What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Alchemist
Coach Ibrahim had a runner on his club team who kept insisting she wanted to specialize in the marathon, even though every metric said she was built for shorter races where she could plausibly reach a national level. He'd spent a full season nudging her back toward sprint distances, citing her times and stride. She kept showing up to distance sessions anyway, quietly, on her own, before official practice. Watching her run an unsanctioned twenty-mile route one Saturday, visibly happier than she ever looked at the track, he realized he'd been coaching the athlete he wanted her to be rather than paying attention to what she was telling him through her own choices. The question he couldn't shake afterward was how a mentor tells the difference between guiding someone toward their real potential and simply overriding a direction they'd already chosen.
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
Helping someone else find their own pull
Santiago's father does not choose Santiago's path for him, he recognizes it and lets him go, even while wishing for something different. A coach's version of this is resisting the pull to project their own preferred outcome onto someone else's genuine direction, especially when that direction diverges from what the data or convention would suggest.
Deferring entirely to a mentee's stated preference can mean withholding expertise they specifically came to you for.
Before your next session, ask your mentee one open question about what they actually want, before offering your own recommendation.
Reading what a mentee's choices are telling you
What the novel treats as omens, a mentor might treat as the behavior that reveals a mentee's real direction more honestly than their words do, the extra unofficial practice, the question repeated across sessions, the visible energy in one activity compared to another assigned one. These behavioral signals often carry more truth than a mentee's stated goals, shaped as those are by what they think a coach wants to hear.
Reading too much into isolated behavior can mean missing a mentee's genuine, stated need for structure and direction.
Notice one behavior your mentee repeats unprompted and ask directly what draws them to it.
Supporting persistence through a mentee's setbacks
Santiago's setbacks are his own to work through, and no one removes them on his behalf. A coach watching a mentee struggle through a loss, a rejection, or a plateau faces a similar test, distinguishing between support that helps someone persist and intervention that quietly does the persisting for them.
Stepping back during every setback can look like abandonment to a mentee who genuinely needs more active support right then.
After a mentee's setback, ask what they think the next step should be before offering your own answer.
What the mentoring relationship gives beyond the result
The novel's ending suggests Santiago's real gain was everything learned while pursuing the treasure, not the treasure itself. A coaching relationship that never produces the specific outcome originally targeted, the title, the placement, the record, often still builds real judgment, resilience, and self-trust in the mentee, value that outlasts any single season's result.
The clearest tension for coaches is between honoring a mentee's own direction and providing the concrete guidance toward measurable goals they are paying for or depending on. Holding both means treating expertise as one input to offer clearly, while leaving the final direction genuinely open to what the mentee, not the coach, actually wants to pursue.
Name one thing, honestly
- What has a mentee shown you through their unprompted behavior that contradicts what they've said out loud? - Where have you nudged someone toward your own preferred outcome instead of their evident one? - What has a mentoring relationship already given someone regardless of whether the original goal was reached?
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
After a mentee's setback, ask what they think the next step should be before offering your own answer.