Stop Being Overwhelmed with Information

A friend’s son loves basketball. Knowledge is pointless if not shared so I take him for lessons when I go around to see the family. He is a good kid and tries hard.

Also, he is 11 and so he is terrible as all 11-year-olds are. So terrible and even more terrible because they don’t know how terrible they are. It is part of the learning process.

This weekend, I went to watch him play in a 3 on 3 tournament. I wanted to bark a million things at him because they were all doing so many things wrong. The huge issue with telling him anything was overload and competency.

Too Many Things

We can’t take on a lot of information at once. It is why many people turn the music down when parallel parking. The information overload overwhelms their cogintive process.

The boys were making mistakes, firstly because they are learning, but also because they were overwhelmed with information. Their opposition moving, their teammates moving, the ball, the crowd, all of this information was coming at them and essentially they shut down.

Overstimulation creates underperformance.

Can he do it?

The next challenge was deciding what parts of his game he should be improving upon.

I could have told him the most important thing but if he doesn’t have the skill level to make the adjustment on the fly then it is creating more cognitive load on an already fragile system.

Phases of Development

We learn skills in three stages, cognitive, associative, and autonomous.

Cognitive is the start when you have to think through everything. You establish a goal and move through a sequence of actions to achieve it. When learning to dribble a basketball you have to think about moving your hand to meet the ball, how hard to hit the ball, where your feet are, your body, you probably can’t move your feet and keep bouncing the ball.

You move on to the associative stage. In this stage, you have more skill so you can start to refine specific parts of the sequence, breaking transitions down and exploring how to solve the problem in a more nuanced manner. With dribbling you start to feel the ball on your hand, you change fingertip placement, how long you keep the ball in your hand etc.

Then you get to the autonomous stage where you can do the action without having to think about it. Now you can dribble and move your body independently, you can talk and make other decisions without having to think about what the ball is doing.

Giving Your Team A Chance

Yes, we want our team to be amazing and respond instantly, but they are not computer programs and respond as fast as they can.

When trying to upskill the team make sure not to throw too many things on them at once. Is it a completely new skill? It is the refining of an intermediate skill? These will take different approaches.

Teaching something new will require more involvement from you and having less variables in everything else.

Developing an existing skill will require direction but less one on one time, set and forget if you will.

Remove as much noise so they can understand the specific skill they are trying to improve, slowly increase complexity.

If they are skilled you can throw adjustments at them on the fly but if they don’t have the competency you have to go slower and more gentle with them.

If your goal is team improvement then don’t overload them with stimulation and don’t ask them to do something at a high level when they are just learning.