Nothing outside yourself can cause you any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind
– Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
In essence, the profligate use of cognitive strategies overvalues the role of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings in performance.
– The Elephant in the Room: Feel and Its Role in the Nothing State of High-Quality Performance
Elephants do not belong in the room. The phrase refers to an issue that is weighing heavily on every mind present but which cannot be addressed openly because it would rock the boat. The way this phrase has been used relegates the noble elephant to the unenviable position of being something to get out of the way.
Kimiecik and Newburg (2021) disagree with this and pretty much everything we have come to accept as truth in relation to the mind game, not mind games. The former refers to the mental state of a performer and the latter refers to “a psychological tactic used to manipulate or intimidate” (Merriam-Webster). In a most refreshing and enlightening way, these authors who have co-written other books, have used the phrase differently in a manner which restores the noble elephant to its place of honour by suggesting that we should let the elephant have its way.
Their article employed the metaphor of the elephant and its rider. They used the elephant to refer to our subconscious mind and the rider to the conscious mind. They say that for some time now, performance coaches have been focusing on thoughts before, during and after some performance. This is to emphasise the rider’s control over the elephant.
According to them, top performers do not attempt to contextualise their performance or to consciously control their experience of performing. Instead, like the elephant, they, “naturally live by touch, feel, and play”.
In their words, “the real secret … of high-quality performance” is not rider in control of the elephant but what they term as “Elephant with rider”. We can think of it this way. In the movie Avatar, a Na’vi warrior has to bond with a mountain banshee which is a dragon like creature so as to become its rider.
The mountain banshee is a feral creature, one which is forbidding and awesome. In the real world, Man has devised several techniques to exercise control over his fellow man, larger animals and the environment in general. In the same vein, there have been attempts to deconstruct expert performance and to codify such performance in the form of techniques.
In Avatar, the Na’vi warriors do not resort to dehumanizing and condescending measures to manipulate the banshees. A Na’vi warrior does not resort to some version of behaviourism or mind games. An example of these would be in the Korean drama, Start-Up. Here Won In-Jae, an erstwhile scion of a wealthy businessman, Won Doo-Jung calls him out for starving his pet dog, so that it became entirely dependent on him regardless of how he treated it.
In stark contrast, before a Na’vi warrior rides his dragon like creature, he approaches it with respect. He feels its presence and allows it to feel his. This is not unlike how horse riders get acquainted with their equestrian counterparts. It is through this mutual experience of being present with each other that the Banshee begins to accept the warrior. In this sense, when a Na’vi warrior says he is riding the dragon, he really means he is one with the dragon. He does not exist independently of the dragon.
The subconscious mind, whether we think of it as the elephant, a dragon or Banshee, is far more powerful than the rider, which is our conscious mind. When the performer allows the subconscious mind to lead, she produces masterpieces. An exaggerated illustration of this is found in the series Heroes, where Isaac Mendez, a painter goes into trance like state, when “his pupils and irises fade into light white colour and he becomes unresponsively focused on painting the images in his mind” (Wikipedia). Isaac would never be able to tell exactly how his masterpieces (which could accurately foretell the future) were created.
In the same way, many world-class performers (WCP) have reported entering a trance like state where they are entirely unconscious of what they are doing when they are doing it. They all report having feel ‘ed’ their way through the performance. Kimiecik and Newburg list a number of WCPs. The illustrious list includes exceptional performers in different areas, such as Tiger Woods who ESPN reported as saying, “I got my feels back”, Buck Brannaman, a horse trainer who described the relationship between horse and rider as “you both feel together” and Bono from U2 who said of his “experience with music” as “the greatest feeling I could have”. It would be remiss to not also mention Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, who said, “you must never think at the typewriter, you must feel”.
In sum, exceptional performances are rendered when the performer thinks nothing but feels everything. The word feel has been used synonymously with emotions. How are you feeling right now? I feel excited, happy, nervous and so on. Kimiecik and Newburg distinguish feel from feeling. They say emotions interfere with performance; “our feelings about things are high in energy, but low in helpful information about reality” and contrast these with feel which is “the body’s experience and skill of sensing and knowing what’s happening in the moment”. They describe feel as “primordial” and as a “feeling of rightness”.
They caution that feeling right is not the same as feeling good. They say that learners often need to feel good about themselves and tend to be overly confident about their abilities. For example, “despite their predictions that they could and would improve the skill”, learners did not improve in the least after watching YouTube videos which demonstrated some skill – “In watching, the participants thought they were learning.” It was only when “participants watched others juggle, and then were able to hold the juggling pins in their hands (a “taste” of performing), were they more realistic in their predictions”.
The foregoing paragraph discloses two points.
First, learners cannot improve by hearing someone speak or watching someone execute some task in the front of a class. They may mistake mere engagement for learning. If for example, the presenters look good and are charismatic, they are likely to mesmerise the audience. The learners would be fixated on the teacher who is very expressive and may have other engaging qualities. The only person who improves at anything in this scenario is the person talking in front of the class. This person becomes well-versed at sustaining the attention of desk-bound learners whether it be in a physical classroom or through a video-conferencing software.
By hearing someone speak or seeing someone do something on a whiteboard or smartboard whether it be with a chalk or a high-tech looking pointer, students would not get a feel of what it is like to try the task themselves. This brings us to the second point which is that it is only when students can feel a task, that they get good at it.
So, what exactly does feel mean in the context of English Language learning and how do students feel their way to excellent performance? Feel does mean the absence of thinking but only a certain form of it. A quote from Michael Phelps, also from Kimiecik and Newburg would help untangle this apparent paradox. He said, “I’m not thinking…I’m blocking everything else out”.
What he was referring to was “creating a rhythm of the body to bypass debilitating cognitions” (Winter et al., 2013 as cited in Kimiecik and Newburg, 2021). These debilitating cognitions refer to the attachment of meaning to experience.
When a student attempts an open-ended comprehension passage, several thoughts could run through her mind. Many of these would have nothing to do with the task at hand. It is very tempting to allow the conscious mind to take over – This is hard. I don’t understand this word. I didn’t do well the last time. What might happen if I don’t do well this time? What will I do after the test? Oh well, results are not important. There are other things in life.
These thoughts are debilitating. They prevent the student from accessing the fullness of her abilities. They prevent the student from thinking about the passage and her answers to the questions set on the passage.
Such thoughts are natural and would find their way into the minds of even the most proficient students. During such times, according to Shunryu Suzuki, the student should not catch hold of such thoughts but simply let them be. When she ignores these thoughts, her mind would be free to focus on the passage. She should not even be thinking in the sense of consciously evaluating her answers. What feel means here, is when she simply writes according to what feels right and there is no scratchy feeling.
When a student has spent enough time being present with a task, she would know what feels right and what does not. Being present means having tried her hand and this in turn means, having received sufficient feedback in various forms be it from peers or an instructor who is sufficiently available. During the exam, all she has to do is go with what feels right.
In this way, she becomes one with the task. She works on the test entirely on feel. When the subconscious mind registers a scratchy feeling, she could direct her conscious mind to address the dissonance. When the conscious mind is stuck, she could empty her mind of worry and just wait calmly for the subconscious mind to throw up the answer. In this way, there is oneness between the task, her subconscious and conscious minds.
The good performer does think, just not in the way we’d think.
The Brain Dojo
