Before I review this book I want to share with you how I find books. Simply, I pay attention. When I visit a strength coach or someone I respect, I look at their bookshelves. I either take pictures or I put it on my Amazon wish list. If a coach I respect suggests a book, I add it to my Amazon wish list. If I see a social media post from someone I respect, I add it to my wish list. When I come to need a new book, I purchase it off my wish list.
Too often we think that we can find the secrets to knowledge by asking smart people or people we respect what they are reading. The books I read vary in meaning and processing tremendously. For example, this book was suggested by a friend over a year ago. I am also currently reading Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, and Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, and just finished The Process by Cam Josse and Fergus Connolly. If you were to ask why I read all of those books, it was because I was interested in them at the moment.
The other thing for me is I don’t quit on books. I may take a long time or a short time to read a book. It varies quite a bit by how much I have going on in my life. I am definitely in the creation portion of my life. I create a ton of content such as podcasts, blogs, presentations, web shows, articles, books, courses, and general social media. I have to balance what goes out with what comes in. I struggle with the output if I do not have a fair amount of input. I am life lifelong learner who is now in the process of becoming a career creator. Careful for what you wish for, it just may come true.
This is a good segway to Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, in that this is a process to understand learning. Hunt’s main goal was to communicate to programmers that need to evolve with their role and purpose. As a strength coach, I have an assignment to do. Take a client or athlete and have them execute things within a program and based on their results and the rate of those results I refine and improve. From a value perspective, that has a perceived lowered ceiling that we need to understand.
Hunt mentioned that as we all progress in our industry, we move on to roles outside of our expertise. He cited both nursing and programming as the primary examples of this progression. It is the same for coaching. As you move up, you move more into management and further away from coaching. Pretty much for the last 10 years of my career, I have been a head strength and business owner. My day looks a lot different from when I was on the floor coaching or lifting all day. One could say I have evolved out of my role, alternatively the role evolved away from me.
That is Hunt’s point. We either become stagnant in our skills and cannot advance our ability or we have to find something else to become good at. the association that we learned one thing so therefore we can learn another thing is a big risk for a business or organization. If do not develop a system of learning, we have no way of determining whether we can flourish in a new role.
What Hunt cited is that the brain is like a central processing unit. We have ‘R-Mode’ which is responsible for intuition, problem-solving, and creative thinking. We also have the ‘L-Mode’ which is responsible for detail-oriented thinking and accomplishing tasks within a checklist. R-Mode is usually the untapped resource for people as they advance through their understanding of their job. Hunt’s point is that we never capitalize on R-Mode development because we never reach that point in our career within our specialty.
What Hunt is illustrating is that we rarely develop our intuition and instinct to do our job because it is not valued. We value the accomplishment of tasks, not finding novel solutions to complex problems. That takes a different mental approach that stems from alternative forms of thinking and processing. We grade a novice’s ability based on their L-Mode, we also grade an expert’s ability on the same criteria. Experts are governed by their decisions in situations with no definite answer. Novices are governed by the ability to perform defined tasks from someone else.
Back to my point of reading, we need to become more well-rounded as strength coaches. You will face problems you do not have answers for. That is ok, what is not ok if we face problems with solutions designed for different situations. Developing what Hunt would call R-Mode is crucial to becoming an expert in any field, but also becoming competent overall.