Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to episode number 393 of the Essential Tennis Podcast. Today we're talking about how to level up your tennis fast by leveraging the improvement circle. There's a concept that I wrote about in my book in chapter 5 if you're interested. And this is going to tell the story of a girl that I recently
gave some feedback to. Actually, specifically, her coach reached out to me. This is a 10-year-old girl. Her coach sent me a video of her backhand and asked for some help analyzing her backhand
and figuring out what was wrong and how to improve. And while watching the video just revealed something so critically important for adult tennis players, if you've been playing tennis for a long time, you're in adults, you feel like even using basically the same strokes, the same game, getting the same results for a long time, please don't give up because this episode of the podcast is going to tell you exactly how to break free.
So this backhand swing, when you watch the video in real time, even if you don't do a lot of analysis, you're not a coach, you can see that occasionally this 10-year-old would kind of golf the ball. I would say there may be kind of a baseball combination of a baseball swing and a golf swing very, very level. And sometimes she would drive it super strongly
and very straight. But then other times, probably about a third of the time, her racket face, her strings were face upwards, she would pop her racket face open and just launch the ball up into the air. And she's obviously a good athlete, very coordinated. She's obviously taking a lot of lessons. You know, she's got the whole look down and she moves very smoothly and very efficiently. And she's everything that you would hope for in yourself if you were
picking up the game of tennis as a child. And that's kind of lesson one for today. I want to hear me loud and clear that even though this player that I reviewed for her coach is young, she has time on her side, even though she's coordinated, even though she's athletic, even though she's received a lot of coaching, a lot of lessons, she still has this sticking point in her backhand. And probably other parts of her game too, but I just focused on
her backhand for this particular feedback. Being young isn't some kind of magic solution. And I hear I almost only work with adult players and I hear the same kind of rumination from my students over and over. Oh, if only I started younger. If only I learned what I was a kid. If only I was like, I could take 20 years, you know, off the clock, then I'd learn this so much faster. And just to address that in an honest way, you probably
would, you know, like we learn easier as children. There's no question about it. I think that's pretty scientifically backed. And so it would be easier, but it's not going to solve all your problems. And for me, looking over the backhand of this young athletic coordinated player, that's the first thing that came to mind for me and a lesson I want to pass on to you is, I don't care how old you are, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, older. It's
tough for all of us. And so that leads me right into lesson number two. And here's what I'm going to talk about the improvement circle. I want you to picture a circle in your mind. Don't close your eyes if you're driving right now. And on that circle, there's four different points. The circle is basically broken into four different sections. There's like an upper right, a lower right, a lower left, and then an upper left. And there's
kind of arrows connecting each of these four parts of the circle. And in the upper right section of the circle, this is where anybody starts when they begin learning a new skill, like a backhand or a serve or anything else related to tennis or anything else in life. And that section is called unconscious incompetence as the first phase of improving. And what that means is that you don't have any information. You don't know what you don't know. And that's
the unconscious part. The incompetent part of it is you can't do it. You have no ability to do the skill and you also don't know anything about it. So we solve that by taking some lessons or watching some videos or reading a book. And then we move down to the lower right section of the improvement circle called conscious incompetence. So conscious meaning now we know what we're supposed to do. At least in theory, we have the information. We
have some knowledge that we've gained, but we're still incompetent. We still can't execute or perform the skill correctly. Then we solve that by doing some practice. And that moves us to the lower left part of the improvement circle. Conscious competence. So we've retained that knowledge. We've retained that understanding and information, but we've done adequate practice. And we've tried it enough times that we can also do it now
correctly, but we have to maintain our focus or our concentration. It has to be a conscious effort for us to do it right. Then with the right kind and the right amount of training we move to the upper left part of the improvement circle. The final stage here is subconscious competence. This is the holy grail. This is essentially the end of the mastery journey where now we can perform the thing that we know about, but without thinking about it anymore.
