Show, Don't Tell
“When the mind is free of any thought or judgment, it is still and acts as a mirror. Then and only then can we know things as they are.”
There are times when a coach or instructor sees something wrong with a player’s approach.
Communicating the solution can be difficult. “You’re doing this but you need to do this” does not necessarily translate into improvement. Sometimes you have to guide a player into their a-ha moment.
There is a great example of this in Alex Speier’s Homegrown.
Red Sox’s Rafael Devers was scuffling in the minor leagues. Hitters are inundated with all types of numbers and heat maps to help illuminate their weaknesses. Most are well aware of their shortcomings but there’s a disconnect between what they should be doing with what they are actually doing.
Devers asked his hitting coach, Lee May Jr, to meet him at the batting cage for some additional work. May agreed but told Devers that he was not going to make any changes to his swing. His issues were not mechanical.
May guided Devers to the problem:
“May flipped Devers five balls below the knees. Devers hit all of them into the ground. The hitting coach then threw him five in the middle of the zone, each he obliterated. Instantly, Devers understood: the problem wasn’t his swing but his pitch selection.”
That small session did wonders. By reaching his own conclusion on which areas he does damage on (and areas that he doesn’t) Devers was able to apply that quickly into the game and he finished the year with a .300 average, .369 on-base percentage and a .575 slugging over 77 games in Double-A.
Why was this approach effective?
Devers received instant feedback. By crushing thigh-high flips and grounding all the ones below his knee into the turf, he was able to make the intrinsic connection that he was powering pitches up and dusting the ones below his knees.
In The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey describes a training session he had with a player who was struggling with a backhand. The player said that five different tennis pros had told him he needed to improve his backhand but that he had not been able to correct it. Gallwey had the player take a few swings in front of his reflection to have him see what it looked like.
By seeing his swing in action, the player was able to understand what was happening: He was taking his racket back too high, just like the previous coaches had told him.
“With the aid of the mirror, he directly experienced his backswing,” Gallwey wrote. “Without thinking or analyzing, he increased his awareness of that part of the swing. When the mind is free of any thought or judgment, it is still and acts as a mirror. Then and only then can we know things as they are.”
Increasing awareness is a big key to coaching.
Like most good coaches, May saw the problem in Devers’ approach. Devers was driving pitches beneath the zone into the ground. He could have had a conversation to tell Devers to stop swinging at that pitch. He could show him the heat maps or the data again but numbers and visuals don’t necessarily get a person to the right physical feedback. Players need awareness.
Coaches and instructors may want to tell their players what is wrong and provide them with the answers but the best solution is to show them and let them solve it for themselves.
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