1. Growth and Setting Goals — Why We Need Targets
Nothing anyone gets better at happens without a target pulling them toward it. In the gym, at work, in a relationship, growth happens when we set a marker just beyond our current ability and organize our effort around closing that gap.
As a Certified CrossFit Level 3 trainer, I’d been coaching long enough to feel comfortable, and comfort is exactly where improvement quietly stalls. I needed a defined standard to aim for, something that would stretch me past where I currently was. The Level 4 gave me that. I joined the Knowledge Pro by Best Hour of Their Day to prep and spent a year and a half working on my coaching before I got an opportunity to sign up for the CF-L4 Coaches Prep Course. A vague ambition like, “I want to be a better coach,” turned into something concrete: Meet this standard in this evaluation.
2. Focus on the Process — What the CF-L4 Prep Course Taught Me
The CF-L4 coaches prep process is structured around repetition with feedback. You record a class, watch it back with your assigned mentor, rebuild the class flow based on that feedback, and do it again. Three times through. After that, you record a final class for evaluation, this time reviewed by a different set of evaluators.
I’d already been practicing a version of this process through the Knowledge Pro. What the prep course sharpened was something more specific: You need to be relentless with the process of improvement itself. I saw what that meant in my first review. As we watched my first class back, my mentor and I saw me try to fix one athlete’s position multiple times without much success, then shift my attention to other athletes in the room. The advice I got afterward was simple: be relentless in your coaching. That meant not walking away from an athlete until I’d given it my all. It also meant staying with their form throughout the workout, instead of turning my attention to writing scores on the whiteboard.
I started implementing both. In the next session, with those two issues addressed, new areas came into focus that I hadn’t even been able to see before.
One of the things I tell my athletes is not to fixate on the outcome of a single workout, but to remember that they’re on a longer arc than any single session suggests. By the end of the three mentor sessions, watching my coaching get taken apart and rebuilt each time, I finally felt ready to put a class forward for the final evaluation.
3. Failure — The Hurt, the Grief, and the Gap I Didn’t Expect
I was at the airport, waiting to board a domestic flight with my family when the email notification popped up. The result of my final evaluation: FAIL.
I let it sink in for a moment before turning to my wife, who was standing right next to me. I don’t think I processed much of it in that moment beyond the word itself. That single word hurt badly. I’d expected to process it clinically, just as I tell my athletes to treat setbacks as data, not verdicts. But coaching is tied to my identity, and this didn’t land as feedback so much as a sudden hit of grief. First the shock, then the harder part underneath it: the gap between what I’d expected of myself walking in and what the results actually said.
Stages showed up over the next while that I recognize now but didn’t see coming at the time. A flash of “that wasn’t a fair read of what I did.” A stretch of replaying moments, wondering how I could’ve done that differently. A real dip in confidence, walking around wondering if I was actually as capable a coach as I’d believed I was, all while trying to enjoy a family trip I was supposed to be present for.
I’m used to managing other people’s setbacks, not sitting inside my own, so I didn’t rush past any of it.
4. Reframing the Result — Starting the Work of Turning It Around
The hurt has settled just enough now that I can turn the result into a diagnosis instead of sitting inside it as a judgment on my ability. I’m not on the other side of this yet; I’m at the beginning.
I’m not starting from guesswork, at least. The evaluators didn’t just hand me a fail. They named specific areas, and one that stood out was clarity in teaching and giving instructions. I don’t have to spend time figuring out what went wrong — that part is already done. What’s left is deciding how to address those areas for improvement.
I haven’t had to figure out the how alone, either. I shared the news with one of my mentors at the Knowledge Pro, along with fellow coaches like Kaustubh Tambhale and Jens Konrad, and each of them offered to be a sounding board through the process. A support structure like that helps keep the task at hand objective, without letting it collapse into “I’m not good enough.”
From here, the plan is the same loop that got me this far: coach, review, adjust, aimed squarely at teaching clarity and the other areas the evaluators named. I get to treat the upcoming retry window as a focused training block rather than a vague deadline hanging over my head.
Closing Thought
This isn’t the first time I’ve followed this cycle, and I don’t expect it to be the last. Going through the Level 4 process is just the latest place it’s shown up. As a coach, I can’t teach growth mindset once and be done with it. I have to keep choosing to practice it myself and lead by example every time this gap between what I expected and what I got shows up again. I haven’t closed this particular loop yet, and I’ve got my work cut out for me as I prepare for a reattempt.
