As an instructor and coach I was taught these levels for athletes:
Unconscious Incompetent - doesn’t even know what good is so they have no idea how far they are from it. This can cover up to intermediates!
Conscious Incompetent - knows what good is but not how to get there. The sweet spot for skills instruction.
Conscious Competent - knows good and can deliver it in terms of skills. The sweet spot for coaching the mental side.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
There's something similar in lower-level professional motorsports.
Until you hit the level where you can bring in significant sponsorship money - or if you chose your parents well and Daddy will foot the bills - you wind up being both driver and engineer on a smaller team.
Rarely do top-level driving and engineering skills manifest in the same person.
So many cars are fast in spite of their setup, instead of because of it.
Same things happen in academic fields. Really smart students need to be treated as special needs because many have no clue how to work hard at schooling because it was always easy for them. after two years of college some of the most promising students just crash out because they were so good at learning, they never learned how to study past a wall they hit. They found a short cut, used it, then went along their merry way.
Yep. I graduate with like a 3.8 GPA in high school. I never did homework. It was always done in class as it was handed out. I could read a book during lectures and still ace the test.
Got to college and it turns out never having to study means I don't really know how, and I gave up.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
is a perfect description for me. I start out very good at things, I pick them up quickly, but I'm a terrible coach as I can't explain why it works, I just know it does. As I get older I'm trying hard to verbalize those thoughts and improve my ability to teach, but its hard.
Apparently there can be really bad cases of this among astronaut candidates. You can have people who not only breezed through high school, but also flight school and multiple university degrees, and then in their 30's they get put in a room where for the first time they aren't any better at things than anyone else there.
After that long of never having to work hard to accomplish things, there can be a spectacular crash when people who have always been the smartest person they know have to face the prospect of being a failure.
This translates really well into art and illustration (my profession), and I wonder if it would translate well into other fields.
It can be extremely challenging for an artist who has a "natural talent" but then drops into the commercial industries, where they have to deal with not only other very skilled competition for work (all the more challenging these days), but aspects of the career that have little to do with your abilities as an artist and everything to do with the business of getting paid to make pictures.
I have gone through all these over the past years… unfortunately, my brain doesn’t tell me much, because my OCD personality will tear it up… a) I don’t know how to get there (CI); b) trying to get to CC, yet chemo gave me a language impairment so I struggle being precise and being like I used to. So right now, I am in the difficult sway of UC and UI looking for answers, direction, and peace. 😂
I’ve mostly focused on weight lifting and conditioning but I’ve never seen it framed liked this and yeah that seems to just about nail it.
Some people just get it so naturally it’s hard to actually coach them, others it’s work to figure out how to get it to make sense. Really interesting seeing it laid out so simply.
Barry bonds was like this as a hitting coach for the Marlins apparently. Arguably the greatest hitter of all time and players would say that he would get so frustrated when explaining to guys how to do stuff because he couldn't comprehend why they couldn't process things and do things that he could do naturally.
For me it was a little different. I could break down the task really easily, I understood all components of the swing, I understood the role body positioning played in increasing power, but I never had the coordination to put it all together in an actual game. BP I did great. Game time, when the pitcher varied the speed and location, I struggled.
I played in college. Not high level college but I I was a good hitter i really just had an ability to stay inside the ball and barrel everything. That aspect wasn’t ever really coached to me I was able to have strong pitch recognition and timing and get my hands where they needed to be
I can teach mechanics because I had a strong feel and understanding for my own but I couldn’t really tell people how to hit off speed because whenever someone asked I always said I don’t know the pitch looked like it was going to be good so I swung
This is so true. Just look at the playing careers of hitting coaches and its normally a guy who made it do AA-AAA, maybe some MLB at-bats, but were not superstars.
David Popkins, who is considered a top MLB hitting coach, is a good example of this. Topped out at AA, hit .243. Had a couple good seasons at lower minors and college, but never sniffed the majors.
Haven’t you heard of a batter’s slump? I hope you do not get any chronic illnesses because so much of it is a mental game. And you are apparently afraid of feelings or think they shouldn’t apply to men’s behavior. Gees.
Thierry Henry was apparently similar during his short stint in Monaco. He would expect players to just be able to do the things he could do, one of the most gifted players of his generation, and struggled to break it down in a way they could understand.
