What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from How to Take Smart Notes
Ray coached youth soccer and also mentored two younger coaches coming up through the club. He took notes after every practice and every mentoring conversation, filed neatly by date in a single long document. When the club asked him to write a development plan for one of the young coaches he mentored, capturing how her approach had evolved over eighteen months, Ray sat down expecting an easy summary. Instead he found a document with dozens of individual entries, each describing a single session, none of them pointing back to any other. He could sense that her feedback style had changed over time, but he couldn't prove it, quote it, or trace exactly when the shift happened, because nothing in his notes had ever been connected to anything else he'd written about her. He wrote a vaguer plan than the moment deserved, based on impression rather than evidence, and privately knew that eighteen months of careful notes had somehow produced nothing he could actually point to.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Write your own read of the session, not just what was said
Right after a session, write a sentence or two capturing what you noticed about this person's growth or struggle in your own words, rather than logging only what drills you ran or what was discussed. The agenda is easy to reconstruct later; your own read of the person in that moment is not.
Ray's notes were mostly session logs, drills run and topics covered, with almost no record of his own evolving impression of the person he was coaching.
After each session, write one sentence starting with "What I noticed about them today is" before logging anything else.
Link today's observation to an earlier one about the same person
An observation about a coach's feedback style becomes meaningful only once it's connected to an earlier observation about the same trait, so you can see whether it's changing and in what direction.
Ray's notes about the young coach were spread across eighteen months of a single chronological document, so the shift in her feedback style was buried in unrelated entries and never surfaced until someone asked him to describe it directly.
When you notice a trait in someone you mentor, search your past notes on them for the last time you noted something similar and link the two.
Let each person's real pattern emerge instead of assuming one
Don't decide in advance what someone's strengths or weaknesses are and then only take notes that confirm it. Let the pattern in your notes reveal itself over enough sessions before you name it.
Ray assumed early on that the young coach's main growth area was tactics, so his notes focused there for months and nearly missed her actual, more significant shift in communication style.
Every few months, reread a person's notes with no assumption in mind and ask what theme actually recurs, whether or not it matches your first impression.
Let the pattern across sessions become the development plan
A coach who links observations over time ends up, without extra work, holding the raw material for every assessment or development plan they'll ever write. The pattern that would otherwise require guesswork and memory is instead already visible in the notes, waiting to be named rather than invented under deadline.
Writing your own read of a session takes a minute right after it ends, while linking that observation to earlier ones takes a look back you're tempted to skip between busy sessions. Protect the immediate note every time, since your impression fades within a day, and build in a short weekly review to link notes across people, since growth only becomes visible once observations sit side by side.
Name one thing, honestly
Which person you coach or mentor has changed in a way you've sensed but never actually written down and traced across sessions?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Every few months, reread a person's notes with no assumption in mind and ask what theme actually recurs, whether or not it matches your first impression.