I’ve never really enjoyed exercising. Even though I’m generally quite disciplined and fully understand the benefits of staying fit, sport has always felt like an effort I struggled to integrate naturally into my daily life. Because the long-term outcome mattered to me, in 2016 I started working with Ginés as my personal trainer. I know I’ll never be a great athlete, but since then I’ve achieved something much more useful for me: maintaining a routine adapted to my needs and getting the benefits I was looking for.
I recently came across a video from 2021 of me doing pull-ups. In those few seconds I’m clearly struggling and tired. My body is telling me I’ve had enough and, from where I am — literally hanging from the bar — my view of the situation is pretty simple: this is it, enough of this torture. But Ginés sees it differently. He knows me, he has watched me train, he knows when I genuinely have nothing left and when I’m the one who has decided I have nothing left. And he has something I don’t have in that moment: another perspective. Just as I’m about to give up, he says: “Come on, you’ve got two more.” After nearly 1,000 training sessions, many of them at 7 a.m., we’ve built the kind of trust that means that if he tells me two more are possible, they probably are, even when my mind is telling me otherwise. And they are.
Original training video, 2021.
Now, in 2026, I can see a strong parallel with what can happen in a coaching process. Not because a coach is there to tell you what to do, or simply to keep pushing you further for the sake of it, but because when we are caught up in a problem, a decision or a difficult professional moment, our field of vision tends to narrow. We see the fatigue, the risk, the times we have tried and failed, the doubts, the fear… and we stop seeing some of the possibilities. That is when someone can appear who knows you, whom you trust, and who is looking at the situation from somewhere else. Not to tell you that you can do anything, but perhaps to help you discover that you may be capable of something you had already ruled out.
Sometimes that means having a difficult conversation, organising your thoughts, making a decision you have been postponing for months, considering a perspective you had not seen before, identifying a belief that may be holding you back, or simply seeing a next step that you could not see from where you were standing. In the same way that one isolated training session does not create real change, coaching is also a process: over a number of months, change starts to happen through involvement, commitment, consistency, vulnerability and a willingness to look at things we may have been avoiding for some time. It also means being prepared to question some of our own beliefs and judgements, which is not always comfortable.
We invest quite naturally in a language teacher, a personal trainer, a nutritionist or a master’s degree when we want to progress in a specific area. And yet we often hesitate more when it comes to investing in broadening our perspective when what is at stake is our professional career. I went through two coaching processes myself, in 2011 and 2015, and both helped me gain clarity and make important decisions at different moments in my career.
Who has been that person for you — the one who saw “two more” when you had already decided you couldn’t? And if you are currently at one of those professional moments where you feel you are going round in circles, perhaps what you need is not someone to tell you what to do, but a conversation that helps you see something you are not seeing today. If that resonates, let’s talk.
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