The “Coach” is key in any learning process

Some time ago I took ?up a new sport. It’s called Padel and it is a racket sport, typically played in doubles on a downsized tennis courts which has glass walls. You could really say that it’s a cross of tennis, squash and fronton, but in fact this game commands an art of its own. The fascinating thing is the continuous insights I had whilst training with my Padel coach.

I actually had two coaches and it was curious to observe my reaction to them both! As a teenager at school, every summer term we played tennis and in those years I was a huge fan of Bjorn Borg. I would religiously watch Wimbledon every single year and Borg was my absolute hero, demonstrating resilience, excellent technique, fantastic brain power and concentration and never an inkling of any emotion. I used to spend hours and hours practising my tennis shots alone (much to the chagrin of my parents) against our garage or against one of the walls of our house. Without constant repetitive practice, I actually became quite adept with a racket and later also took up squash. So, when I started with my first coach, at first he was actually quite delighted that I wasn’t a complete beginner with a racket, however due to the fact that I’m still quite a “hard hitter” trying to get the ball across the court (in my memory banks a tennis court!), he was constantly getting annoyed with me because more often than not I was hitting too hard and too long. He hardly ever gave me positive feedback and most of the time his attitude and body language seemed to ooze with criticism plus his often negative remarks started to erode my childlike glee of discovering a new sport.

Luckily for me, this coach actually moved away and I started with a new coach. Wow, what a difference a coach makes! Enric was a totally different kettle of fish. Firstly, he is drenched with expertise due to the fact that he’s been coaching professionally for many years. He detected from the beginning that there were certain things that I had automatised from tennis and squash, but that needed adjusting for Padel. He talked to me in my language: the language of the subconscious brain. In many ways he reminded me of Timothy Gallwey, the author of the Inner Game of Tennis, an amazing book which talks about the thinking brain and the performing brain. The point for me was and is, that my subconscious brain over 35 years ago created my subconscious programs for playing tennis and squash. Amazingly, I still had this technique and Enric had to expertly tweak my “programming”. Just with slight nuances, just with slight changes and above all, the way that he positively recognised me when I got it right and he praised and acknowledged me in such a way that it provoked me to give more and more “corrected” shots. Gradually I started noticing how the old programming was giving way to the newly adjusted programs and my technique, my shots and my game really took on a new direction!

This whole process has given me a lot of insights and a lot of food for thought relating to the learning process.

1.?????? No matter what we are learning, the person guiding us through this process is absolutely key. If the educator makes the learner feel bad, negative, unable to do it the right way and in general feel that they’re not making progress, this will generate not only the desire to throw in the towel but also the internal feelings of inadequacy. When you have a coach who is constantly supporting, empowering and believes in you, it really does bring out the best of us. The attitude of the educator is absolutely key.

2.?????? The amazing discovery that 35 years down the line (and really no tennis during those years), I was still performing extremely skilled tennis shots was quite a revelation about the power of my subconscious brain and my extraordinary “muscle memory”. This actually got me thinking “what else was I doing in my school years when I was learning something and could I harness that to enhance what I’m learning at the moment. One thing actually came to mind relating to language learning and that was that in those early years of learning French I clearly remember having pictorial scenes with the French vocabulary on it. So, what could you harness from your childhood learning and rekindle to help you scaffold more into the language you are learning or improving now?

3.?????? The other insight was more of a confirmation that to become skilled at anything, we need to repeat it over and over and over again. It has to become second nature. Evidently, my constant beating the ball against the garage as a teenager had ingrained my racket technique so much, that over 35 years later it was still there. Language learning is exactly the same. Constant exposure to the new language is key for both conscious and subconscious input. How could you bombard your subconscious brain more and more with the language to really step up the implicit learning?!

4.?????? My final insight is that tweaking old habits and ingrained practices with new tecniques is not easy but not impossible. With the right encouragement and expertise from an expert coach, who instantly can detect what needs adjusting, we can alter and adapt, building up from previous knowledge and creating new connections. In this respect, it could always be interesting for the coach to always find out the starting point of the learner. By doing so, we respect everybody is different and we are able to help that particular learner from their particular start point. My second coach acknowledged me for my brilliant tennis strokes, while gently insinuating that together we could springboard from that and adjust it to the necessary technique for this particular game. His expertise was phenomenal. It reminded me of the story of the Japanese who were able to discern the gender of baby chicks just by looking at them immediately after being born. To the normal eye, this task is absolutely impossible because they look exactly the same, but the Japanese experts were able to distinguish male from female due to the fact that there subconscious brain recognised the difference. My expert Padel coach could sense and detect my slightest wrong move in the most amazing way. Many Neurolanguage Coaches are language experts who can instantly detect when language needs tweaking and adjusting and in addition are able to sense when some “language structures” are being avoided. ?I call this “being a language whisperer!” Just recently I was conducting a first session with two top executives with a brilliant level of English. They made no mistakes whatsoever, but both of them without realising it were displaying quite a lot of avoidance of certain areas of grammar that do not in fact exist in their native languages! Curious how the brain scaffolds and manifests the language structures it is more familiar and happy with than those that it is less familiar with! Having a Neurolanguage coach with the right expertise plus the right sensitivity actually propels people to go to deeper levels of language!

?Curious to hear your thoughts about all of this and curious if any of you have had to adjust subconscious patterns and tweak them into new patterns – like my experience from tennis to Padel…..

Looking to take your language learning to a higher level or looking to learn more efficiently and potentially faster with a process that is totally personalised to you?Connect with our network of highly skilled Neurolanguage Coaches across the world and for any language www.neurolanguagecoachnetwork.com or connect me personally and I will connect you with one of our Professional Neurolanguage Coaches.

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