Finding Your Groove

CHAPTER FOUR - Accelerated Learning

Confusion is death to the learning processes. If you are confused, you stop learning; it's that simple. To accelerate your ability to assimilate information, you must avoid confusion.

Learning is a critical area because there is always some new information that you need to absorb quickly. It might be the latest scouting report, the last minute changes to your dance routine, or a technology breakthrough that you must explain at the stockholders' meeting. You need to have a way to avoid confusion, especially when the pressure is on.

The secret to avoiding confusion is to organize your material properly. If your mind receives the information correctly, you will learn as fast as possible. Faster than you ever realized. If you don't present the information properly, you stand a good chance of being confused.

The first step in organizing your information is to identify the way you use it. There are two choices: SIMPLE ROUTINES and DECISION ROUTINES.

SIMPLE ROUTINES

A simple routine is any activity which you don't have to think about once you learn it, like riding a bike, or throwing a ball. A decision routine is any activity that requires decisions, like how fast to take the corner, or where to throw the ball. The type of activity dictates how you need to organize it.

Most physical activities are SIMPLE ROUTINES. Once you learn to ride a bike - no matter how difficult it may have been initially - you don't have to think about how to ride it each time you get on. Activities like throwing a ball, mastering a dance step, and most sports movements fall into this category. Remember that simple sequences are not necessarily easy to learn, it's just that they don't require decisions.

For example, learning to throw (simple routine) should be separate from learning to play short stop (decision routine); learning to put top spin on your ball (simple routine) is different from learning playing strategy (decision routine).

The rule for learning simple routines is that you can only string together seven movements or fewer. Seven moves are the limit.(1) Trying to learn more than that at any one time creates confusion and destroys the learning process. You must limit the number of the basic steps you're learning to seven or fewer. When the routine you are trying to learn is more than seven steps, and quite often it will be, you need to break your movements into groups of seven or smaller, and study them in these smaller groups.

This is the organization your mind needs to see in order to take in the information. As your movement begins to sink in, the process accelerates very rapidly. This is because the routine that was initially seven steps becomes one step once it sinks in. Then the next seven steps condense into one step, and then the next seven. One more regrouping allows you to study seven more combined steps, bringing the count of the steps you're actually studying to forty-nine. With the next combination, you're handling three hundred forty-three steps (seven groups of forty-nine each). Not only do you learn the steps in a fraction of the time, but you are able to do it without ever being confused.

Figure 4. The grouping of movements.

Most people's trouble with fundamentals stems from trying to learn too much (over seven moves), too fast. By breaking your activity into groups of seven and learning the most basic groups first, you will learn better and faster than you ever thought possible.

The shot putter's example shows how the regrouping can take place.

Figure 5. The shot putter's example.

The power of this technique surfaces after you study the smaller groups of seven of fewer. As you learn each grouping, the moves combine into one move. In the shot putter's case, the entire first movement simply becomes pivot.

Learning a new dance movement is another example illustrating the "sevens rule." In the beginning your most basic learning steps might be: turn left foot, bend waist, lift elbow, dip shoulder, twist neck, and push hips out. These are the basic steps, and since they are under the seven limit, they make up the SIMPLE ROUTINE you must learn. If you had three more steps, it would push you over the limit of seven and you would need to regroup them into seven or fewer steps. You need to study these groups for however long it takes to master them.

At some point a transformation takes place, and the six steps become "pivot." The separate parts become one smooth motion. As a single motion, pivot can combine with other strings of movement, and the process accelerates. Thus a routine like pivot, turn, spin, and slide, which may have originally consisted of some twenty moves, becomes a manageable four. Similarly, as these four are learned, they combine again, forming a single category like "swing."

The SIMPLE ROUTINE learning rule is quite straight-forward: identify your most basic steps, study them in groups of seven or fewer, and combine them when it seems natural to do so.

DECISION ROUTINES

The other type of activity, DECISION ROUTINES, are those that require active thinking and moment to moment decisions. If an activity involves any choice, or if there is any analysis required, it is a decision routine. Deciding where you should throw the ball, how to shift your position on the stage, or adjusting to audience reactions are decision routines. If there is any decision required, it is a DECISION ROUTINE.

In order to avoid confusion, the decision routine rule states that you must not exceed three choices.

