Atul Gawande, a distinguished Harvard surgeon and author, argues that everyone needs a coach. After working eight years as a surgeon, he realized that his operating room success had slowly reached a plateau. Soon after that realization, he attended a medical meeting and had an afternoon free, and tried to track down someone to play in a game of tennis. Finally, he went to the local tennis club and was told that he could practice his ground strokes only if he paid for a lesson and hit with the club pro.

Gawande writes what happened next:

He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate who'd played on his college team. We hit back and forth for a while. He went easy on me at first, and then started running me around. I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. "You know," he said, "you could get more power from your serve." I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. He had me pay attention to my feet as I served, and I gradually recognized that my legs weren't really underneath me when I swung my racquet up into the air.

My right leg dragged a few inches behind my body …. With a few minutes of tinkering, he'd added at least ten miles an hour to my serve.

Not long afterward, Gawande was watching tennis star Rafael Nadal playing a tournament match on TV.

The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does …. But doctors don't. I'd paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

Coaching operates from the premise that "no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own."

The apostle Paul knew that we need coaches in living as Christians. Watch me, he said. And let me give you some pointers. We learn by seeing truth lived out and modeled. We learn by imitation. Some things are caught, not taught. Some things are caught and taught.