The lessons of being useless

A thing you can find difficult is knowing where you’re supposed to be on a volleyball court.?

Perhaps you know that a volleyball team has six players. And that any one time, three of them are playing in the front half of the court, three at the back.?

Maybe you understand from watching volleyball that it’s the job of the front court players to hit the ball over the net, and to block attacks from the opponents. Or that back court players must prevent the ball from hitting the floor if it comes back over - the first of three touches a team has to send it back again.

Knowing that, you might then guess that a game starts with the six players in these positions.?

But there’s more.

A lot more.

Enough so that even people who play volleyball - people like me - find it hard to remember.?

First, it’s built into gameplay that players don’t stay in those positions for long. Each time they win back serve, the team rotates clockwise, each player moving to take up the position of the person next to them. 6 moves to 5, 5 to 4, and so on, all the way round so that 2 moves to where 1 was and takes the serve. The previous server moves from 1 to 6.?

But then there’s the fact that, as with football or rugby or basketball or netball, a volleyball team is made of specialists. Each player has a defined role, and fulfilling this role requires them to be in a specific area of the court during play. Hitters specialise in hitting either from the left, from the right, or through the middle - your front court role also determines where you play in the back court.

Additionally, each team has a ‘setter’, who is the equivalent of a point guard in basketball or a scrum half in rugby. A playmaker. Setters are skilled and fast, and responsible for setting up the hitters. It's their job to stand near the net to make sure they’re in a good position to take the second of the team’s three touches, regardless of where they are in rotation.?

You might have clocked already that these specialist functions are in tension with the rotation. It’s a case of rules against roles. The rules state you must maintain your position relative to your team-mates, ensuring you stay ahead of or behind or to the correct side of the relevant players. But your role requires you to be ready to move to the right place on the court as play evolves.

One final thing. Since you only rotate once a team has served and received in one position, you will spend at least one point in each of the six positions on court attacking, and at least one defending.?

As a result, the start of each point will see players standing in any one of twelve different places on the court, depending where they are in the rotation and which team is serving. During the game, a team will contort itself into a series of irregular, pointy shapes as they optimise the standard 3x2 oblong to get the most from every play.?

And remember. All this is happening at speed, as you concentrate on actually playing the game, which may involve receiving the ball as it arrives straight at you, or tracking the movements of your opponents at the net to pre-empt their attack, or calling out to let others know you’ll take this one, or that you can’t, or that you’re available for a pass, and it will almost certainly involve you focusing in the moment on your technique and timing and touch, because small margins make the difference between an effective attack and a limp one, between a defence made and a ball missed, between a point won and a point lost.

It’s a lot.??

I started playing volleyball at 16. Just a couple of seasons, before going to university, where I pretty much relinquished organised sport altogether. There was some five-a-side football now and again, but that was it.

Then last January, I wondered if team sport could be a solution to my ongoing problem. I needed a more effective way to exercise more regularly. Like many people, I’d had spurts of running, swimming too, but neither stuck. A weekly training commitment would surely help, I thought: fitness as a by-product of fun, rather than an end in its own, slightly worthy right.

So, thirty years after I first learned to play, I found and joined a volleyball club. I attended the social sessions for a few months, then as the new season rolled around in September I was invited to try out for the team. Admittedly it was the club’s fourth string team, but a team nonetheless.

I got in. I was delighted.?

Most of the team I play with are half my age. They’re keen, and focused, and generous to the gerontological case study who joins them each week. Their energy and keenness set a bar for me that serves to keep my effort level high. Each week I get home tired. Good tired. This remained the case as my baseline fitness improved, which wasn’t just because I tried harder. This was a mental tiredness. A training session demands 90 minutes of concentration. Listening, understanding, trying, refining. The intensity of drills is matched by the focus required for the feedback loops of learning that come with them. It’s no good simply doing the thing. You need to notice the relationship between the thing and your body’s approximation of it, and then work out how to make your version less approximate.

