Wednesday May 06, 2026

Keith Sharpe: It's never about you

Keith Sharpe is Head of Coaching and Leadership Development for the Great Britain Cycling Team, coach mentor for the Premier League, and someone who has spent over two decades supporting athletes and coaches across Olympic, Paralympic and professional sport, including time at Right to Dream in Ghana and Denmark, where he led their Character Development strategy. Outside of all of that, he volunteers as a Samaritans listener.

Three Key Messages

1. It's never about you Keith's game plan contribution lands in four words and it's one of the most important reframes any coach can make. The athletes you work with have dreams, goals and ambitions and your role is to support them in chasing those things down. That doesn't mean coaches can't have their own aspirations, but when you step into the coaching role, it needs to be about the person in front of you. Keith puts it simply: coaches are a contributor to what athletes want to achieve. Polishing talent, not producing it. A small but significant distinction.

2. Bring your normalness One of the most quietly powerful ideas in this conversation. Keith talks about what he calls the most me feeling: that moment when you are completely and utterly yourself. For him it's a Friday night, pizza on order, friends coming round, music on. The challenge he puts to coaches is to find that feeling and bring it into everything you do. Because consistency of character isn't just good for you, it's good for the people you coach. Athletes who don't know how their coach is going to turn up today carry an anxiety that gets in the way of performance. Being authentically, consistently yourself removes that.

3. Seek perspectives and really listen to them Keith's game-changing advice is rooted in something coaches ask of their athletes every single session: get comfortable being uncomfortable. His challenge is to regularly seek feedback from the people you coach. Not just once, not just when things go wrong, but as a normal, embedded part of your practice. Start simple. Ask what's going well. Ask what they'd like more of. And when the feedback feels prickly, get curious rather than defensive. As Keith says, if you can do that now, those conversations just become part of how you work together.

Other Things Worth Knowing

Hurry slowly A theme that runs quietly through the whole conversation and one Keith writes about brilliantly on LinkedIn. Patience isn't passive. It's trusting that consistent effort over time is the thing that creates real development. Too many coaches and athletes want to rush the process. Keith's reminder is a good one: a butterfly can't be a butterfly without first being a caterpillar.

You don't coach at people, you coach with people Keith's nightclub analogy is one of those ideas that once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. If you start dancing at someone in a nightclub, you're going to get some strange looks. Dance with them and everything changes. Coaching is a partnership. The coaches who get the most from their athletes are the ones who genuinely invest in that relationship, building community, creating belonging, and getting people to contribute.

Language matters A brilliant thread in the conversation around the words we choose as coaches. Keith is thoughtful about this: coaches who over-communicate create confusion, not clarity. And the language of producing athletes versus polishing talent isn't just semantics. It reflects a fundamentally different mindset about whose journey this actually is. Worth sitting with.