• What the Experts Say
• Videos for Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach
• Books for Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach
• Links for Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach
• What We Learned

What the Experts Say

Jon Emmett – Be Your Own Sailing Coach

You need to assess yourself and then spend your time training in the most efficient way. You can, after all, improve your sailing by going to the gym or reading from the comfort of your armchair.

Eric Twiname – Sail, Race and Win

If you are to do a good job of teaching yourself you should begin by understanding the role you must play in this game of self-teaching, since the job of coach is different from that of the sailor.

Videos for Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach

Jon Emmett literally wrote the book on becoming your own sailing coach, and all his videos are here. For example:

This is a useful (if slightly OTT) video. My key takeaways were:

• Make sure the information you consume, the sources you learn from, are all high quality
• Don’t multitask while learning – be focused
• Reflect on everything you learn – “What are the main takeaways?”, and “How can I use this information in my sailing?”
• Implement – decide how you can use what you are learning, then schedule to actually practice it – take some action
• Share the information – discuss it with other sailors, teach it to someone else
• Spend at least twice as much time reflecting and implementing as you did consuming the information. In sailing, you probably need to up that ration many times over.

https://youtu.be/AWCwY_4le7M

Books with information on Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach

Coach Yourself to Win – Jon Emmett

Sail, Race and Win – Eric Twiname (particularly the first chapter, but the whole book is superb on this area)

Be Your Own Sailing Coach – Jon Emmett

Helming to Win – Nick Craig

Start to Win – Eric Twiname

Websites and online articles for Becoming Your Own Sailing Coach

https://www.facebook.com/coachyourselftowin/

Ben Tan gives some useful tips on how to organise your training

This article covers self-coaching well

What We Learned…

Most of the material around this area suggests that you need to find a way to become your own coach if you want to improve significantly and quickly. The racer in you is both hyper-critical and hyper-conservative. He doesn’t want to make any mistakes, and he gets annoyed when they happen.

But a coach needs mistakes in order to improve performance (no mistakes = nothing to improve). Not such bad news for most of us – all those mistakes you make are brilliant for the coach side of you. An important step towards improving your sailing is actively coaching yourself. This may seem obvious, but very few sailors actually manage to do this at all, and only a small minority do it effectively.

How many of the following things do you currently do?:

1. Set long-, medium- and short-term goals for yourself
2. Analyse races after the event
3. Keep a track of measurable things (like fitness) to check progress
4. Sail regularly outside of racing specifically to practice and improve weak areas
5. Practise skills that you are weak at
6. Read books to help you understand the skills needed to sail and to race better

If you do all of these then you are already a pretty good self-coach. If not, then you need to start doing at least some of these to help your results improve.

A coach and a sailor have two different mindsets, and developing a coach’s mindset towards your sailing will help you to improve. A coach sees mistakes as opportunities to get better, a sailor sees them as infuriating blunders that cost places. A coach looks at a sailor objectively, a racer tends to be far more subjective, either looking at his or her skills through rose-tinted spectacles or being excessively hard on themselves, even in areas where they are actually performing well.

To be a good self-coach you need:

• To be a little bit organised with regards to your sailing
• To be more analytical of your sailing than most people are used to
• To be willing to practise things that you aren’t good at
• To sail outside of a racing environment (even for 15 minutes a week) in order to get good quality practice in
• To be able to prioritise

This website can help with all these things, and you’ll find it easier and more enjoyable to improve your results than you thought.

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• What the Experts Say
• Videos for Goal Setting
• Books for Goal Setting
• Links for Goal Setting
• What We Learned

What the Experts Say

The Sailing Experts:

Paul Goodison – Laser Handbook
“I believe in general that people make their goal setting too complicated and impractical to use and update regularly”

Eric Twiname – Sail, Race and Win
“anyone can use these ideas on their own sailing to produce the maximum amount of improvement for a given amount of time and effort”

Ben Tan – The Complete Introduction to Laser Racing
Goal setting is like creating a clear and detailed map of the race course…If you do not know where the top and gybe marks are, how will you know you are on the right course!

Beggs, Derbyshire & Whitmore – Mental and Physical Fitness for Sailing
“the long job of turning the dream into reality can be helped immeasurably by understanding about goals and learning how to set them for yourself”

Jon Emmett – Be Your Own Sailing Coach
“There is a lot of research to show that most successful people use goal setting”

Merricks and Walker – High Performance Racing
“Goal setting is the foundation upon which all our sailing campaigns are based”

The Non-Sailing Experts:

Dennis Waitley – (as quoted in Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog)
“Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving.”

