Insight Is Not the Learning You're Looking For
Thinking ≠ Being
When you download a software update for your phone or your computer, you expect the device to work differently than before you installed the update. But you wouldn’t say that your phone “learned” to do new things. The phone is the same before and after the update. What makes the difference is how you use the phone. Your actions determine if the update is even visible. You might keep using your phone the exact same way as before the update. Is the phone any better after the update if the update isn’t used?
Coaches regularly approach learning as though it is a process of downloading an update. They read coaching books, they watch coaching videos, they sit in coaching seminars. They ask questions, they take notes, they do all the things good students do. When they learn from books, videos, or seminars, they think they’re downloading coaching software updates that will make them different coaches afterwards. But downloading facts and drills isn’t the kind of learning coaches need most.
The problem I want to address isn’t that coaches are learning the wrong kinds of things from reading, watching, and listening. What strikes me most is that they’re doing the wrong kind of learning when they’re learning that way. The books, videos, and seminars provide information that fall into two categories of knowing, propositional and procedural1. Those categories, to me, are more informational than anything and having more information doesn’t make you a different coach. Knowing more facts and having more coaching recipes to follow doesn’t guarantee that those facts and recipes have any place in how you actually coach.
Propositional knowing (facts) and procedural knowing (recipes) are less helpful ways of knowing for coaches because they don’t encompass what it means to be a good coach. You can know lots of facts about coaching and not be a coach, much less a good coach. Knowing things doesn’t make you a coach. You can know lots of drills and games and not be a coach. Knowing things to do and steps to take also don’t make you a coach. To be a coach requires different kinds of knowing than these.
Being a coach means having perspectival knowledge, which means you know what it’s like to do coaching things. Specifically, you know what it’s like when you do coaching things. Being a coach means having participatory knowledge, which means you know who you are when you’re coaching. These ways of knowing are rooted in doing and being rather than in thinking. The authors of the 4P model of knowing2 make clear that no one way of knowing can substitute for another. What they’re saying is you can’t replace doing or being with only thinking.
But that’s what so much of coach education, both formal and informal, is built on: thinking as either a substitute for or a path towards doing and being. Coaches talk about what they know and what to do. They talk about those things because they are portable, meaning they are easily understood across teams, times, and places. Because that’s what they hear being discussed, less experienced coaches assume that’s where they should start. They start there and try to build towards doing and being. But experienced coaches go about things in a different direction.
Experienced coaches are likely to process the 4P model’s ways of knowing from most complex and interconnected to least. They know how to be coaches and that allows them to “do” coaching. As a result of their acts of coaching, they can describe how to coach. They can further disassemble their processes into separate facts about coaching that others can know. But if you start with a bunch of facts, you can’t assemble them into steps unless you already know the processes they fit into. Without an existing coaching perspective, you can’t implement the processes into coaching situations. And you can’t have a coaching perspective without being a coach. The authors describe it this way.
Even if a lion possessed the capacity for propositional knowing, its utterances would remain unintelligible unless grounded in procedural knowing, the embodied routines and skills that ground those propositions in more concrete and practical aspects of the world. Thus, if a lion were to speak of hunting, it would need to anchor its discourse in the concrete procedures of stalking, pouncing, and coordination of the pride (that we identify as) constituting its hunting practice, rather than offer mere abstract speculation. (p. 10)
They are saying that lions, if they could speak to humans, couldn’t truly describe what they do, not because of a language barrier, but because humans have no experience of being lions. If humans lack the words to describe the experience of being a lion, it’s because they’ve never been lions. Coaching isn’t that different than lion-ing in the sense of knowing. Propositional knowing isn’t enough. Procedural knowing isn’t enough. There has to be doing and being.
And yet, coach education and learning proceeds as if it is possible to assemble facts together into being a coach. Most coach education gives coaches facts about and routines for coaching without giving them any chance to develop their own perspective or their own sense of identity. Then coaches talk about all the things they didn’t learn until years later in their coaching. This, to me, demonstrates the idea that there’s a difference between knowing how and being.
Coach education would have you believe thinking can be turned into being but your experience, your literal experience, tells you something different. You have to be in order to progress towards the coach you are trying to become. So what is it about thinking that distracts coaches from the learning they truly need?
