How a "Beginner's Mind" Can Improve Your Teaching and Coaching

written by John Strong, Niagara County Community College

Success enjoyed by individuals attempting something for the first time occurs so frequently that it's taken on the familiar moniker "beginner's luck." But rather than luck, perhaps there's more to these frequent successful occurrences. It's my experience that success often comes because beginners aren't encumbered with fears of previous failures. The Japanese term “shoshin” translates as "beginner's mind." Author Shunryu Suzuki commented, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."¹ As teachers and coaches, I believe there are advantages if we deliberately maintain a beginner's mind throughout our endeavors. Often we can achieve greater results and enjoy deeper personal satisfaction.

Picture yourself at the beginning of the year. Your students/athletes are seeing you for the first time after an extended period and seem relatively happy about it. Some seem to have grown, some perhaps matured, and some might be brand new faces altogether; but at this moment all things are possible. Now let's imagine two separate scenarios. First, you use experience to inform the decisions you make regarding class/practice structure, class/team management issues, and of course to shape your personal philosophy. Experience combined with a beginner's mind allows us to clearly see how past practices can be built upon (e.g. enhanced time management during class or practice episodes, clarity in the pitfalls of wasting time with elements that bear little fruit in the broader picture, etc), and can better help us attain our goals.

In contrast, experience's less helpful cousin is the expert mindset. The expert mindset creates a scenario where pessimism creeps in at the first sign of trouble. The expert mindset doesn't use experience as a teacher but rather a predictor of fortunes to come. With the expert mindset guiding our thinking we bemoan errors during instruction rather than giving better explanations or trying different ways to solve problems. We are unhappy with our students and complain more. With the expert mindset firmly in place we tend to quickly abandon the "well intentioned" plans of high performance at the first signs of trouble and replace them with a cobbled together mishmash of something destined to cause the least amount of confusion. What's worse is that in the expert's mind, "It was all inevitable in the first place. You could see it coming a mile away!"

Different authors agree that humans seem to have an odd tendency toward haphazard fortune telling. 2002 Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman quoted Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink² in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.³

(Gladwell) describes a massive failure of intuition: Americans elected President Harding, whose only qualification for the position was that he perfectly looked the part. Square jawed and tall, he was the perfect image of a strong and decisive leader. People voted for someone who looked strong and decisive without any other reason to believe that he was. An intuitive prediction of how Harding would perform as president arose from substituting one question for another (predicting the ability to perform as a leader vs. the ability to look like a leader).

The genius in Kahneman's thinking is multi-layered, but my point is that believing in our intuition is frequently far more problematic than many of us are ready to admit or understand. What Kahneman calls System 1 or Fast Thinking is what most of us use on a regular basis: the dismissive expert mindset. System 2 or Slow Thinking is far more deliberate and draws on logic in order to elude traps of unfounded intuition. A personal story from my experience at Niagara County Community College illustrates this point.

During my first semester as a Physical Education Teacher Educator I faced a problem that most instructors at some time experience: a student with a LOT of energy. As an elementary school physical educator I'd learned that these students were often labeled as hyperactive or ADHD. In high school the same students were sometimes referred to as "problem children." And I learned that adapted physical educators chose to view them as emotionally disturbed. Experience told me that I had a choice to make because inaction was not an option. My expert mind quickly thought to verbally chastise the student and embarrass away his unsavory energy in order to regain control of my class.

Luckily I chose to put off my "expert mind impulse" and cordially asked the student to finish what he was doing and then asked him to speak with me after the class was over. Away from the pressure of the class and the immediate need I felt for control and power, I was able to relate to that student how I appreciated the fact that he seemed "into the lesson," but that I felt his energy would be better spent focused on the needs of others and the deepening of his understanding of the subject matter. In short, I asked him to be less of a distraction and more of an aid to the enhancement of the classroom environment.

Well, I wouldn't be telling this story if it didn't turn out well, so I'll simply say that the student responded better than I could have ever hoped. The young man went on to make fine grades in all of the classes he took with me, went to college and got a job as a Physical Educator and coach (a task none-too-easy to complete in New York state believe me!).

So what can we learn from this story? That the quick reactions and intuitions of System 1 thinking sometimes preclude us from what turns out to be wonderful experiences both in academic and athletic settings. You can probably recall many similar parallels in sport. If the expert mindset was in place in the mind of Holger Geschwindner he wouldn't have let a seven-footer like Dirk Nowitzki dribble away from the basket, and certainly not turn into the shooter that has changed the mindset of how "big men" can play the game of basketball.

Put simply, what I'm encouraging you to think about is to maintain a beginner's mind when you teach and coach. Allow for the reality that has yet to reveal itself. Allow each day, each event, and each play to unfold in front of you without a pessimism that might otherwise taint the experience. It's tough to predict the possibilities of the young people we teach. Give them room to change and surprise you. Give them a "fresh start" every chance you get. Although we certainly shouldn't turn a blind eye to poor behavior it's a mistake to make quick decisions or judge people without opportunities for them to change. Allow experience to dictate how to maximize your professional practices by avoiding the expert mindset and embracing the beginner's mind of openness. If you do, you'll find yourself on the road to creating your own luck!

DOWNLOADS
¹Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice. Weatherhill, 1970
²Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Little, Brown and Company, 2005
³Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

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