Seneca
“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind”

Franklin Roosevelt
“To reach a port, we must sail – Sail, not tie at anchor – sail, not drift.”

Videos for Goal Setting

There’s not too many videos (at least that we could find) about goal setting for sailors, so here are a couple of videos about the topic from hugely successful people, albeit in different sports.

The whole of this interview is well worth a watch – Dave Brailsford is a fascinating man and he covers a lot of interesting ground on winning in this video. For this topic, though, the most useful stuff is at 27 minutes 30 seconds and on, and he give some good detail about how he approaches goal setting, and uses it to achieve amazing things:

Books with information on Goal Setting for Sailing

The following books have excellent sections on Goal Setting for Sailing:

The relevant page references:

Mental & Physical Fitness for Sailing – Alan Beggs, John Derbyshire & John Whitmore, page 6
Laser Handbook – Paul Goodison, page 130
Be Your Own Sailing Coach – Jon Emmett, page 2
Sail, Race and Win – Eric Twiname, page 12
Complete Introduction to Laser Racing – Ben Tan et al, page 227
High Performance Racing – John Merricks and Ian Walker

Websites and links for Goal Setting for Sailing

The following websites are useful for helping with Goal Setting

A good article on goal setting for sailing

This article talks about the importance of having short- and long-term goals

An interesting piece on the importance of setting the right goals

This post on sports psychology and sailing has some thoughts on goal-setting

This article on planning practice has a good paragraph on the importance of setting the right type of goals

This is a piece on boat-building, but it has some stuff on goal-setting and managing goals that can be useful

This page is promoting a piece of software to help with managing your goals (www.goalscape.com), but it has some interesting stuff in it…

…and this is a site to which you have to pay a subscription to get the articles, which has a few sailing specific, goal-setting pieces.

[Old links:

Michael Blackburn writes a good article about Goal Setting here]

What We Learned…

This article aims to give you an overview of the goalsetting process, and to give you access to all the background information relevant to setting goals for sailing. If you don’t want to read the background material then there are three things that you need to do in this area that are pretty well essential to improving your sailing:

1. Set a Dream Goal
2. Set an Outcome Goal
3. Set some Process Goals
4. Commit to analysing your progress and updating your goals

That’s it – that’s all you need to do. The remaining information is only for those who want to do more in depth goal-setting, want to understand the process a little better or need help going through the goal-setting process.

An Overview of Goalsetting for Sailing

Most modern thinking these days says that goal setting is absolutely crucial for developing your dinghy sailing, and will be a big factor in determining how much you improve and how quickly. There is now a fair amount of material available to help you with your goalsetting, and there are a number of areas to consider when setting goals to improve your sailing performance. However, it is important not to get bogged down in this area – goal setting can be fun and needn’t be a time-consuming task.

We have a number of tools that will help you set all the different types of goals that will ultimately help you succeed.

The following things are important for goalsetting:

1. Setting a Dream Goal (Long-Term)
2. Setting Outcome Goals (Medium-Term)
3. Setting Performance Goals (Short- to Medium-Term)
4. Setting Process Goals (Short-Term)
5. Always setting SMART goals
6. Understanding what your weaknesses are
7. Figuring out what things will block your progress and working out how to deal with this
8. Analysing your progress and updating goals

Each type of goal relates to the others:

• The Dream Goal is important as it helps define the direction of your training, and will help you to prioritise the areas that need improvement.
• Outcome Goals are an essential link to the Dream Goal, as they help to breakdown the necessary steps to get from where you are to where you want to be.
• Performance Goals are measurable activities to help you analyse progress of individual activities that make up good performance.
• Process Goals are the nitty-gritty, the individual nuts and bolts that, when perfected, make up the perfect performance.

It is worth being aware that as you go down the above list, from Dream Goal to Process Goal, you gradually get more control of the outcome. The higher up on the list, the more you are at the mercy of things that are outside your control (the performance of others, etc.). Click through the links to get more information on each of these Goals.

Remember always that setting goals is a tool designed to help you improve your sailing. If they are becoming a hindrance (constant disappointment, obsessing about the goal rather than the process towards the goal, etc.) then something is wrong with the goal-setting process. Revisit the process and set yourself new goals based on the principles outlined in the What Makes a Good Goal section.

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Reading about a culture that is alien to me is fascinating. Interestingly, in her bibliography Lijia Xu lists 15 books, and 13 of them are about sailing or sport performance. One of the remaining two is Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. If you haven’t already read it, I strongly recommend you do so (not least because it frequently turns up on “Top 100 books” lists). It is an utterly brilliant and hugely effecting insight into China, and a book that lives long in the memory.

