I come from a swimming family. At 5am my brothers and I would drag ourselves out of bed to go follow a black line at the bottom of a pool. My brothers were very successful surf swimmers and I was an OK pool swimmer, enough to win the blue ribbon at school carnivals.

A couple of years ago I got back into swimming for fitness and have found it to be good for clearing my head from the daily stresses of life.  I started slowly, as you do, and built up my stamina to the point where I am now doing 4 or 5 sessions a week of 2kms.  I’ve been at this level for the past 6 moths.

I’ve also taken up ocean swimming, starting with the 1km races, as far as 2.4km and from one beach out around the headland to another.  I’ve done OK too! I’ve finished top ten in my age category in every race I’ve competed in.  

There is one woman who always wins and her time is 3-4 minutes faster than mine over 2kms – that’s about a 10% difference! Explaining to someone my secret desire (not so secret now) to win one of these races, he asked me about my training regime.  At that point it became very obvious that whilst I could swim I had no idea about how to finesse my skills so I could swim faster. I needed a coach.

I realized that this is quite a common thing. I’ve met many people in life and business who have great skills in a particular area but have no idea or plan on how to achieve the best results they can.

Take content creation for instance. A lot of people can create content – even great content. But they don’t necessarily know how to focus that content to achieve maximum results. They need a content coach. Someone to keep the end result in mind, finesse the style and output and maximise the ROI. Just like any other communications discipline content should be about achieving results, its not just about building stamina.

Me? I got some tips from a swimming coach and now I incorporate sets of fast sprints into my training. Who would have thought in order to swim faster, I needed to train faster?