The second serve drops into the bottom of the net, and the player doesn't look at the net. She looks up at the balcony.
Callum has coached her for eight weeks on one routine: a long breath out, eyes on one spot in the service box, a slow count of two, then go. In practice it has held every time. At a tournament in Abu Dhabi last month it didn't. Four double faults in the deciding set, and a loss she still won't talk about.
This was meant to be an easy practice set at their padel club in Dubai. Then the club's head coach, who picks the pairs for next month's event, came out onto the balcony with a coffee and sat down. Callum watched her right wrist stiffen and the count speed up. First serve long. Second serve into the net.
Later the same day, a regional sales director Callum also coaches forwards him a screenshot. The quarter closed at 112% of target. Under it, one line: "Then why do Monday calls still make me feel sick?"
Two performers in different arenas, and Callum suspects they need the same conversation. (Callum and both clients are composites.)
What is high performance coaching?
High performance coaching helps people who already perform well perform more consistently, especially when the stakes rise. With athletes and leaders it usually works on clear goals, preparation, routines, focus, regular review and recovery. It's practical and measurable. When the drop comes from who the performer believes they are, it needs another layer.
That second layer is the subject of this guide, and it's where a coach's own training is tested hardest.
If coaching performers is where you want your practice to go, you can look at that with Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, on a free Zoom that runs twenty to forty minutes, along with the route through our training that would get you there. Pick a slot on our apply page. Or read on.
How is performance coaching different from transformational work?
Performance coaching works on what the performer does. Transformational work looks at who is doing it.
Most of what Callum and his padel player built is performance coaching, and it's good work. A routine that steadies the serve. Process goals for each set rather than a result for the match. A review after every tournament: what worked, what didn't, what to train this week. For the sales director, the same tools in another arena: a plan for the quarter, a rhythm for the week, preparation for the calls that matter. When the gap is skill, preparation or strategy, this is the right help, and often all that's needed.
Transformational work asks a different question. Not "what will you do at five-all?" but "who do you become at five-all, and why?" It looks at the identity a performer carries into the arena, and at the old material that makes certain moments feel far bigger than they are. Our guide to what transformational coaching is sets that layer out in full, and our map of types of leadership coaching places performance coaching among the others.
Performance work doesn't stop mattering when identity work begins. The serve still needs drilling and the quarter still needs a plan. What changes is how much the drilling has to fight against.
How can you tell when performance is the presenting issue but identity is the real one?
Watch for four signs. None proves anything alone. Together, they suggest the result is carrying more than a result should.
- The skill holds in private and breaks in public. The serve works when nobody's watching and fails when the person who picks the pairs sits down. In our experience, a gap in skill tends to show wherever the performer plays. This one tends to appear on cue.
- Result language turns into identity language. "I double-faulted" becomes "I'm a choker". "We missed the number" becomes "I'm not cut out for this". Listen for the moment a verb about doing becomes a verb about being.
- Winning brings relief, not satisfaction. The sales director's 112% didn't feel like a good quarter. It felt like a narrow escape. When a win only lowers the dread until the next one, the performer is defending something, not building it.
- An off-season feels like disappearing. An injury, a slow month, a week of leave. If the performer feels smaller every day they aren't producing, their sense of worth is on loan to their output.
When two or more of these show up, in our experience, more technique tends to produce a better-prepared version of the same collapse. The work has to move to the performer.
Why does a better routine stop working under pressure?
Because the routine lives in her arm, and what interferes with it dates from a season years ago.
Weeks later, the player told Callum about her first club, in Valencia. Every junior had a shelf in the clubhouse for trophies. After she lost the under-14 final, hers stayed bare for a whole season, and she walked past it on every training night.
That season left her a rule she'd never say out loud, "if I don't win, there's nothing of me to show", and it left her forearm a grip it reaches for whenever someone who decides things is watching.
Callum's routine trains the arm, and it's good training. The grip isn't a training problem, though. A season put it there. Our training aims at the seasons behind a grip like hers, and at releasing what they leave in the body, so that a routine has a free arm to work with.
Callum had a reaction of his own on that court. When the head coach sat down, Callum's jaw set, because her result had quietly become his: his standing at the club, his private proof that he's good at this. A coach whose worth rides on a client's scoreline can end up pushing for the technical fix, because the fix settles the coach. We've written about what that does to coaching presence.
Our cohorts work to one sentence, and it decides who can sit beside a performer at five-all: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. A coach's need for the client to win is found and worked on in the coach, under supervision, before it can steer anyone's session.
Whose result did you feel in your own body this month, a client's or yours? Keep the answer close when you pick a training. Sara's free call exists for that decision, where and whether to train with us. Arrange a call with Sara.
How do you find out what losing means to a performer?
Run the Monday-after test in your next session. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it works as well for a padel player as for a sales director.
- Name the next event that matters. A tournament, a board meeting, a quarterly review. Get the date.
- Ask for the Monday after a win. "Walk me through that morning. What do you say to yourself in the shower?" Write their words down exactly.
- Ask for the Monday after a loss. Same questions, same detail. Write those words down too.
- Compare the two sets of verbs. If both mornings are about what they'll do ("I'll fix my second serve"), you're probably on the performance layer. If one morning is about who they are ("I'm finished", "they'll all see it now"), you've reached the identity layer.
- Ask whose voice the losing Monday sounds like. Don't push. Let an answer arrive, or not.
- Check your own Monday. Which of their two mornings would you rather hear about, and why? If you badly prefer the win, part of your coaching is riding on their result.
- Agree the layer for the next four sessions, together. Performance work, identity work, or both, said out loud.
Some pressure isn't a coaching matter. If a performer describes panic that won't settle, changes in eating or sleep, or low mood that lasts, encourage them to see a doctor or a qualified mental health professional, and to involve the team's medical staff where there is one. If they're already seeing someone, your sessions sit beside that care and never stand in for it.
What would you need from a training to coach people whose results are public?
Three things, and RSCI is built to give each of them.
- Practice that someone watches. Our training page lists supervised practice in both programmes, and "Advanced supervised practice" in RS Method Complete.
- Your own scoreboard dealt with first. The training page lists a "Personal inner-work component" for RS Method Coach, and says plainly that "Throughout the training you experience the methodology personally."
- An ICF route, if the organisations and performers you serve look for one. With RS Method Coach comes ICF Level 1 education, toward the ACC. With RS Method Complete comes ICF Level 2 education, with a route to the ACC first and, once your coaching hours allow, the PCC.
RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 with ICF education included, and it's mostly online and self-paced, with live training days. RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 with ICF education included, and The 5-Day RS Method Experience in Dubai is part of it. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
On a court or in a boardroom, the coach's part doesn't change. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Much of this guide is about the sentences performers say to themselves. Mais Mohammed said this one out loud, on camera, about her own experience of the work: "The best decision I took for myself in my entire life." It's Mais's sentence about Mais's life, and it isn't one to put in a client's mouth.
On our life coach training page, the section headed "Learn it. Experience it. Practise it. Use it." walks through the training step by step, and the prices sit beside each programme.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. You've just read about a coach whose jaw set at five-all. If you noticed your own, tonight's a good night to read our life coach training page and see what the training would ask of you first.