There is no substitute for learning from experience
Where do technical instructions originate?
Tennis was brought to America from Europe in the late 1800s. There were no professional tennis teachers to teach technique. The best were players who experienced certain feelings in their swings and tried to communicate those feelings to others. In the effort to understand how to use technical knowledge or theory, I believe that it is most important to recognize that, fundamentally, experience precedes technical knowledge. We may read books or articles that present technical instructions before we have ever lifted a racket, but where did these instructions come from? At some point did they not originate in someone’s experience? Either by accident or by intention someone hit a ball in a certain way and it felt good and it worked. Through experimentation, refinements were made and finally settled into a repeatable stroke.
Perhaps in the interest of being able to repeat that way of hitting the ball again or to pass it on to another, the person attempts to describe that stroke in language. But words can only represent actions, ideas and experiences. Language is not the action, and at best can only hint at the subtlety and complexity contained in the stroke. Although the instruction thus conceived can now be stored in the part of the mind that remembers language, it must be acknowledged that remembering the instruction is not the same as remembering the stroke itself.
Of course it is very convenient to think that by giving ourselves correct instruction—“hit from low to high,” for example—we will hit great topspin backhands again and again. We want to trust Self 1’s conceptual process of learning technique instead of Self 2’s learning from experience. Thinking that it was the obeying of an instruction that produced the good shot, ignoring the role that Self 2 plays, sets us up for disappointment when we give the same instruction yet the same good shot does not occur. Since we think the instruction was correct, the conclusion we come to is that not obeying it led to the error. Then we may get angry at ourselves, make disparaging remarks about our ability and call ourselves stupid or use a variety of ways to blame ourselves.
But maybe the error was in not trusting Self 2 enough and relying too much on Self 1 control. It is as if we would like to think of ourselves more as an obedient computer than as a human being. As a consequence, we are apt to lose access to the direct pathway to the muscle memory that carries a more complete knowledge of the desired action. In a society that has become so oriented toward language as a way of representing truth, it is very possible to lose touch with your ability to feel and with it your ability to “remember” the shots themselves. I believe this remembering is a fundamental act of trust in Self 2 without which excellence in any skill cannot be sustained.
When the verbal instruction is passed on to another person who does not have in his bank of experience the action being described in memory, it lives in the mind totally disconnected from experience. The chances are now even greater that there will be a split between memory of theory and the memory of action. (I am reminded of the lines from “The Hollow Men,” by T. S. Eliot: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.”)
And as we begin to use an instruction to pass judgment on our shots instead of attending to the lessons of experience, the gap between experience and instruction is further widened. The instruction, used as a conceptual “should” or “should not,” puts a shadow of fear between Self 2’s intuitive knowing and the action. Many times I have seen students hitting perfectly good shots, but complaining about them because they thought they did something “wrong.” By the time they have brought their stroke into conformity with their concept of the “right” way to do it, the shot has lost both power and consistency, as well as naturalness.
In short, if we let ourselves lose touch with our ability to feel our actions, by relying too heavily on instructions, we can seriously compromise our access to our natural learning processes and our potential to perform. Instead, if we hit the ball relying on the instincts of Self 2, we reinforce the simplest neural pathway to the optimal shot.
Though this discussion has been primarily theoretical up to this point, it has recently been confirmed by the United States Tennis Association Sports Science Department, as well as by almost everyone’s experience, that too many verbal instructions, given either from outside or inside, interfere with one’s shotmaking ability. It is also common experience that one verbal instruction given to ten different people will take on ten different meanings. Trying too hard to perform even a single instruction not well understood can introduce an awkwardness or rigidity into the swing that inhibits excellence.
In previous chapters, I made the point that a great deal of technique can be learned naturally by simply paying close attention to one’s body, racket and ball while playing. The more awareness one can bring to bear on any action, the more feedback one gets from experience, and the more naturally one learns the technique that feels best and works best for any given player at any given state of development. Bottom line: there is no substitute for learning from experience. However, even though we have the ability to learn naturally, many of us have forgotten. And many of us have lost touch with feel. We may need to learn how to feel again and learn how to learn again. The saying of an old master is pertinent here: “No teacher is greater than one’s own experience.”