curiositas
the latin root of curiosity: desire of knowledge, inquisitiveness
It’s that time of the month, where I sit down to think about what has captured my attention this month, and I think it’s hard to go past the concept of curiosity. Just last night, I found myself wandering on a street I’ve never been to, in a suburb I don’t remember the name of, and probably couldn’t find again if I had to. But I was chasing the sunset.
I thought this was a really cool way to explore the topic of perception, action coupling, something that I find can be quite inaccessible to the average person and yet it is all around us.
Last year, I was struck down by plantar fasciitis, excruciating pain in the soles of my feet, that made it very difficult to walk. Over the coming months, I would feel my action capabilities shrink, and the thought of exercising unbearable. I have never enjoyed exercise for the sake of it, so I would bury myself in team sports and scheduled training, but the more I learned about how to design good training sessions, the more unbearable an athlete I became.
I recently sat down with a friend who took far too much pleasure in role playing the kind of athlete I undoubtedly was, lowkey arguing with my coaches if they made a bad call, or questioning why we do things. Now, I would welcome those things as a coach because I want to curiously explore them together - I want to know why you think that wouldn't work, or why it wouldn't suit you, and I hope I asked them far more respectfully than the mock enactment was this time. (I promise this is connected)
In my treatment went through physiotherapists, trying to find the best course of action for a symptom that was incredibly individual, and often treated in a variety of ways. We tried just about everything, and the skill acq in me started to wonder If we were going about this the wrong way. We were so focused on the symptoms, the pain in my feet that I could barely overcome, but we never really looked for a cause.
Treating the feet helped occasionally, but progress over time was negligible, so we started to look at the rest of the body. We eventually found that my calf muscles were laughably tight. I may have avoided stress fractures as a child being a pace bowler, but that didn’t mean that the muscles in my back were not mad at me for all of those years spent bowling. We finally got to the point where I could dare to walk again, and once again, I could feel my action capabilities expand.
Please keep in mind, this is not my area of expertise, but it was fascinating being a somewhat passenger and sharing some ideas about complex systems with my practitioners as we worked through the problem together. It was this curious approach that I really resonated with, and started to find some success with.
Before I knew it, opportunities for action that were not available previously, started to return. Things that never would’ve crossed my mind like walking 4.5 km to work, and not hesitating for a second. I signed up for the gym even though I absolutely hate being there (the irony of being an exercise scientist is therefore not lost on me), but I knew that to keep my expanded action capabilities, I needed to keep showing my body that I am capable of so many things.
And just last night, for probably the first time in a year, I was able to walk with intention - to get the worst photo of the most beautiful sunset.
I wanted to use this example over time, and on a different scale of analysis, because we often talk about perception-action coupling as just information, then movement, then seeking more information, but it is so much broader than that. Not only is this cycle never ending and simultaneous, it happens over so many different timelines at once.
My ability to walk up a hill to get a better view of the coastline is a function of the year that I’ve just had, and the year that is upcoming, woven together. If the same moment had occurred eight months ago I probably wouldn’t have acted on it. I probably couldn’t have.
But this time the information I perceived was a pink tinged sky that I could not ignore, and my movement allowed me to chase it. I didn’t quite get to the vantage point I wanted, but I did spy a few interesting things along the way, like these footholds on a tree to help little people climb it, and a swing hanging from the higher branches.
I have always seen trees as climbable, fences as jumpable, hills as walkable, for as long as I can remember - but those affordances recently disappeared. Slowly, I can feel them coming back, but that’s only because I try to pay so much attention to the world around me.
One of my greatest sources of frustration recently is realising that not everybody can, or does, pay that much attention to anything at all, let alone to the people they are responsible for working with and supporting.
(No, I am never not thinking about coaching)
I get it, we are all busy. I am writing this with barely 30 minutes to spare on a leap year, which means I had an extra day to write this and I still didn’t have the time. I also know that my hyperactive mind affords me an infinite number of thoughts, so I get from the bad ideas to the good ones pretty quickly.
The cynic in me is lazy, and lashes out. If you catch me on a day where I have spent all my energy, you’ll hear the all-too-common rant about how our lack of intentionally as coaches is causing harm and nobody seems to care. On my good days, I try to be more humble and gentle about it, instead trying to focus on the ways I can inspire people to make the most of the time they have with young people, and ultimately reshaping their relationship with sport and physical activity for a lifetime.
Curiosity sees us continually attend to the wellbeing of what sparks our interest.
The wellbeing of what sparks our interest.
I just wanted to reiterate that. To me, this is exactly what coaching is about, when done well. Yes, we want to help people become more capable movers and performers, but to what end? If you’re more likely to be struck by lightning in Australia than to make it to the NBA in America (see below), what is the point? If we start with wellbeing, then curiosity is about asking how I can attend to that goal. My intention is set: create the best possible environment for the people in front of me.
To me, that has never meant running the sporting equivalent of a military training camp. And if someone genuinely believes they want/need that, my first question is where has that behaviour has been learned. Not just because I don’t think it’s enjoyable, but because it’s a waste of time, quite literally.
If I want to help someone learn something, I can seemingly fast-track that learning by solving the problem for them, but that’s not learning. They can now perform the solution to a problem, but what if that problem (or the conditions leading up to it) change by 1%? Chances are, that exact solution won’t work. And that frustration of thinking you have a grasp on something, only for it to be out of your reach again? One of the beautiful but exasperating moments of sport.
If we instead help learners to become problem solvers, then we are building in that adaptability to the various forms of a problem. A 1% change might not even be noticeable anymore, because it is no longer about making the same move, but working out what moves to make along the way to solve that problem, to win that moment.
We should be trying to do better, rather than doing more. And for me, I am led by my curiosity - a care-full attentiveness towards the things that matter for me, which ultimately comes down to this amazing quote by Cam Tradell:
There's a difference between delivering a sport to people and coaching the people in it.
Which one do you do?