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Browsing Posts in Information Processing

Learning Something New to Overcome Bad Habits

Language and Communication for Canoe and Kayak Coaches

It’s a lot easier to learn something new than to re-learn something and overcome bad habits or inappropriate schema.  Coaches know this, and students know this too, so the very mention of ‘re-learning’ means an uphill challenge before we even start coaching.  So how can coaches use this to their advantage?

We can reframe the situation, and utilise the curiosity and eagerness our students possess.  Instead of going through the long and painful process of re-learning, invite your students to learn how to do things in a different way.

It’s a lot easier to learn another way of achieving something – and it gives us more options!

For more information or training in how to use NLP in your coaching please contact me at Kim@kimbull.co.uk

Open canoe, sea kayak and white water courses and coaching, 1:1 and group workshops, BCU Training and Assessments in Northumberland and the North East.

All Articles, Canoe and Kayak Articles, Coaching Articles, Communication, Information Processing, Language of Change none

The Focus of Canoe and Kayak Leadership

Decision Making for Canoe and Kayak Leaders

Have you ever wondered how really good leaders make the right decisions?  How do they know when to stop the group and put them in a safe place while they paddle something or scout ahead?  How do they know when to stop the group and change strategy?

One thing they do is unconsciously monitor where they are placing their focus of attention.

Evidence suggests we can only focus our attention on one thing at a time.  However, we can switch focus from one thing to another quickly, with practice.  What we need to decide is how much of our time we should spend attending to any particular thing.

There are so many things we could attend to, and they can be put into three general categories-

  • The Environment (including the weather, the water and hazards)
  • The Group (including their performance, welfare and morale)
  • Ourself (our emotional state, the skills we’re performing, and our physical feelings eg temperature)

Good leaders are paying attention to these three areas in different proportions, and these proportions will vary depending on the situation.

If a leader is well within their own comfort zone, their focus of attention may look something like this-

Focus of Attention

Group

45%

Environment

45%

Self

10%

Now, imagine that the group arrive at a challenging piece of water.  The Leader decides that he needs to pay more attention to the environment – perhaps 70% of his attention. But that means the very most he can attend to the group is 30%, perhaps not enough.  So the leader stops the group, puts them in a safe place, and no longer has to worry about them while he pays attention to the environment and his own safety.

Now, perhaps the leader decides that the challenges ahead are within the capabilities of the group, but when actually paddling the leader will have to concentrate of his own performance and increase the focus of attention on himself to 50%.  And he’ll need to adapt his performance within the environment, so the environment requires 40% attention.  Again, that means that he cannot focus on keeping the group safe, so he decides to run the water one at a time with those not running it safely out of harms way.

So next time you’re out with your groups, have a think about how much attention you are paying to these different areas at different times and in different places.  Calibrating this can be a useful way to know when it’s time to change strategy.

For more information on leadership, coaching and courses please contact me at Kim@kimbull.co.uk

Open canoe, sea kayak and white water courses and coaching, 1:1 and group workshops, BCU Training and Assessments in Northumberland and the North East.

All Articles, Information Processing, The Focus of Canoe and Kayak Leadership, White Water none

The 4MAT System – the Easy Guide to Learning Styles when Kayak and Canoe Coaching

Canoe and Kayak Coaching Learning Styles

The 4MAT System – the Easy Guide to Learning Styles when Kayak and Canoe Coaching

Introduction

The 4MAT system allows you to easily meet the learning styles of your students.  Many people find it useful because it is an easy structure which you can incorporate into all of your coaching sessions.  One reason for doing this is to allow you to keep more students engaged for longer and make your coaching even more effective.  This article will explain what the simple steps are so you can use them straight away whenever you coach.  I’ll explain how to use the system with practical examples.  And when you apply the 4MAT system you’ll be amazed at the effect it has on your coaching and your students – and you won’t have to worry about meeting the needs of people with different learning styles anymore as the system incorporates these for you.

The 4MAT System and Learning Styles

The 4MAT System comes from a study of learning styles by Bernice McCarthy.  She noticed that people with different learning styles learnt by asking particular questions.

Some people asked Why? Why are we doing this, why should I participate?

Some people wanted facts – they wanted information – and asked the ‘What’ question.  What are we going to do?  What’s happening?  What’s this for?