It’s a lot.??

But learning the positions left me especially bewildered. There was so much to take in. For weeks it seemed everyone was speaking a foreign language. As we moved round the court, with team-mates taking time between points to work out the situation and point out positional errors, I felt totally lost. It was so extreme that at one point I decided it must be an elaborate ruse, like the team was sending up the idea of complexity. It was like when you hear free jazz for the first time and think, is this for real? Or being a listener to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue but without knowing the joke in Mornington Crescent.

The coaches did share a video to get me up to speed. Others had already seen it, but for a while it actually made things worse. It was too much information to carry. My time in practice games was spent transposing half-remembered 2D graphics onto a very 3D, very quick and very real court situation. Mostly I let others tell me where to stand.

“We’ve got to get this nailed,” said the coach at one point. Not just to me, thankfully, but to the whole team, some of whom I was relieved to see were also still having trouble.

“If you have to think about this during a game, your mind won’t have room for everything else it needs to think about.”

This, strangely, was the moment I felt OK about it.?

Instead of stressing that I was still behind, I accepted that I was still learning.

Because this is what learning feels like. That slow, tortuous experience of assimilating new knowledge, or new ways to think, or, as in this case, move. It’s a stage when your consciousness is filled up with remembering how to do something, or simply to do it all. As if a new idea is not so much living rent-free in your head as it is escaping through a hundred open windows as your brain tries to push it back in using a colander. As if the mental notes you’ve been keeping were made of paper and were square and yellow and stuck all over the windscreen of the car you’re driving.??

We spend a lot of our lives in this state, don't we? But we often pretend that we know what we're doing. Or we make things even harder for ourselves by forgetting what learning entails.

Yet this is what it’s like to do most things. Like learn to drive, or play a video game for the first time, or get to grips with our company’s new IT system. Sometimes, if the learning process is well-designed, the effort in itself is rewarding. Achievement unlocked! But most of the time, it isn’t. Most of the time it is more painful than we can possibly describe, and therefore we don’t, unless it’s in words of four letters and one syllable, which is how I like to ‘describe’ my progress at home when ‘learning’ a new DIY ‘skill’.?

The trouble is, however well constructed the path, there’s no shortcut. We all need to trudge our way through ‘conscious incompetence’ to ‘conscious competence’ before we arrive at the sunlit uplands of ‘unconscious competence’, that magical state where we drive without effort, or elegantly arrive at the final level of the video game, or execute a task in the IT system without swearing.

Or, indeed, achieve whatever excellence at DIY looks like. I really couldn’t tell you.?

To be conscious of our incompetence is to label it, and to label things is to accept them, and acceptance is the first step of any effective development process. As a writer, I’m hyper aware of this even as I’m desperate to deny it. Most writers would happily forgo the first draft stage, so painful and unrewarding is it, yet without it nothing would get written. And as with writing, so with life. Our conscious incompetence in any capability is merely the first draft - the attempt we must go through if we are to improve.

Thought of this way, our uselessness is not only temporary, but necessary.

Our uselessness is actually useful, one of the most effective tools we have.?

Let us count the ways in which our uselessness is useful. Here are three.

ONE

First, our uselessness is useful because learning new skills keeps us flexible. The older or (supposedly) wiser we become, the more valuable it can be to maintain a beginner’s mindset.

I am someone who is paid to train, advise and solve problems on behalf of others. By putting myself in a situation every week where my default beginner status is shoved undeniably if kindly in my face for an hour and a half, I am reminded my expertise is merely contextual. It instils humility and plasticity, the best weapons we have against assumptions, which are dangerous because they are invisible. It reminds me to counter whatever experience I can bring to a new brief with an open mind.

But my weekly appointment in novice-land is also healthy from a purely cognitive point of view. I’m not geriatric yet, but friends of mine who are over 50 have told me it’s definitely a good thing to be making new neural pathways at this stage of life, even if there’s no evidence yet that the ‘use it or lose it’ strategy really does stave off dementia. And, since there’s an argument that our lived experience is the sum of the people we spend time with, it’s also not a bad thing to try to keep pace with people who are better at things than us.

