why its time to enter your coaching era

Table of Contents

• Focus of the Week: Coaching Era

• Mindset of the Week: Self Reflect

• Life Skill: The Think Day

• Career Advice: Mr. Beasts Perspective on Hiring

• This is Cool: Big Week for Robots

FOCUS OF THE WEEK
The World Needs More Coaches

The people responsible for working directly with students at TKS have the title of directors. But in reality, they are coaches.

That’s where the lions share of the value comes from in the program. It’s the feedback loop that is created from the opportunity to get consistent, high quality coaching from someone who is invested in your success.

I would always tell students at the start of each program year that there was a clear correlation to what a student accomplished in the program, and how many one on ones they booked with their director.

Multiple curious students would message me on Slack after I said that, wanting to understand why that was.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but in most schools, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to have one on one coaching time with your teachers.

You can ask them questions in class, but that’s in front of everyone. A teachers working time at school is largely for teaching and prep. Same idea for students; when they’re at school, they’re in class.

The traditional education system isn’t designed to support a direct one on one coaching model, at scale.

And teachers aren’t currently trained to be coaches in the truest sense. Educators understand how to give feedback, but coaching goes far beyond that.

Azar gets it.

What he shared below makes a lot of sense.

Why do the top performers in any industry have coaches?

It’s a third eye, or another perspective, outside of your head that helps you see what you can’t, allowing you to progress more efficiently, and effectively to whatever goal you’re working towards.

The reason this can work at TKS is because it’s not school. They don’t have to play the game of credit hours, or follow rules that no longer makes sense.

As a director at TKS, only about ~10 hours of your week are spent “teaching” during the weekly session (x3 cohorts). The other time is available to help students level up.

In fact, that’s how you’re assessed. Directors are measured against what real world outcomes their students produced in those 10 months.

From all the things that a director has control over, the quality, and intensity of the coaching they deliver to their students is easily the biggest needle mover.

Maybe it’s not fair to compare TKS to school since they’re playing by different rules.

Let’s look at Alpha School then.

They’re a legit, accredited school in Texas. Students there receive the same diploma as everyone else. Students work through the same curriculum expectations, and take the same standardized tests as every other kid in Texas.

But they have a model that is all-in on coaching.

The school/model is actually really interesting. I’m going to write a longer post about what I’ve learned after interviewing one of their students, and going down a few rabbit holes.

Here’s a 1 min clip that speaks to a current students experience at Alpha.

The tl;dr (coles notes) is for their academics, Alpha uses mastery based apps that allow students to move at their own pace for the classes they’re taking.

Because of that, they only have to spend about 3 hours per day on school work, freeing up the second half of the day to work on the ‘masterpiece’ which is essentially project based learning on steroids.

Imagine a project of your choosing that you get to work on every day for half a day, throughout the course of your entire high school journey 🤯 

Rigid rules aside, this is possible everywhere.

Between Youtube and Large Language Models, we have more concentrated intelligence than we know what to do with.

We’ve been talking about the importance of shifting from sage on the stage, to guide on the side for decades now. We’re now in a place where that’s realistically possible.

The best content from the best minds, available on any device, at any time. That can free up our teacher time for individualized, personalized coaching - where the magic really happens.

Alpha school and TKS are models worth studying. They might not work as is for your school, but they can at least provide a data point as to what’s possible.

I understand that changing the education system is outside of your control. But as an educator, you do have autonomy over what happens in your classroom. I would challenge you to start small.

Think of one specific area this week where you can create the opportunity for coaching. Start there. And then let me know how it goes.

Can’t create the time to coach? Maybe these tools can help.

Here are three cool tools I found that leverage AI to help individuals receive personalized coaching in the context of career/life exploration.

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1️⃣ First up is InStage. I met them at the Cannexus conference back in January.

From what I remember/understand, they help with two primary use cases:

1 - Interview prep. Their AI would call the student and do a mock interview over the phone to help them practice and prepare the actual co-op interview and experience. Young people generally are terrible on the phone, so this makes a lot of sense.

2 - The second part is an ongoing journal/reflection of the co-op experience. At the end of each week, the AI calls the student to ask how things have been going.

Those calls gets transcribed, and shared with the co-op team so that everyone’s kept in the loop, and the human staff can provide some personalized coaching based on what they’re seeing.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what I remember.

They mostly work with post-secondary right now. I know they work with a few secondary schools, it just hasn’t been the focus.

And check out their website if you want to hear what a call is like from a student perspective.

Pretty cool, right?

I know their team, so let me know if you want an introduction to learn more.

2️⃣ Next up is career dreamer from Google.

This one’s new. I started hearing about it last week.

Unfortunately, it’s currently only available in the US.

Career Dreamer uses AI to find patterns and connect the dots between your unique experiences, educational background, skills and interests.

It helps you to quickly identify your unique skills and talents and how to talk about them, and connects you with careers that might be a good fit.

It’s super simple and straightforward. I could see this being a fun activity for students.

First, it asks you about a previous role you’ve had. I put Coach at TKS; that’s the only context I gave it. You can also put student as a role.

It then suggested some skills that I was likely to have developed in that role.

You can see in the screenshot below, that I could have filled it out a lot more, giving additional experiences, education, skills, and interests. But with the little context I gave it, step 1 was the AI crafting this career identity statement for me that I’m pretty happy with.

From there, it helps me to explore career paths based on those skills and experiences.

In the middle circle below, I can toggle the paths it shows me based on previous experiences, or skills, or both. The blue dots are connections it made to a database of related opportunities, and the green dots are AI suggestions.

Then you can click into one to learn more.