Others were interested in asking ‘How?’ How does this happen?  How does this work?

The last group wanted to explore future consequences, and asked What If? What would happen if I did this?  What would happen if I did it that way?

There is clearly a relationship between these 4MAT categories and Jung’s psychological types, Kolb’s learning styles and the work of Honey and Mumford.  These links are shown here-

4MAT

Kolb

Honey and Mumford

Jung

Why?

Abstract

Reflector

Introvert

What?

Concrete experience

Activist

Extrovert

How?

Active experimentation

Pragmatist

Feeler

What if?

Reflective observation

Theorist

Thinker

So how can canoe and kayak coaches use this?  When coaching, we can build the answers to the 4MAT question categories into our sessions to ensure we meet the needs of all of our learners and therefore all the learning styles.  Here’s one way of doing this when you coach-

  1. Start by answering the question ‘Why?’, because until you give reasons answering the question “Why should I bother learning this?” the Why groups won’t engage in the learning.  Until this question is fully answered, Reflectors won’t be ready to participate further.
  2. Then give the ‘What?’ information.  Let the What group know there’ll be plenty of action.  This group will also be satisfied by an activity – they’re Activist so let them loose.
  3. Thirdly, answer the ‘How?’ question and let the How group experiment with the content of the session.  Pragmatists want to know how they will use the skill in a range of practical situations.
  4. Finally, answer the ‘What if?’ question by putting the skill in context.  You can also engage the What ifs by inviting questions – “What did you discover?  What questions do you have?”  The Theorists will open up and ask questions as they build theories for the future.

So, for every major section of learning-

  1. The first thing to do is introduce it and then say “This is why you would want to know this”, and then give some reasons.
  2. And then, give the knowledge and information – “This is what you do, this is what it looks like, and these are the key points.”
  3. And then, invite your students to go away and learn/experiment with how to do it in different contexts.
  4. When they come back, tell them what will happen if they use it in real situations, and invite questions and feedback.

In your coaching, by taking your students through this simple process you are giving them experience of every learning style, and everyone in the group, whatever their learning style is satisfied.

In Summary

I’ll finish with a practical illustration-

The reasons why you need to know this are that you want your students to be fully engaged throughout your coaching.  In the past, you may have had some people switch off, or at some point half way through ask ‘Why are we doing this?’, and it would be good to avoid such situations again, wouldn’t it?  This is why you need to know this.

What this is all about is that people have different learning styles and assimilate information in different ways.  These learning styles are generally satisfied when certain information or questions are answered.  Each of us has a preference for one of these questions.  This is what you are learning.

Think about how easily you can use this structure in your coaching and engage with all of your students because you are answering the question they are thinking about (either consciously or unconsciously) before they have to ask it. How you will do this is by following the simple steps above.  This is how you will actually use this in a practical sense, and how you will implement these ideas into your coaching.

And what if you’re thinking, “What if I started structuring my coaching in this way?  What would be the consequences if I did this from now onwards?”  One of the consequences would be that all of your students would have been presented with the content of your coaching session in a format that most suited them.  As well as allowing them to assimilate the information they wanted in the way they preferred, you have helped them learn easily and given them experience of the other learning styles too.  This is what will happen if you do this.

If you need another example, go back and read the introduction again.

For more information about BCU coaching courses, training in NLP and learning styles please contact Kim.  Canoe coaching, kayak coaching, BCU training courses and assessments are available in the north of England, Cumbria, the borders of Scotland and beyond.

Email -  kim@kimbull.co.uk

All Articles, Canoe and Kayak Articles, Coaching Articles, Information Processing, The 4MAT System – the Easy Guide to Learning Styles when Kayak and Canoe Coaching, Uncategorised 4MAT, learning styles

Information Processing for Canoe and Kayak Coaching

Information Processing for Canoe and Kayak Coaching

When were learn, we are processing information.  It has been estimated that at any time we may have up to two billion pieces of information bombarding our senses.  Evidence suggests we can only process 7+/-2 pieces of information, so a key skill for coaches is being able to direct the attention of our students to process appropriate information.

This clip, from the ‘NLP for Sports Excellence’ training, explains how the processes on Generalisation, Deletion and Distortion affect the way we process information.

For more information on how these skills can help you, contact Kim.