Like doing sports with people twenty years our junior.??

TWO

Second, our uselessness is useful because the path to automatic is anything but. Indeed, we might remain on that path indefinitely.

Take cooking. Even the meals I make most often require an occasional look at the recipe. It’s good to remind myself not to be frustrated with that - that my brain and body are already processing so many automatic actions that I shouldn’t be surprised if the precise moment to add the diced vegetables doesn’t make the cut. The reality is, I simply don’t cook any meal frequently enough for it to become rote. It’s the same with all habits, the constructive cultivation of which now forms a small cottage industry. Many’s the time I’ve applied BJ Foog’s Tiny Habits model to aspects of my life. Yet only some of the behaviours stick, mostly because I under-appreciate how much effort is required to get to the stage where I don’t have to think about them.

To accept the reality of my incompetence might tether me to the real world for longer, and therefore tether more strongly the new habits I’d like, to the life I actually lead.?

THREE

And finally, our uselessness is useful because it is good for all of us that all of us experience what it’s like to feel lost. We are in this thing together, and it helps us look at problems from both sides.

As a beginner, I really appreciate it when our volleyball coach will pause a drill when he sees we are lost or struggling. He tries to make things easier by refining his explanation of the task, or by demonstrating something more explicitly, or by asking us to concentrate on one small element. As a trainer myself, I also sense the coach’s own deserved gratification as the support he offers during that pause leads to a better outcome, It reinforces the value of his interventions, to him as well as to us. That's good all round.

We could do with remembering how productive it is to meet people where they are, but especially so when managing, mentoring or training them. Skills development is an exchange. The feedback loop flows in both directions. Being lost ourselves reminds us to look for the signs of being lost in others, and to be attuned to the interventions that might work best. What do they already know? What have you already covered? Which reference points could help explain something? When is it time to step back and approach an idea from a different place?

Playing student and teacher in different parts of my life reinforces the idea that teaching well requires effort, but also that the effort is worth it.??

I’m finally starting to feel less useless at volleyball. At knowing where to stand, and when. Mostly this is through repetition. Some kind of spatial memory mechanism has kicked in, having had to physically move for each point. If he's there, and he's over there, then I need to be.... here!

This is not something I can replicate in my own training work, since I rarely get that long with people. To go beyond merely ‘knowing the ropes’, a sailor had to put out to sea. A couple of days' theory won’t allow for that. So when I think about the short period of time I get with people, I think about how lost I felt at times during volleyball practice. I think about how complicated it can be to know where to stand on a volleyball court, and to explain it, and I think about how teaching isn’t always about how much you know. A good teacher sees their course from the vantage of a novice, and can lift the curse of their own knowledge to do so. The content you impart is only half the story - and sometimes it's a thing that gets in the way. Instead, it's my job to help people find out for themselves what new skills feel like. Perhaps even to find out what they’re capable of.?

To provide training is to engage with how people really learn. How much information can they carry at any one time? What’s the right balance between being given new information and being able to test it practically? What are the right feedback mechanisms to use? How can you stretch students while also making the task feel familiar and achievable? How can I help them if they're having difficulty?

All of this is a way of saying that teaching is complicated. More complicated for sure than trying to remember 12 positions on a 9x9m square.

Knowing I’m good at other complicated things did make it easier to stick at it. But I now see the real value flowed the other way. Because skills development is an exchange. The confusion I felt on the court took me right back to when I was a beginner in other areas of my life, and areas where I am still. It reminded me there was a time I didn’t know anything about training, or indeed the things I’m training people in. Yet I acquired those skills. Slowly, incrementally. By doing the thing. Over and over.

It always was this way, and always will be.

Realising there's no option is half the battle.

It's a lesson that can only come with being useless.?