Invisible barriers (part 1)
When you teach something to someone, focus what is blocking their learning.
This summer, I tried to teach my kids (3 and 4 years old) how to swim. They had become comfortable in the water, but only with floating belts on. I had no idea at what age could kids start swimming, so I gave it a try.
I removed their belts, and improvised a swimming class. First, on the grass, by showing them the arm and legs movements, and helping them rehearse. And then, in the water, by holding them while they were putting these movements into practice.
It was a total failure.
Their perfectly-mastered body movements turned into panic reactions the second their heads went under water. I concluded that they were probably too small to be able to swim…
But an old stoic mantra came to my mind: What stands in the way becomes the way.
What does that mean? Simply that, when trying to achieve something, you can choose to look at obstacles as indications of where you should put your efforts on — not as excuses to stop pursuing your goal.
Applied to my situation, the way forward became obvious — especially for my naive mind that didn’t have any preconceived view about how to teach swimming. For my kids, the biggest obstacle was their fear of drowning. So we should forget about swimming, and just focus on how to put our heads under water.
Exit the body movements, enter the breathing exercise.
Slowly, we practiced dipping our chin under water. Then our mouth. Then our nose. With our eyes closed. With our eyes open. Then our entire face, for 1 second. For 2 seconds. For 5 seconds. We tried to touch our toes with our hands. We threw an object in the water, and picked it up. We threw multiples objects, and picked them up in one go. Beneath the surface, they discovered they could sit, and kneel, and lie down. They even learned how to pass in between my legs. They were so proud of it that they asked their grandparents to film them.
After a couple of days, the fear was gone. Being under water had become fun.
The best part of that story? In the end, they did make progress in swimming. First, under water. Then, later, they started to pull their heads out.
As you may have guessed by now, I have no idea where this newsletter is going. However, this short story is probably a good example of what I usually write about:
Look at an ordinary situation;
Try to understand what is happening in the person’s brain;
Find a source of inspiration from another field;
Come up with a way to connect it to the situation;
See what happens.
This story was about accelerating learning by removing a mental barrier that was blocking physical progress.
The next story will be the opposite: removing a physical barrier blocking mental progress.
Thank you to Fabien Crombé, Ayça Sevkal-Guyot and Maël Berkouk for reading early drafts of this article, and to Laurent Memmi for having tattooed The obstacle is the way on his arm.