Coaches get caught up with learning facts and processes first because it feels good. Knowing facts and processes, even when devoid of perspective, makes you feel like you’ve done something, when all you’ve done is gain some insight. Mark Manson discussed this in a recent podcast about change3. Here’s what he had to say.
Insight can only take you so far. It can’t actually make you behave differently. It can’t make you feel differently in and of itself.
…
I think the other reason adaptations are so hard to change is that there’s a little bit of an illusion that comes with gaining information. So for example, let’s say somebody’s listening to this right now, and something we’ve said has triggered an insight in their mind, that dopamine hit of like, oh my God, I now I understand something I didn’t understand before. That feels like change without changing. And this is just the self-help trap in general, people get addicted to insight because it constantly feels like they’re doing work even though they’re not really doing work. They’re not…there’s no implementation happening. And if there’s no implementation happening, then nothing is actually permanently shifting or being changed.”
Thinking is not a substitute for being. Insight is not a substitute for behaving differently. You can’t stop at insight. Or, you can stop at insight (and many coaches do). But that’s the biggest lesson for me in the 4P model, discovering the line between insight and action, between thinking and being. I am just as guilty as others of getting drunk on and distracted by insight. I love being a “porch guy” sometimes, just talking about things, having insights into how I and others think. But then I realize that those insights are, at best, only words on paper. They’re thin desires that are easily attained and they’re everywhere in coach development.
I have participated in some mentorship programs and they always seem to be a series of conversations intended to yield insights. But the more I consider how coach development happens, I’m not sure much of it happens through insights. Sure, insights can lead to actual change and, therefore, learning but they are not learning on their own. That means coaches and mentors can’t accept insight as the outcome of their work together. I believe that means you can’t structure mentorship programs such that they only create insights.
Insights are for book clubs. Mentorship, in my opinion, should be about creating change, not settling for insight. That’s because good coaching isn’t about what you think nearly as much as it is about who you are. But, if you’re new to coaching, how are you supposed to be something you have yet to be? Here’s where coach development often gets it backwards. It’s assumed you should try to start with what you haven’t been, a coach. It’s assumed you can take all the things you (and others) think about coaching and communicating those thoughts will turn into coaching.
Instead, start where you are, or more accurately, start with who you are. Be yourself first and figure out everything else in relation to yourself. That sounds scary because it feels like you’re working without a net but that’s not true. You have your identity to fall back on rather than falling back on facts and recipes. Work from why you think coaching matters instead of working from a list of facts about coaching. When do you feel alive as a coach? While that is something you can verbalize, go create that feeling in your coaching. That’s how you’ll improve as a coach.
Notice how this way of growing as a coach is active rather than passive. Notice that the activity required is not following a recipe you read. This is not downloading a coaching update. And that’s why a mentor can be so helpful. They can help you see who you are while you are coaching. That’s a lot different than talking to a mentor about coaching. They can point your attention towards things you may not be noticing as they happen instead of talking about hypotheticals.
The difference in these two different approaches to mentorship is the difference between what Donald Schön calls reflection-on-action and what he calls reflection-in-action. The former happens when you’re not coaching and promotes non-participatory forms of knowing. Reflection-on-action gives you insight. The latter happens when you are in the act of coaching. While a mentor inviting you to reflect while you’re coaching may slow you down or tie you up, that’s the price of participatory learning.
Maybe that’s what underlying all this talk about different kinds of knowing. There’s a price to pay for participatory learning. Insight is knowing something without paying a price for it. You end up getting exactly what you paid for.
These categories are taken from this fascinating paper:
Beyköylü, H., Vervaeke, J., & Meling, D. (2025). The Four Ways of Knowing: Revising the 4P Model of Knowing Through a Non-dual and Reflexive Perspective (Gw7r5_v2). OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/gw7r5_v2
Rob Gray and his guest, Pete Blair, discuss the paper in Gray’s podcast:
580 - The Ways of Knowing - The 4P Model w Pete Blair
ibid
From SOLVED with Mark Manson: How to Change Your Life, Solved, Jun 3, 2026
(The quoted section begins around 2:09:50)