For details of canoe and kayak training, BCU courses and canoe coaching or kayak coaching contact Kim Bull.  Training courses run throughout the North East, Cumbria and the borders of Scotland.

Email – kim@kimbull.co.uk

All Articles, Coaching Articles, Information Processing, Information Processing for Canoe and Kayak Coaching, Uncategorised Information Processing, psychology

Learning and Your Conscious and Unconscious Mind: A Canoe and Kayak Perspective

Learning and Your Conscious and Unconscious Mind:  A Canoe and Kayak Perspective

We are all aware that we have a conscious mind, and we could all benefit by building trust between it and our unconscious mind.  So what is our unconscious mind?  Our unconscious mind runs everything that we don’t do consciously.

There’s a model of learning that illustrates the conscious/unconscious mind link very well.

STAGE 1

Unconscious Incompetence

STAGE 2

Conscious Incompetence

STAGE 3

Conscious Competence

STAGE 4

Unconsious Competence

It suggests that when someone learns a new skill they start by not even knowing that they can’t do it, because they don’t know it exists to be done.  Then they realise that they can’t do it.  As we learn it we get to know that we can do it but only if we concentrate.  Finally, the skill becomes automatic and you can do it without thinking.  At this stage it is your unconscious mind that looks after the skill for you.

How many times have you been doing something unconsciously without having to think about it?  You do not consciously ‘manage’ your body, your unconscious mind does.  You don’t have to consciously breathe, but you can if you want to.  So if we can trust our unconscious mind to breathe for us then we can trust it with other tasks too.

Would you trust your unconscious mind with other skills you’ve learned such as driving your car?  If you’ve ever been driving and arrived at your destination but don’t remember details of the journey then that’s exactly what you do.  If you remember first learning to drive (when you were consciously incompetent) it may have seemed complicated.  But now your unconscious mind drives you and navigates you safely even though you are not consciously aware and you are ‘miles away’ in some kind of trance.  If a dangerous situation had arisen, your unconscious mind would have said ‘Hey, I need some help here!’ and you would take over driving consciously.  In fact, at any particular time most of the cars on the road are being driven by unconscious minds, all quite safely!

So if you trust your unconscious mind to keep your heart beating and you trust it to drive you then you can certainly trust it in your sport too.  And one of the main reasons for trusting it is because it contains all the resources you need.  It ‘knows’ all of the things you don’t consciously know now.  How many times have you resolved a problem not by conscious thought but by sleeping on it, and the next day the answer just pops into your head?  You know that when you’ve forgotten something the answer can be on the tip of your tongue, but the harder you try to consciously remember, the more elusive it is.  It’s only when you let your unconscious mind take over (by not thinking about it) that you are able to remember.  So you not only know more than you might think, you actually know a great deal more about everything to do with your sport because you don’t have conscious access to the majority of what you do actually ‘know’.

So just like solving a problem by ‘sleeping on it’, you can overcome many of your sporting problems by tapping into your unconscious mind for the answers you need and know now that you don’t yet consciously know.  And that’s good!

I suspect you already know that one of the best ways of doing this is to access your unconscious mind through sports hypnosis and NLP.  And imagine how good you will be when you have progressed through the learning model to ‘unconscious competence’ and then go beyond it -

So for now be aware that your conscious mind just represents the tip of the iceberg and as you start to trust your unconscious mind you are making friends with a dormant giant within.  Future articles will examine ways of harnessing the unconscious mind and dealing with distractions – a key skill in keeping ‘in the zone’.

“In judo, he who thinks is immediately thrown.  Victory is assured to those who are mentally non-resistant.”

Robert Linssen.

Contact Kim for training in how to develop your skills in this area

Key Benefits

-Learn to tap into your vast unconscious resources.

-Bring your whole mind into action.

-Lead yourself to enhanced performance.

For details of canoe and kayak training, BCU courses and canoe coaching or kayak coaching contact Kim Bull.  Training courses run throughout the North East, Cumbria and the borders of Scotland.

