John Tenns personal ‘brief history of coaching’
I first qualified as a trampoline coach at 18 years of age, to earn some cash whilst working at the Finsbury Leisure Center, back in the late seventies. I then got qualified in as many sports as possible.
Later on in the early 80’s, as Islington Council's Sports Development officer, I decided to raise a trampoline team to take part in the London Youth Games. At the time I coached, trained and quickly assembled a group of high level athletes. We trained in venues all across London, anywhere where we could get time to train. I then joined the club at the Sobell Sports center. The club quickly became one of the biggest and most successful clubs in Europe. We called ourselves ‘Airborne Trampoline Club’. On the back of our sweat shirts we had the club strap line ‘Peaceful Warriors’, inspired by a personal development book that changed the course of my life, ‘Way of the Peaceful Warrior’ by Dan Millman.
What I got from Dan's book, and another book called ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ by Tim Gallway, was that there was a more effective approach to coaching available. I then pioneered a coaching methodology that I called awareness training, coupled with asking questions versus telling. These days this style of coaching would be called non directive and transformative. Back in the day, my style of coaching was revolutionary, and was misunderstood by many of my peers. These days this methodology is very well respected and widely used.
I read as many books as I could that gave me an insight into making a difference with my athletes. Our results spoke for themselves, and the bottom line is the Airborne Club produced a string of British Champions, a World Champion, British Team Champions 8 years in a row, and on many occasions made up half of the British international team.
During this journey, I became the highest level of coach, wrote coaching articles for the British Trampoline Federation periodical, coached the British team, became a coaching course director, coaching the coaches, I was awarded coach of the year award two years running, and I was presented with the distinction of ‘Master coach’ by ‘British Gymnastics’.
I coached every evening and weekend in my spare time, and we travelled all over the UK, Europe and the world in our quest for performance excellence. We created a belief that we had something special. It was a time of imagination, creativity, hard work and a vision that there is another way, not just for the sport but also life itself. We were 24/7 in search for the edge, it was awesome.
I coached my wife who was in the British Women’s Olympic Weightlifting team. She became triple Women's Olympic Champion in the 1990's.
All this experience provided me with a perfect segway to my time at Landmark Education, I did the Landmark Forum in 1994 which made a very profound difference to my life, so much so that I joined Landmark's staff in 1997, and went on to lead the Landmark Forum and the Advance Course too. I led programmes and courses all over the world to around 70,000 people in 70 cities. The opportunity to make a difference was awesome. I completed working with Landmark Education in April 2008, inside a personal vision and commitment to be there for my son (who is 4) and family.
2008-09 I am a Senior Consultant with JMJ Associates, again making a difference by consulting, coaching and everything in between. I am privileged to be part of a journey that enables multi national organizations to impact their whole workforce, to embrace a radical alteration in their relationship to each other, and the key in the door for them is safety. The impact of the consulting work for me was far deeper and wider than anyone would expect; it is quick, deep and is given away in a way that the organisations are empowered to be self-sustaining. This business model really fitted with all of my personal values. My values being:
Empowering people to be the best that they can be
- Empowering people to be self sustaining (independent), so that they can do it themselves.
- People becoming connected in a way that their life is filled with: respect, honor, achievement, understanding, fun, happiness and love.
I am completing being a fulltime Senior Consultant with JMJ to make a difference to an even wider audience, whilst still contributing and working for JMJ as an external consultant.
So here I am today, at ‘New Realm’.