Stop trying so hard…
— 17 oktober 2017
"Observing the normal interaction between a student and his tennis teacher provides a window into the way we have all learned to make changes."
Two observations stand out as I reflect on my early experience with coaching performance in sports.
The first is that almost everyone who came to me for a lesson was trying very hard to fix some aspect of their game that they didn’t like. They expected me to provide the remedy for their problem.
The second is the relative effortlessness with which change for the better took place when they stopped trying so hard and trusted in their capacity to learn from their own experience.
Observing the normal interaction between a student and his tennis teacher provides a window into the way we have all learned to make changes. Normally the player approaches the teacher with some kind of complaint, either about one of his strokes or about his results. “I’m nog getting enough power on my serve”, he might say, or “I need to make a change in my backhand”.
The teacher watches the student demonstrate his current stroke, then he compares what he sees to a model in his head of “the correct stroke”.
This model is based on what the teacher has been taught is the “right way”. Looking through the lens of this model, the coach sees all the differences between “what is” and “what should be”, and begins the hard work of getting the two to match.
To accomplish this task, the teacher may use a great variety of instructions, but there is a single common context. Perhaps he says “You should step into the ball as you make contact, with your weight on your front foot. You shouldn’t take your racket back so high on your backswing. Your follow-through should be done more like this”. The common context is: “I will tell you what you should and shouldn’t do”.
Faced with this series of should and shouldn’t commands, the student’s patterns of behavior becomes quite predictable. Placing his trust in the judgmental feedback of the teacher, the student’s responsibility becomes merely to do what he’s told.
Thus he tries hard not to do what he shouldn’t do and to make himself do what he should. Told that his racket is being taken back too late, the student forces his arm to move back faster. For the student it may feel overly tight and awkward, but the teacher sees the response to his command and says “Good!”.
What is really being said is “Good, you are trying to obey me”. The student comes to associate “good” with this forced and unnatural way of fixing his strokes. The teacher provides the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, and the student supplies the “trying hard”, which is followed bij another “good” or “bad” judgment by the coach.
So it goes, over and over again. Change is viewed as a movement from bad to good, defined and initiated bij someone other than the one who is making te change. It is done in an judgmental context that usually brings with it resistance, doubt, and fear of failure on the part of the student.
Neither student nor teacher is likely to be aware that this approach to change undermines the student’s innate eagerness and responsibility for learning. They may struggle with the inherent contradictions in this approach, but it is usually the only way they know.
My first insight into another way came the day I stopped trying to change the student’s swing…….
Dit fragment maakt deel uit van de mini-serie “Zelfstandig leren denken”; klik hier als je de andere artikelen wilt lezen.
bron: The inner game of work, Timothy Gallwey.
