This is Issue 2 of The Monthly Edge, my monthly newsletter. One email a month, the stuff I actually use. If you’d rather get it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe here. You can also read and share this issue on Substack.

Let me be honest with you this month, because I think you’ll recognise it.

May and June were the busiest I’ve been in eight years of doing this. Genuinely. Then July arrived and the diary went quiet.

That’s the bit nobody puts on LinkedIn. So let’s talk about it.

The peaks, the troughs, and the head that has to hold both

Over the last three months I’ve had a run of interviews, tenders and pitches. Roles I wanted. Work I’d have loved. And a fair few of them haven’t landed, or haven’t landed yet. So the busiest spell of my career has rolled straight into a quiet July and August, and my head has had opinions about that.

You know the ones. “Maybe you’re not good enough.” “Maybe the last eight years were luck.” “Maybe that’s the top and it’s downhill now.” That voice doesn’t knock politely. It just walks in.

Here’s what I’ve learned to do with it, and it’s the most useful thing I can give you this month. I don’t argue with the voice. I answer it with a practice.

I ground myself. Feet on the floor, back to who I actually am. I am loved. I am grounded. I am present. I am abundant. Say it and mean it, not as a fridge magnet, but as a correction. And then the gratitude check, which does the heavy lifting. Name what’s actually good right now, out loud, and the catastrophe in your head just quietly loses its grip. It can’t survive contact with the truth.

Because here’s the thing about peaks and troughs. The work goes up and down. It always has and it always will. The only thing you actually control is the mindset that sits underneath both. The peak isn’t proof you’ve made it. The trough isn’t proof you’re finished. They’re just weather. You are not the weather.

If you’re in a quiet patch yourself right now, wondering if you’ve lost it, you haven’t. You’re between things. That’s not the same as finished.

The two-hour afternoon

Last issue I told you about my four protected hours. The deep work, guarded like a meeting I can’t move. A few of you wrote back about it, which I loved.

Well, here’s the plot twist. Last week I sat down to my four hours and I was done by twelve. Not half done. Done. Everything that mattered, finished, in two.

And do you know what I felt? Not triumph. Anxiety.

That’s the ADHD in me. An empty afternoon and a head going “you should be doing something, you’re being lazy, get busy.” The old wiring that says your worth is measured in hours at the desk. I had to sit with it and go, no. The work is done. Done is done. Being busy for the sake of feeling busy is the exact disease I’m always banging on about.

So how did two hours swallow a four-hour day? AI. Properly used, not dabbled with.

I dictate my thinking out loud with Wispr Flow, messy and Northern and half-formed, and it captures the lot. Claude Code and Claude Cowork do the structuring, the drafting, the donkey work, while I keep the judgement. Bits I’d have paid a consultant for two years ago, I now do before lunch.

Rewind eight years, to when I started Sportivity. What I now knock out in two hours would have taken me the best part of a week. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s the actual gap. And a big thank you to Ruben Hassid, whose stuff on using AI properly genuinely changed how I work. If you’re still using AI like a vending machine, you’re leaving your afternoons on the table.

Last times

I was at a presentation day recently for the son of a good pal of mine, Ian Howard. We got talking, as you do, and we landed on something that’s stuck with me all week. Last times.

The thing about last times is you almost never know you’re in one.

The last time you played a competitive game. The last time you carried your kid to bed. The last time the whole family was under one roof with nowhere to be. You don’t get a warning. There’s no announcement. It just happens, and then one day you realise it already went, and you didn’t clock it.

I’m off on holiday in a couple of weeks, and I’ve insisted my eighteen-year-old, Sonny, comes with us. Because that window is closing. It might be the last time we all go away together as a family before life scatters us in different directions. I’m not going to spend it half-present, thumbing my phone, worrying about a tender.

That’s what all the grounding and the gratitude is actually for. Not to feel nice. To be there. To notice the thing while it’s still happening, instead of mourning it after. Look up. Some of what’s around you right now, you’re doing for one of the last times without knowing it.

Who owns a coach’s professionalism?

Now the sector bit, because there’s a big shift happening and I’m right in the middle of it.

In May, UK Sport and its partners launched the 2032 High Performance System Coaching Strategy. Five pillars, everyone rowing the same way, and the one I keep coming back to is Professional Recognition. The stated aim, in plain terms, is to make coaching a culturally recognised and properly respected profession across the UK.

Good. About time. But here’s where it gets interesting, and where I’m spending a lot of my days.

Right now, a lot of the organisations I’m working with are trying to shift coaching out of the national governing bodies and into community clubs and children’s activity providers, closer to where the kids actually are. I think that’s the right move. That’s the work. Whether it’s the qualification frameworks I’m building with providers like Transcend, the moderation I do for CIMSPA, the T Level design advice I’ve been giving colleges, or the strategy work with the Golf Foundation, the pattern is the same. Delivery is moving to the community.

But moving the delivery is the easy half. Here’s the bit people keep skating over.

If you take coaching away from the governing bodies, you cannot leave professional status behind with them. Somebody has to carry it. And in a community-club, activity-provider world, that somebody is the employer. The person who hires, deploys and is responsible for the coach. Professional recognition can’t just be a badge handed down from the top. It has to be driven, checked and expected by whoever’s actually responsible for that coach being in front of children.

Otherwise you get the worst of both worlds. All the freedom of community delivery, none of the accountability of a governing body. And the person who pays for that gap is a kid on a wet field on a Tuesday.

So the question I’d leave with anyone leading in this space. If you’re moving coaching closer to the community, who in your setup actually owns the professionalism of the people delivering it? If the honest answer is “nobody, really,” that’s not a small thing to fix. It’s the thing.

Before you go

That’s the month, then. The peaks and the troughs and the head that holds both. The afternoon that opened up and the anxiety that came with it. The last times you’re living through without noticing. And a sector trying to move coaching closer to kids without dropping the professionalism on the way.

One thread runs through all of it. Be here. Be grounded. Notice what’s actually good, and who’s actually good, while it’s in front of you.

If any of the coaching qualifications, professional status or quality assurance stuff is live for you right now, that’s squarely the work I do. This is exactly the kind of quality assurance and governance work I do day in, day out, and you can book a free chat and let’s talk it through.

Feet on the floor. You’re here. See you next month.

Andy