Going backwards to go forwards

Suppose you are on a journey and you take what you think is a shortcut. You are making great time, or so you think, until you run into a dead-end. So you have to backtrack to the main road and proceed on from there.

A lot of our skill learning is like that. We find what we think is a good way to do something but then later realise that it has become a barrier to further progress. So then we have to go back and re-build our foundations from scratch.

For example, when you first learn to use a computer, you may adopt the hunt-and-peck method of typing, and over time you can become quite fast using this method (and possibly avoid a repetitive strain injury.) But if you want to become faster then you will need to learn to touch type which initially may slow you down considerably. And it will feel much less natural until you have practised it enough to internalise it.

You will notice the same thing if you want to improve your handwriting. You have to slow down to deliberately practise writing more neatly and at first it will seem laborious and time-consuming. But as you persist it will start to feel more natural.

And this will be true of all situations in which you have an entrenched way of doing things. The longer you have been doing something in a particular way the more natural it will feel and the more unnatural and uncomfortable it will feel to do things in a different way even if that way will ultimately be better. The problem is that you are trading something that you have mastered for something you have yet to master with all of the effort and uncertainty and inital erosion of performance that that entails.

Top performers in sports and performance arts of different kinds are aware of this and when they experience slumps go back and rebuild their skills from the ground up, since over time they may ave developed faults in their performance that can only be removed by correctly practising the basics over and over until the fault is eliminated. This can apply to skills as diverse as golfing to latin dance.

Where performance is less than adequate then it means that there is either something you are doing or something you are failing to do that needs to be corrected. And whatever that is, it is the natural way that you perform at the moment. Only by interrupting your natural performance and changing it to something better can you approve.

And this applies not only to physical skills but to intellectual skills as well. The natural way that you write a paper for a course may well be to just write whatever comes into your head until you hit the word requirement. But improving this may mean acquiring new skills such as developing an outline including your major points, write the paper and then edit it. This at first may feel like too much work but once you get into the groove of doing things in the new way, you may be surprised at how much more effective this is and pleased at a greater sense of competence.

Sometimes what you need to do to improve may not be obvious. So in the absence of a coach, you may have to experiment with different approaches and learn from the outcomes of those approaches to refine your skills. And while you are doing this your performance will suffer.

The reality is that you cannot get better without first getting worse, and that sometimes the only way to go forwards is to first go backwards.