Email – kim@kimbull.co.uk

All Articles, Coaching Articles, Information Processing, Learning and Your Conscious and Unconscious Mind, Uncategorised canoe, kayak, NLP

Aiding Effective Learning for the Canoe and Kayak Coach

Aiding Effective Learning for the Canoe and Kayak Coach

I’m always really curious about how students perceive the information shared with them.  I was speaking with several people recently who had all been taught the same things but by different coaches.  I found it really interesting that they formed completely different opinions about the content of a lesson depending on who their coach was. Take a few moments to read through the simple steps outlined in this article that will let you shape the opinion and point of view of those you communicate with in a positive way.

A great deal of scientific work has been done on how we learn the physical and psychological things that allow us to become skilled in our sports.  However, the link between the learning of the skill and our opinion of the learning process and perception of the skill is often neglected.  Our perceptions and opinions can be one of the most important influences on how well we progress in our sport, and have an important effect on the rate and quality of our learning.

The Motor Skill Learning Bit

We are already aware that many new skills contain too much information for beginners to handle.  It is widely recognised that learners organise large amounts of information into more manageable units.  This strategy is known as subjective organisation and involves the organisation of information that must be remembered in a way that is meaningful for the individual.  Other terms for this are chunking, clustering and grouping.

The important thing is that the chunks become meaningful to the individual.  This implies that we have some mental strategy that associates new information with things we already know.  In coaching terms this is sometimes called finding ‘hooks and hangers’ within the learners brain.  For example, we might break a complicated new skill down into a series of relatively simple parts with each part being in some way already familiar to our students.

‘Hooks and hangers’ imply our memory is like storing things in cupboards.  What we don’t consider so often is that our brains don’t work in a linear fashion with a wardrobe for each cluster of information, but more like a huge walk in dressing room with an infinite number of doors.  This means that the same skill can be stored behind many different doors and retrieved from our memories when any of a range of similar doors are opened.

For example, imagine you’re a good skier but are now going for surfing lessons.  These skills might seem totally unrelated (different cupboard doors), but when your coach starts to explain about using the edges of the board to carve on the wave, the label ‘edge’ you’ve learned from skiing gives you the information you need to help learn the new surfing skill.  Although you may be forming a surfing cupboard door to store information in, the ‘edging’ label is common to both and regardless of whether you go to this label through the skiing or the surfing cupboard door, ‘edging’ now has more meaningful information associated with it in both contexts.

Now your brain is really clever. What if edging was called something else too?  Well, our brains can store the same information under different labels.  ‘Edging’ and ‘carving’ are very similar examples, and when learning something new our brains seek to generalise in many ways, so it may be given many labels.

The NLP Bit

We have labels for things like ‘edging’ and ‘carving’ and also for things like ‘difficult’, ‘hard’ and ‘scary’.  So when coaching, if we say ‘We’re now going to learn to carve, which some people may find difficult’, you can guarantee that most of the students will generalise the ‘some people’ to mean them and also file ‘carving’ firmly in the cupboard labeled ‘Things I Find Difficult’ – and this is before they’ve even tried it!

If a coach introduces a new task with the words ‘Today we’re going to try some of the harder advanced skills’, where do you think we will file these?  Even from our first few attempts our unconscious mind will be thinking ‘These are going to be hard to learn, and to make sure I’m right I might throw the odd spanner in the works to back this belief up.’  And it will do this all unconsciously so your conscious mind never knows what’s sabotaging it’s learning!

I’ve always wondered why canoeists and kayakers give white water rapids names like ‘jaws of death’, and ‘the graveyard’.  I know many paddlers who have read these names in the guidebook on the way to the river and become a gibbering wreck before they even get on the water!  I wonder which mental cupboard doors they’ve opened, and what else they found inside.

Lead Your students to the Most Useful Cupboard Doors

Remember, we have lots of cupboard doors with great labels on them – ‘fun’, ‘exciting’, ‘easy’, ‘simply’; so why not use these instead?  ‘Today we’re going to learn some of the fun advanced skills’, it sounds better already doesn’t it?

As a coach don’t you want your students to associate what you’re teaching them with all the other things they’ve found fun and enjoyable?  When they do, their unconscious mind will be generalising across what you’re teaching them and what they already have behind their ‘fun’ cupbaord door.  All of a sudden they think your session is so much more fun than the one they had the previous week -you know, the one where they tried some of the harder advanced skills.

And now’s the time to consider the easiest way for you to use this knowledge.  Take a moment to think about what was most useful for you in this article, and when will be your first opportunity to slide some of these simple language skills into your coaching. And have fun with it while you do!