All that information that we gain can be basically put on the back burner. And we've developed a habit that happens automatically. And whether we think about it or not, we just do the thing correctly. So this 10 year old girl that I'm talking about, where in the improvement circle is her backhand? Well, it's not actually that simple. She's not in only one place. And reviewing the video kind of showed a split personality. And I know you're going to be
able to relate to this if you worked hard on improving your game. Most of her swings were like I described before. They're very flat. They're very level. Her racket only dropped to like the height that she was making contact with the ball. Sometimes she would even kind of swing down at the ball a little bit, which is why I say it was kind of a golfing motion almost slash like baseball kind of motion. And her racket face would pop open. Like I
said, and she would launch the ball up into the air. Well, there was one swing she took where her coach was probably reloading balls. And she had a couple seconds to kill. Instead of just standing there, she made a shadow swing. And guess what? On that shadow swing, she didn't swing level. She didn't golf and like swing down at the ball. She didn't swing like a baseball player and just kind of swing right straight square at the ball. Instead
on her shadow swing, she started with her racket up. She dropped her racket way down low like twice as far down as what she did on any of the ones where she hit the ball. And then she swung upwards towards imaginary point of contact and up through the point of contact. Totally different. It was completely different swing. Even though three seconds later, the same player demonstrated something wildly different. She showed that
she also had obviously some information in her head. Somebody had told her it by the way she'd be swinging glow to high because she did it. She demonstrated that she knew that she was supposed to do it. And even that she's able to do it. But not unconsciously or subconsciously yet. So the new and improved one, the one where she swings from low to high, she was stuck in conscious competence, the bottom left part of the circle. She was
only able to swing low to high when concentrating on it and making it a conscious effort. And then when somebody would feed her a ball or she was in the middle of a point, she'd go right back to her subconscious habit of swinging straight at the ball. And a lot of times of launching it up into the air. Now, obviously it's pretty safe to say that she's been told to swing low to high. We got really smart girl, athletic girl. Obviously has a coach
that really cares about her. And she's taken a lot of lessons. So why is it that she's stuck? Why is it that even though she knows and even though she can do it when she thinks about it, she continues to be stuck at conscious competence. Can you relate to this? Do you think of any kind of skill where a coach has told you, Hey, you're supposed to swing up on your serve or you're supposed to swing low to high on your backhand or fill in
the blank, right? Million different things that you've probably been told over the years. Well, here's like a really critical lesson and thing to hear me say loud and clear. 99% of humans cannot escape this process and 99% of us experience from time to time, at least being stuck in that consciously competent phase of the improvement circle. And notice I said 99% there's there's and by the way, this is just a guesstimation on my part. But
I frankly, I think 99% is pretty conservative. Let's just go with that. Okay. Let's just say it's 99%. There are 1% of humans who can sometimes skip some of those phases of the improvement circle and they have enough talents. They have enough coordination. They have enough athleticism, whatever you want to call it, enough awareness that a coach can tell them from the other side of the court. Hey, hey, swing low to high and they can say, Oh,
swing low to high. Okay. All right. I'll do that. And just to side to swing low to high and they just snap their fingers and they can just do it and then move on to the next thing. And I want you to know that I am not one of those people. And this 10 year old girl, her all her youth that she has on her side. And it is a benefit. It doesn't work that way for this 10 year old either. Isn't that nice? Isn't that not not in like a,
you know, in a mean way like we're making fun of the 10 year old. But isn't that nice as a however, you know, filling the blank. I'm 42 as a 42 year old. It's nice for me to know that even if I was 10, I would probably still have to go through this same process. Now would I be able to move through it a little bit faster? Yep. Probably. But age does not remove people from their humanness and the need for a certain type of certain kind
of certain volume of training to just do what we know we're supposed to do. And I know that's frustrating. And I know that can be really discouraging sometimes when you take less and after less than you play match after match, you do training session after training session. And you still just don't do what you know you're supposed to do. And here's
the thing. If you don't have the right outlook and you don't have the right perspective on how the improvement process works, then you're just going to give up at a certain point and say, you know what? This is stupid. How long have I been trying to do this? How many times has it been explained to me? How many times have I tried to practice it and I still can't do it? Well, unfortunately, most, most coaches, I don't like bad mouth and
coaches, but most coaches don't even understand this. What we're talking about today in this episode. And much, much fewer players understand this. And so most of the time when somebody is told, hey, swing a little high, and the coach watches them and they still don't swing a little high. That's kind of all the tools in the coaches toolbox. And they're like, okay, yeah, great. Good job. And they just kind of keep feeding. And the player assumes
they are swinging a little high because the coach is like, hey, great. Good job. This is why video is so scary because video shows for sure whether or not you're doing all those things that you have assumed over the years that you've been doing shows you all the things that you're actually not. So you didn't actually train it appropriately to move through the
entire improvement circle. So this obviously begs the question, if you're in the 99%, which you are, if you're listening to me, nobody who's in the 1% is listening to a podcast about how to get better at tennis because they're just so talented that they don't even have to try or work that hard to break through and do something better and different and improve. They just kind of decide to do it super, super rare. So if you're listening to me, you're
not in the 99%. How do we break from conscious competence into subconscious competence? Well, the solution in a nutshell is building in a lot of little stepping stones in between those two phases of the improvement circle. We call those progressions. And there's an art and a science to progressions that can help you break through and continue improving and get to the point where a new and better skill can be executed without having to think
about it anymore. And it's only at that point, by the way, that you really actually get better at tennis. It doesn't really count when you have to think about it because in the heat of battle, you're not conscious. You're just drawing on all of your old subconscious habits. So we have to get to the point where you're subconscious with those new and improved skills or else you're not actually going to get any better. So the next episode of the
Essential Tennis Podcast, I'm going to let you know exactly how to do that. And I'm going to uncover a long list of progressions that you can use the next time you practice. And I'm going to let you know exactly how I use them in my coaching and how you can copy that process in your own training and guide yourself towards better tennis. Hopefully this has been really helpful. If it has, and you want to support the podcast, then check out Diadm
Sports. That's D-I-A-D-E-M, Diadm Sports.com. They've been supporting me, providing rackets and strings and balls and bags and everything you could possibly need. I know you probably haven't heard of them before, but they make extremely high quality gear. It's an American company. I'm friends with, well, I am now. I've been working with the
founder of the company, helping spread the word about them. And if you go to Diadm Sports.com, you can check out any of their strings, any of their balls, any of their rackets, and get 15% all of it by using code ET15. That's ET15. Use the discount code at checkouts. And that helps support the podcast and helps things keep moving. And I appreciate that tremendously.
Big thank you to Diadm. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Catch you next time when I talk about how to bridge that gap between conscious competence and subconscious competence. Till then, keep up the great work on your game. For more free, game-improving instruction, be sure to check out essentialtennis.com, where you'll find hundreds of video, audio, and written lessons. Also, be sure to subscribe to essential tennis on iTunes and YouTube, where we are the number one resource in the
world, providing passionate instruction for passionate tennis players. Thank you so much for listening today. Take care and good luck with your tennis.