ever invented (including the much-abused Myers-Briggs). During high school I worked and played three varsity sports; I had some all-conference honors, a school record in the hurdles, that sort of thing. I also read everything not nailed down and graduated first in my class, a fact that, given my small class size, is exciting to no more than 36 other people. I was Student Council President; the trivia team I captained was the best in the state and 9th in the nation. (These absurdly modest accomplishments are not meant as boasting.  I've got a point around the corner.)

I needed money for college.  My goal was to obtain a National Merit Scholarship, and to become the first graduate of Rangely High School to receive the Boettcher Scholarship, a four-year grant with broad criteria modeled after the Rhodes Scholarship. I reached both goals. Looking back, I see there was already a sort of auto-pilot in effect here, achievement for the sake of achievement, perhaps because I imagined, or hoped, that in that direction life lay.
 

You Can Sail a Long Way in the Wrong Direction

In high school I had been a decent athlete. I wasn’t afraid of public speaking. I could write well enough. I’d aced our modest math and physics programs. On each of the verbal and math sections of the college entrance exams I got exactly the same score. This was my problem, in a nutshell: I wasn’t obviously better at any one thing – which way to go? (For a partial list of what I am obviously bad at, click here).

     Engineering and Business – Why Not?

I went to college at the University of Colorado at Boulder for three reasons, if I recall correctly: (1) it had an aerospace engineering program, (2) my scholarship required that I attend an in-state school and I believed at the time I wouldn’t be able to pay for college at, say, an Ivy League institution, and (3) perhaps I was just a little fearful of the big unknowns represented by the elite schools.

I started out in aerospace engineering because as a boy I’d been fascinated by astronomy (and maybe I was confused about how rocket science could bring me back to that joy, but at least I was listening to my heart). I think I also equated engineering with more financial security than the liberal arts disciplines whose purpose was then, regrettably, so unclear to me.  With a relatively impoverished math background and no familiarity with studying, I failed my first calculus exam with the grand sort of failure of the overachiever.  I'd been advised not to take the weed-out calculus class because of my prior math, and I still have the drop slip I almost used, but instead, I began a regimen of sleeping from 2-6:45a.m. and studying the rest of the time. In the end, rocket science wasn’t, as they claim, rocket science. In spite of the rough start and my overachieving attempt to run track at a Big Eight university, my grades ended up being excellent.

There were more clues, in the search, in what I chose to do and be outside of class: the resident advisor role, the obligatory congressional internship, a coach of a high school girls track team, and a dedicated role as a campus lecturer against date and acquaintance rape.
 

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