Why A Coach Should Be Ambiguous

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Lifter

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Why A Coach Should Be Ambiguous | Cheap Talk

Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.

If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.

An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
 
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JonWil

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Lifter, interesting observations. I think how early, or late, a specific coach is engaged to progress a student's development is a marker for the possibility of 'conflicts of leading'. It seems a more individualized than generalized circumstance. In Mr. Miyagi's case he may have simply had two tasks at hand. One, to train the kid; and two, to get some stuff done around the house. :D
 
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Old Tom

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Lifter said:
I just thought this was interesting so I went ahead and shared it. To all you instructors out there, do you think Mr. Miyagi's approach applies to golf as well?
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In the movie, Miyagi was not just an expert at karate, but also a master of the essence of what karate was and what it meant with respect to being a human being. So far, in the real world of the game of golf, I think we have had many expert golfers at the highest level (Hogan, Snead, Woods, etc.), but few, if any who have known the essence of the thing in a way that they could impart it to others. That's where movies depart from reality.

From what I've read over the years, a few old timers seemed to come close, such as Percy Boomer and Bill Mehlhorn and Arnold Haultain, and a few more modern instructors were definitely on the right track, such as Jim Flick, but the current crop seems far off base. I think Jack Nicklaus knows, but he doesn't know how he knows and therefore what he says seems alien to anyone who doesn't already know because he can't fill in the critical gaps between his golf swing brain and the rest of us.

Old Tom
 
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DCgolf

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Old Tom said:
In the movie, Miyagi was not just an expert at karate, but also a master of the essence of what karate was and what it meant with respect to being a human being. So far, in the real world of the game of golf, I think we have had many expert golfers at the highest level (Hogan, Snead, Woods, etc.), but few, if any who have known the essence of the thing in a way that they could impart it to others. That's where movies depart from reality.

From what I've read over the years, a few old timers seemed to come close, such as Percy Boomer and Bill Mehlhorn and Arnold Haultain, and a few more modern instructors were definitely on the right track, such as Jim Flick, but the current crop seems far off base. I think Jack Nicklaus knows, but he doesn't know how he knows and therefore what he says seems alien to anyone who doesn't already know because he can't fill in the critical gaps between his golf swing brain and the rest of us.

Old Tom
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Like Shivas Irons or his buddy Seamus.
 
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wulsy

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There are many ways to teach golf, but this kind of approach only applies to 0.001% of golfers because golf is simply too hard to learn with the idea of fence painting or the like.
 
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