Create An Uncommon Transformation Program

What we can learn about book coaching from the UCLA women's basketball coach.

Photo by Danny Lines on Unsplash

A few days before the city of Los Angeles caught fire, there was an article in the Los Angeles Times about UCLA women’s basketball coach, Cori Close, who was a friend and disciple of John Wooden, one of the most legendary sports coaches of all time.

Close has just become the winningest women’s coach in UCLA history, but when she met Wooden and began to soak up his knowledge in weekly meetings, she was a 22 years old assistant coach who was working her first job (not yet at UCLA) and he was an 83-year-old who had won ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national championships.

The article caught my attention for many reasons — I’ve always been a big fan of Wooden’s philosophies and have his book, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and Off the Court, front and center on my bookshelf — but I kept coming back to these words from Cori Close:

“Coach Wooden talked about how the least of his concerns were a championship trophy and a banner,” she said. “Those were the byproducts of being a great teacher of life and lessons about things that will live on long after the ball goes flat.”

I kept thinking:

What if writing well is not really about the writing?

What if writing well is about the writer?

What if writing well is a byproduct of the writer learning lessons that transcend the work itself?

These ideas have been swirling around my mind for many years. I often say that a good book coach is as concerned with the writer as we are with the writing; this is the primary difference between a book coach and a developmental editor. But I hadn’t yet made the leap to the idea that writing well could actually be a byproduct of other lessons learned — and I kind of love the concept.

If this were true, a book coach would focus primarily on the writer’s transformation — on helping them become the kind of person who can write the kind of book they wish to write — rather than starting with the work.

So often when I am deep in a coaching process with someone, it feels like this is what I’m doing. It feels like our work has so little to do with the words on the page.

Towards the end of the Los Angeles Times piece, Cori Close explains the goal of her basketball program:

“We want to be an uncommon transformational program that teaches and equips young women for life beyond UCLA.”

In other words, playing good college basketball is not really about playing good basketball at all. This was Wooden’s great lesson.

I love the idea of using a book coaching business to create an uncommon transformational program for writers.

How would your book coaching change if this was the goal? Would you slow down? Spend less time making line edits? Encourage the writer to write pages that get thrown out? Offer more chances to reflect?

It’s exciting to think about.

The devastation of the fires just 80 miles south of my home makes anything but kindness and survival seem beside the point.

But who knows: maybe the transformational book coaching program you create will help someone tell their tale of survival.

Maybe it will help someone spin a dark dystopian tale that helps us all make sense of this.

Maybe it will help someone who understands the forces of wind and weather teach us what we need to know.

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