The Best Teacher
The greatest sign of success a coach or teacher can have is when their players or students are performing as if they don’t exist
By André van Heerden, Communications Director
After I graduated from university and entered the working world, I was fortunate enough to find work in my fields of study of video production and writing.
I was very thankful that I had the knowledge and theory to handle the job requests that were given to me. But what became very clear, very quickly, was that I still had much to learn and that my day-to-day work was going to teach me much more than all my years at school.
There’s a saying in coaching that the game will teach itself. I coach a lot of soccer and I’ve found this to be very true. But I’d revise the saying just a bit: the game will teach itself if you let it.
When I coach my players, I know that certain drills will focus on particular skills, and over time and with repetition, their skills will improve. But I’ve also come to realize that being excellent at a drill doesn’t necessarily mean that the skill will be translated into the game.
At some point, the skills have to work within the game. That can only come from playing the game and no longer being actively coached.
Herbert von Karajan, considered one of the greatest conductors of all time, said, “The art of conducting consists in knowing when to stop conducting to let the orchestra play.”
The game may teach itself, but if someone is constantly teaching or coaching while you’re doing something, you’re not learning the game yourself. Someone else is telling you about it.
As a coach, I often find myself telling the enthusiastic parents on the sideline (and myself) to not coach from the sidelines. All of us watching need to let the players figure things out for themselves.
Confucious famously wrote, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
When I was directing actors in films, I always got much better results when I explained what a scene was about in terms of the plot, characters, and theme, rather than telling an actor how to say a line or perform an action. And the great thing was that if an actor didn’t say a line quite right, they would usually sense it themselves and be able to improve upon it.
Within our working lives, we should be constantly learning from the jobs we’re doing. And we should be letting others do the same. Overmanaging and directing may get the result you want, but it won’t ever be better than you expected.
Maria Montessori, world-renowned education reformer, observed that “the greatest sign of success for a teacher . . . is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’”