Your decision must always be limited to three choices. This doesn't mean the problem has to be simple. Any number of choices can be combined and subdivided, as long as they boil down to three choices.(2) In sports, a surprising number of decisions are made during normal play, providing many chances for confusion. Each sport has its decisions: where to make the play, which way to go with the block, whether to press or fall back, or how to counter the opponent's move. Winning teams and players make good decisions; losing teams get confused.

The first step in organizing your decisions is to pick out the first three options you need to act on.(3) Since these actions will happen first, they are the ones you want in your mind. For instance, the ball must be hit before you can field it. Your first three choices would relate to how it was hit, and they should be the only things on your mind.

Once one of the choices happens, the next response breaks into three choices. This continues until all possibilities are covered. The end result will look something like a family tree with groups of three. Your smoothest responses and best decisions will happen when you have three choices or fewer to pick from at any given moment.

EXAMPLE:

Since the decision is always split into three choices, Tony's mind stays clear.

If at any time your choices go over three, you stand a chance of being confused. In football, it's common for a defense to suddenly become confused and fall apart when faced with an unexpected offensive wrinkle. The reason is that when the defense tries to adjust, they add categories to their decisions, and as a result push themselves into confusion. Some teams keep their composure either by ignoring the changes and leaving the adjustments to the coaches, or they have "bucket categories" into which they put the information they can't handle. As long as they keep their choices limited to three, they will continue to think clearly and quickly.

In business, the ability to cut through confusion will help you stand out in any organization. You may have noticed that there is always one associate who somehow seems to keep the most complex issues straight, and comes up with the suggestion that clears the way for the breakthrough decision. An executives ability to think clearly in the midst of confusion is a most sought after quality, and is often the trait that propels individuals to the top.

It may take some practice to quickly reduce complex situations into three areas, but you usually know most of the issues well beforehand, and can do the organizing before the decisions are to be made. When you are in the middle of a dilemma, and feel confusion setting in, take whatever steps you must to gain the time for doing the reduction.

SAFEGUARDS

Unfortunately, the accelerated learning procedures are often a major stumbling point for instructors. They simply don't follow the rules for accelerated learning, and as a result they constantly overload their students. Once overloaded and confused, learning effectively stops.

The main reason for instructors not following the rules is quite understandable. Once you learn something well, as most instructors have, it's very easy to think only in terms of larger categories. What is two or three simple steps for an instructor, can be twenty or thirty for a new student. "Swing" and "fielder's choice," may be simple terms for the instructor, but they can be well over the confusion limit for a new learner.

If you are the student, there are several safeguards you can take to protect yourself from instructor overload. The primary safeguard is to create bucket categories, into which you can place everything that confuses you. Everything that goes over the limit of three choices, you temporarily put into this category. Eventually you will need to work these instructions into your detailed grouping system, but for the moment, the "bucket category" will keep you from getting confused.

In football, for example, "formation i, double split right, unbalanced right," becomes "split." "split" is the bucket category which holds every spread formation you don't recognize. Though it's simpler than what you may need to know one day, it will keep you from getting confused.

The "bucket category" also works for SIMPLE ROUTINES. You simply create larger categories that can hold all the minor details you don't grasp right at the moment. For physical routines, a larger body movement can be your bucket category. It might mean grouping confusing instructions into hip and head movements. Tilt, twist, pull, and push could reduce to "head bob." In this way it's possible to retain a good deal from advanced training and not be overloaded by details.

If you are an instructor who must teach a diverse group, there's always possibility you'll overload some of the students. You can include predesigned "bucket categories" in your instructions and prevent much of the overload.

To do this, just include in your presentation several general movements that are familiar to the beginners. These moves become their "bucket categories." They are then able to put your more advanced points into groups which can keep them connected to the general flow of the movement and out of overload. If you've ever gotten that glazed look from your students, this safeguard will help both of you.

The safeguards offered here are meant to be a survival technique. They are no substitute for learning the basics at your proper rate. If you have an instructor who tends to overload you, or if you're in a class that's too advanced, you will need to learn the material at the proper rate on your own time.

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Notes:

1. Miller, pp. 81-96.

2. The "three choices rule" is derived from a study of chess masters, which showed that at any given moment the best players only considered three choices, even though the total possibilities were in the thousands.

3. If there are more than three possibilities at that moment, you will need to break the possibilities into three general categories.