novices often fail to observe what happens when they hit a bad shot, apparently because it is too painful to watch. Sometimes they literally cover their eyes when they miss. The trouble with this is that the feedback from where that shot lands is critical to Self 2’s gradual, feedback-based learning process. This is where a coach can help, setting up exercises in such a way that learners are highly focused on seeing outcomes clearly regardless of whether they are “good” or not.
So that is Gallwey’s theory, or at least my slightly fractured version of it. The real question is, does it actually work? Well, it happens that Harry Reasoner did a sixty minutes piece many, many years ago that makes a pretty good case for the effectiveness of Gallwey’s approach. (If you look on youtube, you may be able to find the video—if so it’s well worth watching.) Reasoner actually recruited people who had never played sports to come and take a lesson from Gallwey, which he filmed.
In the video, a student, who is holding a racquet in her hands for the first time, stands to the side as Gallwey and a partner hit the ball back and forth. Gallwey instructs the student to say the word “bounce” whenever the ball bounces, and “hit” whenever the partner hits it. When she has done this for some time, Gallwey kicks the partner off the court and puts the student in his spot. Gallwey continues to hit balls with the same location and pace, and instructs the student to keep saying “bounce-hit, bounce-hit”, with the word “hit” now being uttered when the partner would have hit the ball. A few more balls go by, and Gallwey then suggests that, if the student feels like it, she can try swinging her racquet, but he cautions her to keep focused on maintaining an accurate “bounce-hit” cadence—what happens when she swings is not important. The student does indeed swing the racquet, and, having by now internalized the precise timing of the ball’s arrival, she is able contact it squarely on the first try. When you see this on the video, it’s utterly amazing.
When the student has begun hitting the ball reliably for a while, Gallwey starts giving her tasks to do that involve focusing attention on the ball. One is to describe the sound the ball makes when it hits her raquet. Another–not captured in the video–is to ask the learners to call out fhow far each shot lands from the base line of the court.Gallwey assures the learner that it doesn’t matter where the shots land—he just wants an accurate distance estimate. But an interesting thing happens: the shots start landing closer and closer to the baseline, without the learner making any conscious effort to get them closer.
I’ve seen this video several times and I’m always amazed by it. Even knowing what I know about learning, I’m still surprised to see that Gallwey’s technique works as well as it does.
I believe that Gallwey’s key points—to de-emphasize ego and technique, and to emphasize focus on outcomes—have been incorporated to a significant extent into modern tennis lessons, and that they are the central reasons why these lessons are much more effective than the ones I took.
This is my eighth and final blog in the eight-blog series that we called “The View is Worth the Climb.” I’ve talked about the problems with corporate training today, the fact that we have this broken investment value equation, and the need to fix that broken equation. I’ve discussed the mandate or imperative for transformation and the fact that we shouldn’t be waiting for someone to tell us to do it, that we should be ahead of that and making the kinds of changes and improving our situation greatly so that we are adding more value. I’ve discussed how “Running Training Like a Business” is an appropriate methodology for organizations to utilize to begin the transformation process, and I’ve laid out why outsourcing is a tool that organizations should seriously consider in their pursuit of transformation.
What I haven’t talked about, something that I believe in my heart is that at the end of the day, it’s not about training, it really is about resu