Bryan Bros Shoot

Hey Will, I wanted to leave you a hint about how to come and explain a situation that most recreational players face… actually, you probably lived it yourself: the on and off cycles. It may be important for your instructions as this is a little resume or, if you prefer, a developmental psychology 101 for non-initiated.

When you aren’t very familiar with what I am about to present, you probably explain these things to yourself by trying to think out your state in the present moment… it was fatigue, I over-trained, I was not focused, etc. Well, I have a more sound explanation that has the nice advantage of showing you what you want to be shown: how to avoid it!!!

You spoke about a thing called “concentric circles of learning” — that’s kind of the cheap way to present it and, really, it’s not the original idea. The first person to speak of something like this lived in the Russian Empire and through the early USSR and he developed his theory in an attempt to bring the party a viable system to reform schools and education: Lev Vygostki, his name. The guy proposed something very nice because it not only proves itself worthy in motivity like in playing tennis, it is also true for emotional, social and cognitive abilities as well… any development in the human body follows this principle. Vygotski theorizes that there is a zone in which learning is possible – you called this the learning zone, he called this the “zone of proximal development.” The important part is not the common ground, but what explains the presence of this ground: he defined this zone as being what lies in between the minimal and maximal limits of potential development when the individual is given the resources and the constraints proper to the access of those abilities. One key thing here is constraints — you must set goals, ends, limits… anything that you MUST achieve. However, you cannot set any goal (put any constraint, more formally): it must be one that is achievable given the resources. In your case, resources means knowledge and equipment because all you can do for your subscribers is to give them theoretical lessons and you may propose some equipment for them to use, like anything that may stand as targets, for instance.

Now, I went a far way to talk of a rather simple thing. There are other principles, but one idea is really important: when there is stagnation (lack of progress), there is also, afterward, a regression. So, in reality, when you do the same damn easy thing over an over, you peak, stagnate, regress and then, at the bottom, when it again becomes hard to do, you get back to improvement and so on… so, those “on and off” cycles that you may even see on the pro tour, sometimes, are due to people doing the same damn thing too often and always in the same fashion. And, by “on and off” I mean literally, people who are able to play certain shots with ease one week and, then, totally fail the other — it’s like being able to write a word and, then, failing to do it one more time.

Now, what are people supposed to do? Well, it depends on so many things that I can’t explain that on here — just to cover very broadly a 0-1,5years old child, it would take over a hundred pages, imagine an adult! However, I won’t leave you without any other tool. What I can tell you is that those 4 dimension I mentioned above (physical, cognitive, emotional and social) are inter-determining… you’re not forced to act directly onto the sphere you want to modify. Let’s say a guy is convinced he can’t do it — if you’re a “mere mortal,” to quote you, you’ll probably tell him that he can. It’s unfortunate, but because the guy is convinced of this, I can tell you that he probably has an external locus of control (he believes he is victim of most of his successes and failures) and, if you tell him straight up (that’s trying to solve the emotional problem directly) he is likely to not listen. However, we know that social relations tend to impact this a lot… see where I am going? If you find a way to put this person in a social context that favors his valuation, he’ll get the self-esteem and motivation to try, succeed and recognize himself as the source. That’s the solution a psychologist would use.

So, I gave you two brand new tools you can play with… you can obviously read it, nodding, with a smile of approbation, or, you can try and see if you could actually render theory useful and improve the quality of your material knowing all too well that those simple two things could save frustration to thousands of people over even a single day.