What My Tennis Coach Taught Me About Change

Personal transformation through deliberate practice.

Image from Wikimedia

Change is Hard, But This is the Way. See. Do. Teach.

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I took tennis lessons once. The coach asked me to show him my serve. I hit a few. I looked over and saw him shake his head. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

First, he had me put my racquet down and practice tossing the ball up in the air. He showed me what I was doing wrong. I was bending my elbow, causing the ball to go behind me where I couldn’t hit it well. He showed me how to toss it right. “Keep that elbow straight,” he said.

This simple interaction reveals the first crucial step in any change process: accurately identifying what’s not working and learning a better alternative.

In both tennis and life, we often struggle not because we lack effort, but because we haven’t seen the problem or the solution. First, you must know what sanity is and compare it to what you’ve been doing. You have to know how to do it right to know what you’re doing wrong.

Psychotherapy involves learning to do things differently. The couple who’s coming in for marriage counseling needs to learn to listen and respond differently. The anxious person must learn to relax; the depressed one…