I recently worked with a 10-year-old girl on her backhand and what I discovered was something that every single adult competitive tennis player needs to hear.
This kid is incredibly coordinated, athletic, and she has a great coach. And yet, she still has technical flaws she’s working through. Right off the bat, that’s lesson number one. A lot of us adult players walk around thinking “Man, if only I had started younger… if only I had that young brain and that young body…” And sure, it IS easier to learn the game when you’re 10. But it does not guarantee you’re going to have perfect technique. So please, stop beating yourself up about trying to get better at whatever age you are right now.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting…
In chapter five of my book I talk about a concept I call the Improvement Circle. And this young player’s backhand is the PERFECT example of how it works.
The Improvement Circle has four phases. The first is unconscious incompetence, where you simply don’t know what you don’t know. Then comes conscious incompetence, where you now have information but you still can’t execute it correctly. After that is conscious competence, where you can do it right but only when you’re actively thinking about it. And finally, subconscious competence, where you’ve practiced enough that the skill just happens automatically without you having to think about it.
So where was this girl stuck with her backhand? You’d think it was simple. You’d think she just didn’t know she was supposed to drop her racket down and swing low to high. But here’s the crazy part…
She’s been told to swing low to high a thousand times. Her coach has drilled it into her. And when I watched her shadow swing between rallies, she naturally dropped the racket down and swung upward through contact. She already KNOWS what to do. She can even DO it when she’s not under pressure. But the moment she’s actually hitting a ball in a real situation, her old habit takes over and her swing goes completely level, launching the ball way up in the air.
She’s not stuck because she lacks knowledge. She’s stuck in that gap between conscious competence and subconscious competence. And that gap is where so many of us live.
Here’s the thing though. I’m not immune to this either. I get stuck in this exact same cycle. And so do you. 99% of all humans have to grind through this process. We struggle, we get stuck, and sometimes we stay stuck for a really long time. The 1% who just hear something once and immediately do it perfectly? Those people have a level of natural coordination and talent that is exceedingly rare. And that’s okay. That’s not most of us.
So if you’re feeling stuck right now, I want you to know something. It doesn’t mean you’re not working hard enough. It doesn’t mean you’re too old. It means you haven’t yet made your way through to that subconscious competence phase of the Improvement Circle. And that takes the right kind of practice, done enough times, with the right amount of focus.
That’s the real work. And it’s worth it.
Keep working. I’m proud of you.
Your Coach,
Ian
