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Key points
- When trying to improve or learn a new skill, people often get in their own way.
- People often focus too hard or get lost in negative self-talk, hindering their progress.
- Optimal performance requires a balance between tension and relaxation.
Some days were better than others. This is what Zohra Damji discovered when it came to understanding speech. She had been born profoundly deaf but learned English through reading and lip-reading. When she received a cochlear implant at age 12, she couldn’t wait to hear what words sounded like. But on the day her cochlear implant was turned on, she couldn’t distinguish people’s voices from all the other sounds around her. As she walked around the city, the sounds of voices, car motors, bird calls, the wind, music, and everything else all merged into an unintelligible cacophony. If it wasn’t for the encouragement of her family, she would have thrown away her new hearing device.
Having never heard speech before, it took months of therapy for Zohra to distinguish speech from other sounds, recognize spoken words, and understand whole sentences. Even after all the training, she still preferred to engage in conversation with one person at a time in a quiet room. Talking on the telephone, listening to a voice on the radio, or following a conversation around a busy dinner table could be exhausting.
Yet one day, when Zohra was on a tour of the Great Lakes with her family, feeling alert but relaxed, the voice of the distant tour guide came through loud and clear: “1926...Our next stop is the Central Harbor Front, Lake Ontario...Together they make up 21 percent of the world’s fresh water.” What a contrast this ease of listening was to some of her efforts in her speech therapy sessions. Her therapist encouraged her to concentrate harder, but some days, no matter how intensely Zohra concentrated, she still couldn’t get the words. Listening harder just didn’t seem to work.
In his fascinating memoir Rebuilt, Michael Chorost describes a similar struggle to understand speech with a cochlear implant. One day, while driving, he attempted to follow the voices on the car radio, but they all sounded like they were speaking “pseudo-English.” So he began to think about other things. Then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, he began hearing and understanding whole sentences. He found that if he concentrated intensely, the result was the same as if he paid no attention at all: He understood nothing. “You have to be calm, open, relaxed, alert. Poised at exactly the right mental place between idleness and tension," he wrote.
These experiences echo the theme of W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a book first published in the 1970s and still popular today. After years of teaching tennis, Gallwey realized that one of the greatest impediments to better performance was not a lack of speed or coordination but the way his students talked to themselves during a game: “I’m swinging the racket too late; my serve stinks!”
We’ve all been frustrated by similar situations. We may be playing a sport well, moving easily and fluidly, until we start thinking about our performance. And then our game falters. We may be playing the piano beautifully, just letting our fingers do the work, until we start telling ourselves how to play, thus breaking the flow.
When Zohra tensed up during a speech therapy session in an attempt to follow speech better, her attention was now diverted between understanding the words and telling herself how she was doing. What she and all of us need to do, as Gallwey emphasized, is to engage in the activity without self-judgment and self-consciousness. At some level, we’ve always known this. Think about common expressions about getting out of our own way or losing ourselves in an activity.
