Fate has not yet seen fit to grant me a highly paid coaching position, and the good Lord did not create me with anything more than a mediocre talent for weightlifting. Therefore I am (for the moment at least) forced to pay the bills by other means. During the day, I work for a company that creates bespoke furniture for some of the world’s wealthiest and most discerning people. We specialize in creating interiors for clients who expect nothing less than perfection, who will not be told that something is impossible and who expect everything to be delivered post haste.

Needless to say, working in this environment can be testing for the even the most talented project managers, designers and cabinetmakers. Indeed, highly qualified people have come and gone, but I have noticed that the select few who ‘make the grade’ and anchor themselves in the company all have a similar set of characteristics - character traits that I believe are also present in great Weightlifters. Having identified these characteristics I have begun to give serious thought to how to develop them in the weightlifters I coach.

In my day job, we talk a lot about behaving with Integrity and how Integrity is the safeguard of our commercial reputation. The theory is that if we all behave with integrity, then our collective output will be suffused with it. Because we have each strived to do what we believe to be our best work, we can deliver our products and services knowing that we have nothing to hide and relax knowing that nothing will come back to haunt us. Often in business the reverse is true and individuals will behave in a way that they know lacks integrity in pursuit of short-term gain.

As coaches, the last thing we want is athletes who are only interested in the immediate return. Athletes like this are unlikely to have what it takes to make it through the hard grind and accept the pain and moments of defeat that come with our sport. Furthermore, if you’re an athlete, I’ll assume you don’t want to be the kind of person who is prepared to compromise your personal standards and values for an empty victory. It is my personal opinion that compromising personal integrity is all that is required to start down the road to doping and other kinds of cheating.

I proffer that behaving with integrity is about not doing anything you will need to hide from others. Pretty simple, right? And it starts with the little things: For me, as a coach, it means that I am always totally open about the numbers I’m hitting, which have never been huge, even if I think it will mean I will have to work twice as hard to prove myself as a coach because of it. To some of you reading this, that won’t sound like a big deal but you’d be surprised how many athletes and coaches I’ve caught exaggerating their numbers for the sake of their ego or reputation!

Since I make sure I’m honest about this small thing, I know I will be okay when it comes to bigger issues. I have found that colleagues who behave with integrity are generally pretty secure in themselves and therefore humble. Who doesn’t love a superstar sportsman or sportswoman who takes time to chat with fans and who acts with good grace in public, even in defeat? Humility is a ‘slippery fish’ of a character trait. A pastor friend of mine once said, “the trouble with being humble is that if you think you are, you ain’t!” People in the corporate world who are egotistical often labor under the false impression that they are simply so talented that they simply don’t require the assistance of others and that because of this they needn’t bother offering help to colleagues. And don’t we all take some pleasure from seeing these people fall when disaster strikes?

Our instinctual enjoyment of the pain an egotist suffers after a failure and our inevitable unwillingness to offer help when they are suffering the consequences of a self-made catastrophe is exactly why humility is valuable in athletes. As I’ve demonstrated in previous articles, weightlifting is essentially a team sport and every lifter will need the love and encouragement of their team when they fail. As I said, though, no one wants to help an egotist.

Being humble also means living with an understanding of our place in the world and being aware of our own miniscule ability to influence the randomness of daily life. If you are humble, you accept that things will change and you must adapt. Experience has taught me that no one changes his or her mind as quickly or as regularly as a billionaire. The initial design work we produce can be unrecognizable when compared with the final iterations for a fit-out. For us, nothing is set in stone and therefore if you can’t adapt, you can’t stay at our firm.

The ability to adapt to the new is critical for both coaches and athletes in many scenarios but never more so than in the heat of competition. There is a saying in the military, ‘the first casualty of battle is the battle plan” and so it is in Olympic weightlifting. Your weight category can be in doubt right up until you weigh in. Your initial attempt weights can become meaningless before the ink dries on the card. Confidence can be shattered with a missed first lift. If the athlete cannot quickly come to terms with the constantly changing parameters, then the likelihood is that performance will suffer. It’s about re-evaluating your goals and getting after them again with each change in circumstances.

It is my observation that being capable of thriving despite unfavorable changes is down to a high level of determination. Working for a company that works right on the cutting edge of design, I see the “impossible” happen everyday. Whatever your goal is, you must chase it down with maximum commitment in order to succeed. Determined athletes are my favorite to coach. When I first started lifting, I was always the first in the gym and the last to leave. I love to see people who refuse to give up when they’re first learning the lifts. I know these are the athletes who will be easy to work with. Lifting heavy weight is about making your body do something that it will be telling you it can’t. It’s about winning the internal mental battle. Determined people listen to what the internal voices say but refuse to give up.

In a world of luxury, no material is off limits. Where I work, we often joke that we are only a day away from being asked to source a unicorn horn to use as a door handle! If it’s rare and temperamental, then the chances are we have worked with it. All this means that you need to have a genuine hunger for knowledge to join our team.

In Olympic weightlifting, there seems to be two schools of thought. The first is that it is the coach’s job to understand things in deep technical detail and simply tell the athlete the adjustments they need to make. The second school of thought is a little more enlightened. It is my view that in order to give someone the best chance of long-term success you must not only give them the adjustments but also explain the rationale behind them.

This is how I coach. Although I want my athletes to start out doing exactly as I say, there will come a time when I want them to begin to think for themselves. When they hit a stumbling block, I want us to figure together how to get through it. I want them to be empowered to constantly review their own technique. If they are self policing then fewer bad habits will take root. And I believe that athletes should be well informed and have a questioning attitude so that they can assess the quality of the information they encounter everyday on the Internet. Finally, I want them to feel they can question my methods so that I have the feedback I need to improve the quality of my training.

Having figured out that I’d like my athletes to behave with integrity, be humble, adapt to change readily, have high levels of determination and have a hunger for knowledge, the question remains: How do I go about encouraging these attributes in my weightlifters? The answer is that the best way for anyone in leadership (whether it be in the corporate or the sports environment) to encourage these characteristics in others is to model them in their own behavior.

Now I’m not talking about trying to be the perfect human being. We should all beware becoming Gods with feet of clay. However, we can act out these behaviors in simple ways every time we coach, train and compete. Demonstrate your integrity by being totally honest when you don’t know the answer to a question. Show your hunger for knowledge by finding the information out quickly. Be humble when others compliment you on your achievements and demonstrate the level of determination you expect from others when you hit a brick wall in your own training. As internet gurus are always telling us through their memes, what you get back is a direct reflection of what you give out.