I am always on the look out for a new approach from coaches, something that lifts. In the past week, I have the rare scoop of reading two such articles, which deserve a wider audience.

Brain Pickings is run by Maria Popova. Celebrating seven years of writing, she write about the seven things she has learned in that period. Her observations are simple, yet amazingly accurate.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. As Popova observes, internet culture does not always allow us this luxury.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. This was an adage of my late father and has always paid off for me. Prestige is not something you can take with you, because it weighs so much.
3. Be generous. It is so easy for all of us to be caught up with our own timetable and needs. I find that when my mentoring clients begin to realize how dependent they are on other people and thus open up accordingly do they make progress.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Never a truer word. In religion, this is called a Sabbath. Even farmers let their fields lie fallow.
5. Sleep. If anybody thinks that they can function efficiently and effectively without continuous good sleep, they are wrong.
6. Believe who you are. Popova wrote:  “You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.”
7. Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time. Try to ignore the demands of the 21st century. For all what we see on the news and the rapid stories of start up fame, these make headlines because they are the exception to a rule that applies to 99.9% of us.

In vast contrast, Neil Burns is a former cricketer and now inspirational life coach. He takes on current players, who have enormous talents, but cannot seem to apply them on the pitch.

An excellent example is the England player, Monty Panesar. For all his considerable skills, Panesar began to do everything wrong, and this eventually caused problems in his personal life. He was then sacked by his previous team.

Burns talks about “strengthening strengths” and empowering clients to “develop a stronger sense of self”. …..The principal of mentoring, in Burns’ mind, is to provide a player with someone who is “100% in their corner” while also exploring “painful truths”. In particular he believes players can become stuck when they dwell too intensely on under-performing and when they judge themselves too harshly when things go wrong.

As Burns says: “Knowing yourself and knowing your own game is everything for an elite performer experiencing a downturn.” And this applies to all forms of life; in sport, in business, in the home.