About
Probably the first thing which springs to mind when checking out Rigo de Nijs is probably the Olympic coaching medal tally and being involved in a total of six Olympic campaigns and two Volvo Ocean Races.
Of course this sounds great, but in present day culture where presentation likes to oversell the content, it really doesn’t stand out now, does it?
However knowing these facts should tell a potential customer something about the norms, and values I’m normally dealing with, and a customer now still interested in this, is an interesting customer!
In this section I will shortly introduce myself and what I stand for. A good friend of me told me it was neccesary to introduce ‘my business’ in 90 seconds. So here we go.
History
Born and raised
I was born in a small town in Holland as the first son of a hard working carpenter and his also working wife. I was two and a half weeks old when my parents took me on a sailing holiday on a freshly renovated clinker built wooden keelboat.
I had an ordinary school period untill I thought I knew that I wanted to be a PE teacher at a ground school or active in topsports. I also decided that I would always have a job as long as I made sure I’m good at it. So I went for it in a phase where most of my friends didn’t know what to do.
These decisions learned me that with hard work I can do whatever I want to be doing.
Work history
Since then I worked 10 years as a National Olympic Coach in the Netherlands, 10 years in the German Olympic team, 2 years in Team Danmark and 1 season for Team USA. Apart from that, I did afterguard jobs for several Volvo Ocean Race campaigns. Good for some Olympic medals, a Volvo Ocean Race win and some Europeans and Worlds titles in Olympic classes.
At 24, I was a medal winning coach at my first Barcelona Olympics, but I realized that my vision and skills as a coach were far from where I wanted them to be. At that point I dared to claim that I wanted to become the best coach in the world, fully aware of the total dedication it would need: a social sacrifice from me and quite some people around me.
Nowadays, some more medals and desillusions later, I belong to an elite of worldwide multi disciplined sailing coaches, which could be called ‘medalmakers’ and I still see quite some room for development in my skills and vision.
So what’s next?
Over the years I’ve also learned that really ultimate peak performances take place either as a ‘result of a great team’, or as a result of a ‘single man’s fight against his culture’.
Becoming part of those campaigns mostly depends on: a) of course high levelled skills but also on: b) availability at the right time. So I focus my part time freelance activities now on selective sailors, managers or coaches that are willing to develop themselves and some of you will be another ‘peak performer coached by Coachworks’.
I also became more fascinated in councelling, managing teams or education coaches. So aside from my present job as a German National Coach, preparing the Rio Olympics in the multihull class, I decided in january 2013 to expand Coachworks by Rigo de Nijs with some products in ,Management‘ alongside ‘Sailing’.
Vision
Coachworks is working according a vision in which the principles of sailracing can help people to deal better with concepts like deciding, performing, changing surroundings and exelling in life and work, including all it’s ups and downs, surprises and tragedies.
Principles that work in succesfull sailiracing, work in many aspects of everyday work and life. This makes a Teambuilding on a sailracing yacht an ideal platform to demonstrate situations in which it’s possible for participants to experience different ways of functioning as an individual in a performance team in a sport in which the utilisation of changing surroundings is key to succes.
Some people dramatically call succesfull sailracing ‘an Art’.
I partly agree to this , but I also like to see: ‘a specific sport in a culture from which many life-lessons can be learned’. And, sailracing as an exellent platform or environment for experiencing personal development, teamdevelopment and deciding in changing conditions.
So sailracing is great, and much more than that!!
Good winds!
Rigo de Nijs