Jack Boss Coaching

I used to be great at throwing a baseball.  I went to a small elementary school where there weren’t enough boys to field a full team and my parents never let me sign up for Little League, but I could always find someone to play catch with at recess.  These are some of my fondest memories, and I’m still friends with one of the boys I played with.

I always wondered, though, how we got it right.  At age eight, we could throw accurately from distances of anywhere from ten to well over a hundred feet.  We could take into account the incline of the terrain, the wind, the arc of the ball, our level of fatigue, and even the quality of our grip on the ball.  If there was going to be a close play, I remember being able to anticipate how the baserunner was likely to slide and to figure out where to aim the ball for the easiest tag.  All this came together in the fraction of a second before I launched the ball.

So, how could I know all this?  I also had a boyhood fascination with things military and I remember how hard it seemed to get an artillery cannon to launch a shell in a way that could take a fraction of these factors into account.  It involved complex equations for each variable–gravity, wind, terrain, and trajectory–and required fat reference manuals full of charts, or, later, computers.

As for throwing the baseball, though, the answer seems to be that I remembered how to do it.  In other words, I had thrown a ball so many times, over so many distances, across such variable terrain, into and against the wind, etc., that my neuro-skeletal-muscular systems could draw from this experiential data and make a very good guess as to what was called for by the specific variables of a specific throw.  Some neuronal circuitry converted my sensory data (distance, wind, terrain, grip, etc.) into specific instructions for muscle fibers and the proprioceptive sense that told me that I was moving correctly through space.

So, what does all this have to do with anything?  Well, what doesn’t it have to do with?  We’re not like the computers that aim artillary cannons with equations.  We’re data miners and supercrunchers, who utilize a lifetime of experience to make sense of and act at every moment of our lives.  How do we guage the tenor of an interaction, when it’s appropriate to say something, how best to intervene in a situation, what to do when someone is angry with us, etc.?  We do so by comparing it to all the data we have gained from past incidences of similar occurances.

This is an easy way to conceive of what have been known as unconscious dynamics: our tendency to repeat interpersonal dynamics, relive relational patterns and make the same mistake over and over again are simply because we’re modeling our current situation on memories, but behaviors that might have been adaptive and functional in the past can’t adequately recognize the newness, individuality and uniqueness of the present.  The problem is that we live in a world more complex than the baseball infield.  The sophisticated mind we have are adequate for relatively straightforward, honest  activities that involve Newtonian physics or for the daily life dynamics of getting along in the social pack.  We had to evolve these skills in order to hunt mastadons and to negotiate our primate social lives.

But we haven’t adequately adapted to a world where we are faced with unprecedented newness every day.  We tend to assimilate new situations to old ones, getting stuck in rigid cognitive frameworks for situations that require change and transformation, not more of the same.  This is one reason why it’s so hard to change and hard to get others to change.