The stroke they will not give up

A swimming coach in Al Khobar says beginners are easy. The adults who already swim, badly, are the hard ones.

They learned as children, in a cousin's pool or off a beach, with nobody watching. Their heads stay up, their arms thrash, and they get from one side to the other exhausted. It works, just about. And because it works, they hold on to it as though it were the only thing keeping them afloat.

Which, in their minds, it is.

Most of us carry something like that. A way of selling, of writing, of talking to customers, of running the week. We earned it slowly, it got us here, and our sense of being competent rests on it. When someone suggests a different way, it does not feel like advice. It feels like a threat to the ground we are standing on. So we tighten up, and we defend.

The trouble is that you cannot take hold of a new skill while gripping the old one. The coach can explain the breathing perfectly, and the swimmer will nod, and then lift his head and thrash again, harder this time, as if effort could turn the old stroke into the new one.

That is why good teachers do two jobs, and the first one is not teaching. The first is earning the student's willingness to change. Agreement to be a beginner again for a few weeks. Permission to be bad at something before being better at it. Only then does the second job, the actual instruction, have anywhere to land.

The resistance is clever. It will find reasons: no time, my body is different, this is how people swim here. Answer one and another arrives.

Better is available to the swimmer who loosens his grip. To the one who will not, it stays on the far side of the pool.