Of course, Lijia Xu’s  book doesn’t provide the same level of insight as Wild Swans. This is not a criticism, for few could write a book with the scope and penetration that Jung Chang achieves. (And anyway, it is not Lijia Xu’s intention to write a sweeping view of Chinese culture over the twentieth century – she’s writing a sailing autobiography). But, for us sailors, it does shine a light on how sport in China works, and how the system both helps and hinders their athletes as they work towards sporting excellence. It makes one wonder how Lijia Xu would have fared had she been brought up in a different environment.

You sense, throughout the book, that Lijia Xu (or Lily, as she often calls herself) is torn between a great love of her country and real disappointment in it too. She is proud to have represented China, and works hard to develop sailing there, but she also seems to wish for more for the Chinese people. Having travelled a lot and experienced the world, she really appears to carry two different emotions about her country at the same time, and she seems to feel both grateful that her childhood enabled her to become an Olympic champion, whilst also feeling a strong regret at what was lost because of this very path.

Of course she’d probably still have been hugely successful no matter where she grew up. The fact is that she won the gold medal in part because of the system (she was, after all, a full time sailor from the age of 10), but also in part despite the system. She showed great independence of thought and huge initiative – she learnt English so that she could read sailing books produced in the Western world, and so she could speak to and learn from sailors from outside of China. Her work ethic and discipline is extraordinary, and whilst it is easy to attribute this to her Chinese background and the Chinese system, the fact of the matter is that many other sailors had the same background and were part of the same system as her and they didn’t win an Olympic gold medal.

Lijia Xu did.

It is tempting to focus on the obstacles that Lily overcame to achieve her success – separation from her family and friends at a young age, her limited hearing and sight, her injuries, her difficult relationships with the Chinese hierarchy. But for me the real story is the triumph individuality, and how the desire to constantly develop, to constantly be better, can carry a person all the way to the very top.

This desire was the driving force that enabled Lily to discover Jon Emmet’s book Be Your Own Sailing Coach. She was proactive enough to actually seek Jon out (via Facebook), develop a relationship with him and then engage him as a coach. It is the kind of resourcefulness that separates the elite from the merely excellent.

Jon Emmett appears throughout the book, and his influence on Lily is obvious and acknowledged many times. I was fortunate enough to chat to Jon last year, and I can understand why he has been so important to Lily’s sailing success – he really is incredibly engaging, open, giving and positive. I am tempted to write that she is very lucky to have been able to work with him (and likewise him with her), but luck didn’t really play a role – the determination, work ethic and, of course, the desire to learn and improve, seem to have drawn them together. And together they conquered the world.

Me being me, I can’t help but be selfish and think about how the book can help me. And there is lots here that is very useful for sailors. The book is punctuated by ‘Interludes’ and ‘Positive Affirmations’, where Lijia Xu shares her thoughts on a range of topics, from nutrition to working relationships, from creating balance in one’s life to mental attitude.

These small sections are immensely valuable, and I have revisited them several times since reading the book (to the point that I have marked some of the pages to make them easy to find). Not all of them are useful to me personally (Elegance may be an Attitude for Lijia Xu, but for me it is a distant and unacheivable dream), but the majority provide real insight into a champion’s thought processes. I dearly wish that other biographies that I have read had sections like these – the life story is fascinating and compelling, but these sections provide a practical blueprint to develop a more personalised route to self improvement.

Golden Lily is a fascinating and unusual read. With biographies of dinghy sailors nearly as rare as an uncontroversial America’s Cup, it is refreshing and illuminating to be able to see into the mind of a champion sailor, especially one from China. And with Rio round the corner, it is a timely insight into one of the leading medal contenders for the Games.

Where to Buy Golden Lily

United States
Great Britain and Ireland

Lijia Xu’s Bibliography

• Close to the Wind – Ben Ainslie
• The Secret Olympian – Anon
• Higher Performance Sailing – Frank Bethwaite
• The Winning Mind: The Mental Management System – L. R. Bassham
• Sail Fitter / Sailing Fitness and Training – Michael Blackburn
• Chris Carmichael’s food For Fitness: Eat Right to Train Right – Chris Carmichael
• Wild Swans – Jung Chang
• Be Your Own Tactics Coach – Jon Emmett
• Coach Yourself to Win – Jon Emmett
• RYA Laser Handbook – Paul Goodison
• Wind Strategy – David Houghton and Fiona Campbell
• Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance – I. Mujika
• It’s All Chinese to Me: An Overview of Culture and Etiquette in China – P. Ostrowski and G. Penner
• Core Performance – M. Verstegen
• Advanced Racing Tactics – Dr Stuart Walker

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