I clicked into Account Executive. That was my first real job after a failed startup.

It showcases a few pages of information.

• Sweet Spots (where some of my skills/interests align)

• Day in the Life (tasks and responsibilities)

• Areas for growth (what are my skills gaps)

• Upskilling resources (how I can take action to fill in those gaps)

The upskilling resource recommended to me was a free Grow with Google certificate. I imagine that is probably the case for most career paths you explore in this tool.

The last step is to jump into Gemini (Google’s version of ChatGPT) with some ready made prompts to help you fine tune that resume, cover letter, or continue exploring other job ideas based on what the tool has just learned about you.

This is another great example of how we can leverage these types of tools to augment our practice.

Instead of having to meet with each student individually to pull interests/skills out of them, and then manually brainstorm ideas of what careers those might relate to, AI can facilitate the majority of that process for us.

And then as a trained human professional, given the limited time you have with each student, that time could be spent reviewing their findings, and coaching them on how they can take the next step to make this real.

3️⃣ Meet, Mercor.

From what I understand, Mercor has figured out how to help match the right person, with the right role, using AI.

In theory, this sounds like a great experience for the candidate.

That’s not always the case.

Right now, it seems like a lot of the focus is on helping tech companies find top AI talent.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The reason I’m sharing this with you all is because of the free practice interviews they offer.

• InStage does interview prep over the phone.

• Mercor is doing it over video.

Mercor allows for you to complete “live” practice interviews. In that process your camera is on and so it theirs.

Except theirs is an AI avatar 🤖. But a really good one.

I tried a couple to see how it worked, and it works well. They listen and respond to what you just said, without much delay.

Most of these interviews will ask questions too advanced/specific for high school students, however, the Marketing filter should have a few that students would be able to answer some questions in, ie Social Media Campaigns, Content Marketing Ideas, Creative Marketing Strategies.

Or the Behavioural Interview on top left of the main Interviews page; their general interview.

The intention in sharing this isn’t so students do this thinking they’re applying for a job.

It’s interview practice.

They can self-reflect on the experience, and even record their screen if you want to watch after the fact at 2x speed to give feedback on. Like a coach would.

• Access Mercor’s practice interviews here.

MINDSET OF THE WEEK
Self Reflect

Before you read any further, stop.

Take 5 minutes before you get into your work for the day, be present, and sit with these questions.

If you don’t like the answers to any of those questions, take action. That’s the only way things are going to change.

LIFE SKILLS
The Think Day

If you liked those questions, I have a few more for you.

But you’ll need a full day for these ones.

The Think Day is a monthly ritual where you carve out a few hours to turn off your devices and let your brain roam free.

Pick an inspiring spot, grab a journal, and get ready to zoom out from the daily grind. No fancy tools needed, just you and your thoughts in a coffee shop or nature spot.

The magic happens when you tackle big questions like whether your daily habits are actually serving you, or if you're wasting time chasing field mice instead of hunting antelope.

Think of yourself as the main character in your life's movie - what would the audience be yelling at you to do right now?

The goal is to spot those small course corrections before they send you miles off target, just like a plane that's off by one degree.

This monthly check-in might just be the reality check you need to stay on track.

Key questions to ponder during your Think Day:

• If you repeated your current typical day for one hundred days, would your life be better or worse?

• If someone observed your actions for a week, what would they say your priorities are?

• If you were the main character in a movie of your life, what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now?

• Are you hunting antelope or chasing field mice?

• What are your strongest beliefs and what would it take to change your mind on them?

This text was italicized because it was written by AI. I asked Claude to summarize the text from Sahil’s full article about The Think Day.

CAREER ADVICE
How Mr. Beast Likes to Hire

Mr. Beast is the most popular Youtuber, runs a 9 figure ethically sourced chocolate brand, just launched a massive show on Amazon, all before his 27th birthday.

But that doesn’t mean you should blindly listen to everything he says about life or business. He’d probably be the first person to tell you that.

On a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO, Steven asked Jimmy (Mr. Beast) what character traits he looks for when hiring.

I’ve clipped 2 minutes of it below for you.

Mr. Beast = engagement.

Play this in your classroom for discussion. See if your students agree or disagree.

And if you want more Mr. Beast x Career Advice content, I covered his leaked memo all the way back in the first edition of Modern Life Skills in the This is Cool section at the bottom.

THIS IS COOL
Big Week for Robots

Clone, a Polish startup with just $7.1 million in funding, turned heads by releasing footage of their Protoclone robot in a dramatic demonstration.

The humanoid bot was shown suspended in mid-air, moving to a cinematic soundtrack - creepy but impressive for a company working with relatively modest resources.

Meanwhile, Figure dropped a video showcasing their new Helix Vision-Language-Action model in action.

Two Figure robots demonstrated non-verbal communication and object handoff capabilities, specifically with a bag of cheese. The company is reportedly seeking $1.5 billion at a staggering $38 billion valuation.

Their Helix AI system claims to understand speech, solve problems, and handle household items without special training - much like a human would.

Figure is aggressively expanding their AI team across training infrastructure, large-scale modeling, and reinforcement learning.

Key developments from both companies:

• Clone's Protoclone demonstrates advanced movement capabilities despite limited funding

• Figure's robots show unprecedented robot-to-robot interaction

• Figure's Helix AI system aims to handle any household object without specific training

• The robots communicate non-verbally, suggesting a departure from human-centric interfaces

• Figure is rapidly scaling their AI team across multiple specialized domains

This text was italicized because it was written by AI. I asked Claude to summarize the text from this article about Clone (#6) and this LinkedIn post about Figure.