Contact Kim for training in how to develop your skills in this area

Key Benefits

-Effective coaching and learning.

-Positive communication.

-Positive attitude.

-Increased motivation leading to enhanced performance

For details of canoe and kayak training, BCU courses and canoe coaching or kayak coaching contact Kim Bull.  Training courses run throughout the North East, Cumbria and the borders of Scotland.

Email – kim@kimbull.co.uk

Aiding Effective Learning, All Articles, Coaching Articles, Communication, Information Processing, Skill Aquisition, Uncategorised canoe psychology, coaching, kayak psychology, learning, learning' psychology, psychology

Focus, Attention and Sports Psychology for Canoeing and Kayaking

Focus, Attention and Sports Psychology for Canoeing and Kayaking

My canoe and kayak coaching brings me into contact with many paddlers aiming to improve their sporting performance.  One key area that separates high performing athletes from others is their ability to focus and pay attention to the right things at the right times.

Fortunately, this is a skill which you can easily learn.  Many of us are familiar with the model that we can only consciously process 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information at a time.  This might mean that at any moment on an average day we can hold about 7 ‘thoughts’ or chunks of information, perhaps 9 on a good day and perhaps 5 on a bad day.  It’s estimated that on average our senses are bombarded with about 2 billion pieces of information at any one time.  So how useful would it be for you to make sure you were paying attention to the most important pieces to get the best from your sporting performance right now?

I’m sure you can think of a time in your life that illustrates this principle.  How many times have you been looking for something and just can’t find it?  Although you know where you put it, it’s just not there.  You search everywhere else, and as a final check you look again at where you first left it and there it is – but you’d already looked there and couldn’t see it!

How many times have you been talking to someone and found your attention drifting off?  Something suddenly brings you back to the conversation – perhaps the other person is looking at you and waiting for an answer but you haven’t a clue what’s just been said.

These are examples of deletions.  These things are there but you unconsciously filtered them out.  You haven’t been paying attention and the information went un-noticed.

Some of the information you do sense is distorted.  An example of this is time.  We can all think of a time when the hours flew by – usually because we were having a really good time.

Because we distort and delete so much information, we often fill in the gaps by generalising.  This means we make assumptions without checking.  For example, 2+2=4.  We know this to be true in all situations without having to check.

This natural process of deleting, distorting and generalising can lead to problems.  I was out canoeing recently, on a fairly straightforward river.  We were watching another group descend the rapid and someone in their group was so intent on avoiding an overhanging tree branch they didn’t see a rock and they capsized.  In this case the rock was deleted from their attention.

They swam down the relatively minor rapid and got out at the bottom.  I asked if they were ok.  “Yes, but I didn’t enjoy that swim, the waves were enormous – and that rock was as big as a house!”.  Actually, the waves were pretty small and the rock was about the size of a shoe box, and clearly the person was distorting the facts.

Several months later I met this person again.  They told me the incident had had quite a bad affect on them.  They had now stopped paddling similar rapids and became scared even thinking about them.  Clearly they were generalising what they had experienced and assuming unconsciously that the same thing would happen on every other similar rapid.  I offered to help and we worked together to sort out this simple problem.  Before long they were paddling again and progressing to bigger and more exciting rapids.

The process of deleting, distorting and generalising does have it’s benefits.  Distortion allows us to be creative and think of new possibilities.  Generalising allows us to learn, and deletion keeps us sane by allowing us to leave out the majority of detail when we communicate and yet still be understood (eg, Most people will understand you if you say “I’m going to the shops in the car”, but this statement deletes when you are going, are you the driver or the passenger, which shops are you going to, which car, and are there really shops in the car?).

So do you want to learn to delete, distort and generalise in a way that allows you to maintain your focus and attention when it really counts?  Contact me to develop your skills in this area.

For details of canoe and kayak training, NLP, Sports Psychology, BCU courses and canoe coaching or kayak coaching contact Kim Bull.  Training courses run throughout the North East, Cumbria and the borders of Scotland.

Email:  kim@kimbull.co.uk

All Articles, Coaching Articles, Focus, Attention and Sports Psychology, Uncategorised attention, canoeing psychology, focus, kayak psychology, psychology
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