Last year I wrote about the correct practice I had to find in order to catch a ball. If you haven't read it, you'll learn what a 35-year-old, half-blind, cross-eyed guy had to practice in order to reliably catch a moving object for the first time.
What's important to know from this, is while there's conventional practice that gets a lot of people at least started on acquiring a skill, no two of us are exactly alike. We're not physically alike and not cognitively alike. Even identical siblings move apart from each other from slight differences in experience that inevitably accumulate as they grow up and age.
My difference was profound enough that conventional practice was actually counterproductive.
From my post, "Not only does conventional instruction not work for me: the conventional instruction guarantees that I will fail. I would go to my grave believing that I couldn’t catch, if I hadn’t somehow broken out of my training."
In my practice as an educator, I've observed people who practice resilience, even in the absence of correct instruction, find their way to what works for them. When I worked with young adults with dyslexia, what made them successful wasn't in having overcome dyslexia, but in having learned how to make it an asset. What was troubling is what made them successful, often felt shameful. Their unorthodox paths to success made them feel they were cheating. They'd found their way to correct practice, but it wasn't validated by the correct-practice authorities.
While I had this experience while learning to catch. I've had a different experience with physical therapy. In addition to unconventional vision, I was born with ankle deformity. Over a lifetime of maintaining bipedal mobility, I've had physical therapy that hasn't corrected the condition, but which has taught me to manage it. Along the way, experiments with footwear haven't revealed conventional shoes that aren't counterproductive. I eventually found my way to a custom shoemaker, who makes shoes for unconventional feet. Correct shoes and correct practice in exercise and walking (correct for me) have kept me exceeding expectations in bipedality.
With the examples of catching and walking, there's another lesson in correct practice. Once I learned to catch, and enjoyed this long-withheld achievement for a while, I didn't continue practicing. By this point in life, I had better uses for my time, attention, and energy than increasing my skill at catching. However, I've determined the practice of walking is worth my time, attention, and energy, and engage the exercises that optimize my mobility every day. Not everything is worth the effort.
What's more, while those of us who need unconventional approaches seem adept at finding them through trial and error, it's time-consuming and costly. Another learning for me is that the world has a surprising number of canny teachers out there. The way to recognize them amid the noise of "six weeks to a better you!" goes down like this. Beverly watched me swim, "Try this," she said. She watched some more, "Now try this." Terri measured my feet in dimensions they'd never been measured before. She watched me walk, again and again. She took a mold of them, and made a prototype. Then she said, "How does this feel? Now how does this feel? Amy, a physical therapist, said, "Do this. How does this feel? Now do this. How does this feel? Try this for a week and we'll look at it again.
Try on these ideas for a week. Please tell me how they feel. francis.sopper@kairoscognition.com
Do you or someone you know want to be measured in dimensions you've never been measured before? Try the Kairos Assessment
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
catch a ball: https://www.kairoscognition.com/blog/2683accf59d09858
educator: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/seanchai-storytelling-keepers-irelands-folklore-heritage
Kairos Assessment: https://www.kairoscognition.com/assessments/da21b793beb5de