The grip I had wrong

A man in Abu Dhabi has played padel twice a week for three years. One evening a coach watches him for a minute and moves his hand a few centimetres down the handle.

The next shot goes where he aimed it. So does the one after.

Three years of the same grip, practised faithfully, undone in an evening. The odd part is how it feels. Not like progress. More like a small embarrassment, the realisation that all that effort had been building a habit that was holding him back.

That moment comes before almost every real improvement. Before you know the better way, you have to see that the old way was not as good as you thought. There is a gap between the two, a short stretch where you are no longer confident in what you did and not yet fluent in what replaces it.

How that stretch feels depends on what you were protecting.

If being right matters most, it stings. Every new lesson becomes a judgement on the years before it, and the natural response is to argue with the coach, or to quietly go back to the old grip when nobody is watching.

If getting better matters most, it feels like a gift. Someone has just handed you something you could not have found alone, and the years of the old grip are simply the price of arriving here.

The same applies well beyond a court. The way we price, the way we write to customers, the way we read a number. Any of it might be wrong in a way we cannot see yet.

The people who keep improving are the ones who are pleased to find out.