Our Great Coach on this episode is English cricket coach Kevin Sharp.

Kevin Sharp is an English cricket coach and a former first-class cricketer.

He played 432 professional games and scored nearly ten thousand first-class runs.

After retirement, he became a batting coach at his former team Yorkshire where he helped to develop a number of players who have gone on to represent England including the current Test captain, Joe Root.

He was also the batting coach for the English Womens Team which won the World Cup in 1993.

In 2018 he was appointed as Head Coach of Worcestershire and that year they won T20 Championship.

Kevin is a coach with a deep passion for helping others overcome, in his words, the mental anguish and pain that he felt as a young batsmen. He talks about the pain of living with the thought of underachievement in his career, and how this has spurred him on to become the type of coach who can talk confidently on both physical and mental techniques. In fact, it was another great coach, Anthony McGrath, who introduced me to Kevin, and shared his own experience of using Kevin’s tools as a player and now as a coach himself.

He is spiritual and yet pragmatic, self-effacing, and yet assured enough to talk about the techniques he teaches and how they have helped people succeed at the most elite level.

They key highlights for me in this interview are

• How anxiety can be a good thing if it helps you focus your mind.
• The importance of finding a mentor or person that you can trust and talk to, to help you deal with the unexplored territory that might be holding you back.
• The self-talk diary that he now uses with players to help them exert control over their inner critic and build self-belief.
• And his love of developing junior talent, and the terrific story he shares about meeting and training the now England captain Joe Root for the first time.
• Kevin is the type of wise and calm mentor we all wish we could have in our life and I hope you get as much from this discussion as I did.

If you would like to send us any feedback or if you know a great coach, who has a unique story to share, then we would love to hear from you, please contact us at paul@thegreatcoachespodcast.com or contact us through our website thegreatcoachespodcast.com

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