Working in Movement

One of the chestnuts of the body awareness biz goes something like this: if you don't know what you're doing, you can't do what you want. That is, knowing exactly how you're performing some action gives you the opportunity to change that action. So it pays to develop your body awareness if you want the opportunity to change habitual patterns of perception and movement.

There's an interesting reference to this idea in an ESPN interview with Malcolm Gladwell, author of a great read in Blink.

JM: Is that why, quite often, great players don't make such great coaches?

MG: Yes, that's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players -- or non-athletes -- tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.