how a 50 year old book about tennis can help you learn any new skill

❓❓❓ When you are learning a new skill, whether it's how to mark up an M&A agreement or hit a serve in tennis, it's easy to get lost in the technical details. I recently read "The Inner Game of Tennis" by Tim Gallwey and was amazed that a book that was written 50 years ago about a niche sport contains the foundations of many current ideas in psychology and professional development! And you don't need to play tennis to appreciate its lessons.

🎾🎾🎾 According to the book, if we rely "too heavily on instructions, we can seriously compromise our access to our natural learning processes and our potential to perform". So with the examples of the M&A agreement and the serve, how does a newer practitioner find their way mastery? New associates should endeavor to not just rely on trying to extract knowledge from a senior lawyer's mark-up, they should back up and spend some time thinking and talking with the senior lawyer about what are they solving for, what does the client want? Then the technical pieces will flow more naturally from the overarching goals. In tennis, the newer player should watch more experienced players serving and then hold that visual in mind as they practice serving.

🏆 🏆🏆While you need to understand how each part is supposed to work, if you get overly focused on the component parts, you will lose track of the end game -- protecting your client from risk or hitting a serve deep in the box.