As a local league badminton player with visions of being amazing sometime soon, I’ve invested time and money into having some personal coaching with an ex-England player who is brilliant. I now realise that I’ve been playing for 17 years with chronic bad habits which if I’m going to be amazing I need to change. Last week for example we spent a session on how to serve in singles. Up until now my singles serves have been awful leading me to lose more points. My coach identified 2 basic and critical things for me to change:
1) I was standing on with my weight on the wrong foot, which limited my ability to get power behind the shot, and
2) I was holding the shuttle in the wrong way, which meant I had no control over the direction it went.

When I first tried out my new approach, it felt weird and I ended up hitting my leg instead of the shuttle! It was here that my coach stepped in and said that because I’d been playing in a particular way for so long that doing anything different will feel weird but the more I keep doing it eventually it will seem natural and I won’t even think of it anymore.

She then proceeded to get me doing what seemed like hundreds of serves and I started to see some amazing results even though it still felt weird, so I will stick with it and work through the weirdness on my quest to be amazing!

It reminds me of how when we are learning a new way of doing something it can often feel weird, awkward or clunky and this feeling can lead us to go back to our old less effective ways. So as trainers, what can we do to encourage our learners to work through the “it feels weird” stage of a learning new approach (associated with Conscious Incompetent phase of learning) so that they can get better results?

Answers on a post card please