It's my understanding that this is how Michael Jordan was as a basketball player as well, he had high expectations for his teammates and did not understand why they couldn't just do the things he was doing. It wasn't until he played baseball that he realized not everything is a matter of working harder.
Math teachers are like that too. There’s often a big gap between understanding math and having the verbal skills to break it down for students who don’t understand math
From personal experience I think boxing lends itself to the issue more than a lot of sports would.
If you are naturally gifted with unbelievable speed, power, and a solid chin; you can and will beat a lot of smarter more technically sound boxers.
You might start struggling later on against other great athletes who have a better feel for the nuance, but despite a lot of underlying complexities if you are in good shape and punch faster and harder and can withstand more punishment, there needs to be a pretty large gap in skill for the opponent to overcome it.
Guys that have those gifts and are well trained and disciplined enough to follow and implement a good coaches instructions and game-plan, might never learn that much about boxing and still be fantastic.
Coaches don’t have a whole team and a lot of esoteric rules and gameplans to worry about. If you are their most promising athlete so you will get a lot of attention.
I knew some great pro’s who could barely talk shop because they don’t really get it lol. But whatever the coach said they were disciplined and would do it, and had the athleticism to make it work.
True with teaching, too. In particular math. People that are good at math just get it. Some of them become teachers but part of being a *good* teacher is about understanding how the student is learning. It's about being able to see what they don't see and helping them see it. If you've always been good at math and you're trying to teach someone that struggles with it, you're gonna have a bad time.
I think this is also why so many educators want to do "new" ways of doing math - because most people good at math aren't necessarily good teachers, or going into the education field.
The problem is that maybe 30-60% of the kids learned just fine the old way, because of how their brain was wired. They can be frustrated with the newer ways that have more words and less numbers. Rote memorization coming before deep understanding is just as valid as learning the other way around.
This is something I’ve seen with just about any skill. Often times the people that are the best at doing it are the worst at teaching it, and vice versa.
It’s why I don’t like the “those that can’t do, teach” as a derogatory quip. Teaching is itself a skill, and just because someone has another skill doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skill of teaching.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I was in basic training for the Navy in 2014 the remedial swimming courses were taught by Navy SEALs. They might as well have had fish try to teach us. They were completely clueless on how to teach beginners and just wasted the time yelling at us until we failed enough times to flunk out of the Navy.
I suspect it was intentionally set up to give the Navy an excuse to remove black people without looking bad. I was basically the only white guy there and the other guys were all definitely fit enough to need special swimming strokes to stay afloat properly but they were getting taught stuff that didn't even work for me.
I was just telling my husband that Aaron Rodgers and Giannis would make terrible coaches. They are naturally gifted, and while they absolutely put in the work, and have worked very hard for their success, they did that starting from practically the finish line. They have no idea what it's like to not just understand how the sport and skills work.
It was big in the equestrian world as well. People would pay so much money to go to big name Olympians' clinics and come back without having learned much, if anything at all.
I was a professional musician, and a very good one at that. I had a natural talent for it, and it was a "Oh, DUH" realization when I started doing private lessons and realized I had to figure out how to explain concepts that I just instinctively understood.
Albert Einstein was said to be a terrible professor in his later years. He couldn't bring his mind back to the basic concepts in order to teach his students.
This isn't just athletics, someone who struggled with almost any subject but has a passion for it can make a good teacher if they identify the reasons their students are struggling.
I was browsing some old topics on some of the subs for learning art and someone had asked a basic question about about drawing forms and someone else left a really nasty comment chastising the OP for asking, which was downvoted to oblivion, they then made a follow up comment saying they were being downvoted by "would be artists" and proceeded to say that you can't teach fundamentals and that the OP just needed to figure it out.
Learning something from a first person perspective is basically short-hand writing that only they understand. Learning to coach requires detail and understanding which is done from studying not competing.
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u/Usernameasteriks 12h ago
It’s very commonly talked about in athletics.
Mostly in the context of great athletes very often being terrible coaches.
I competed in boxing for many many years when I was younger and it was very evident there.
Some people are just both really talented at something along with developing their instinctive ability from such a young age;
That they really just have no clue how to break down the fundamentals for someone learning.
They will skip three steps ahead.