Mehr Intention
What two words in a survey taught me about the thing I can't systematize
Wednesday evening. The survey results arrive in my inbox. Four responses from Sunday’s clinic — not many, but enough to sit with.
I open them at my desk, the window dark, the tea I meant to drink still sitting next to the keyboard.
Three answers are what I expected — and I mean that as a neutral observation, not a disappointment. One coach says the session opened a new perspective on methods they already use. Another is thinking about how to filter their exercises through a framework they’ve been developing. A third quotes me back to myself in the nicest possible way — komplexe Themen verständlich aufbereitet, practical ideas, a real benefit for the club. I read that and feel something warm and slightly uncomfortable at the same time, the way compliments do when you’re not sure yet if you earned them.
Then I scroll to the last response.
Mehr Intention.
That’s the full answer to the question: What will you do differently in your next session?
Two words. And I don’t know why, but I kept looking at them.
There’s a version of me that reads “mehr Intention” and feels deflated. Hours of design — activities chosen for their transfer, constraints adjusted mid-session, language about how the game itself teaches — and someone walks away with more intention. That sounds like they could have gotten there by reading a fortune cookie.
But that’s not what I actually felt.
What I actually felt was something closer to recognition.
Because more intention is, in fact, a significant shift. Not the kind that shows up on a checklist. The kind that lives in the body. The moment between seeing what’s happening and reacting to it — which is normally almost zero milliseconds — stretches just enough to become a decision.
A coach who does that once, actually does it, not as a principle they endorse but as something they feel — that coach has crossed something. I can’t quite call it a threshold because it doesn’t stay crossed. You cross it and then you forget and then something reminds you and you cross it again. That’s how it works.
The problem is: I can’t systematize that.
And yet I keep trying. On my own team, three teenagers are learning to coach. When I ask them to prepare a session, their default is to pick an activity they know they can run — something familiar, something safe. Only when I push do they try to explain what it’s for. I watch them backward into the intent from the activity they’ve already chosen, and I recognize the shape of it. That’s not a mistake at fourteen. But it’s the same move — activity first, intention assembled around it afterward, if at all.
The question I don’t have a clean answer to is what reverses that order. For my junior coaches, maybe it’s enough repetitions of me asking why before what. For an adult coach at a Sunday clinic, maybe it’s two words arriving in their own handwriting.
The same week I got those survey results, I wrote a long message to the person who’d organized the clinic. Four options for sustainable coach development — structured, layered, realistic. A week of on-site observation. Video mentoring. Monthly case rounds. Sporadic workshops. All of it coherent, all of it defensible.
I believe in those things. I still do.
But as I was writing, I was aware of a specific anxiety underneath it: I was building structures that would outlast my presence. Things that don’t require me to show up every time, that can carry without me pushing them. That’s the right instinct for building something durable.
The anxiety was quieter and harder to name: can you build a system for intention?
I don’t think you can. You can build conditions. You can design environments where coaches are more likely to stop and ask themselves what they’re actually doing and why. But intention itself — the moment someone decides to do something on purpose instead of on reflex — that’s not transferable. It only happens inside a person, and only when they’re ready.
🙋♂️
If something I made helped you in any way, however small, I’d love to hear what changed or what you built with it. That reflection is what keeps this work breathing.
I kept thinking about the coach who wrote those two words. The same person also asked for individual feedback on their coaching — not group rounds, not another clinic, but someone to look specifically at their sessions. So: two words of resolve, and a request for more of my eyes on their work. A declaration and a request at the same time.
That’s actually what change looks like, I think. Not a clean arrival but a direction and an admission that you can’t get there alone.
That’s the part of this work I find hardest to sit with — not the failures, but the invisible returns. Most of what lands from a Sunday clinic doesn’t appear in a survey three days later. It shows up months later, in a decision someone makes alone.
I want the four options I wrote about to eventually create conditions for that. I want the monthly case rounds and the video feedback to slowly shift how coaches in that club think about what they’re doing. I want it to not depend on any one person — including me.
But somewhere underneath all of that design, I keep coming back to two words.
Mehr Intention.
Not as a method. As a posture. The willingness to stop — briefly, just briefly — before doing something you’ve done a hundred times, and ask yourself: Do I mean this?
I don’t always do that. I’m not sure I do it consistently enough to call it a habit.
Maybe that’s what the clinic gave me too.
🌀
What’s the first idea this unlocked for you? Leave it in the comments, please, or send me a quick message. I don’t want what I publish to vanish into the void.
Rolf is a non-linear pedagogy advocate, author, and coach developer from Germany. He writes about humane coaching, purposeful change, and the road toward dreams worth chasing.
If his work resonates, why not walk a stretch of the road with him?
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