A Little Off, On Purpose

If you have spent your whole life hitting too far left, aiming for the middle may not be enough. Sometimes you need to try the opposite extreme on purpose.

Tauri Laane Facebook archive About 3 min read

A LITTLE OFF. ON PURPOSE.

There is a tennis training method where, if a student keeps hitting the ball a little too far to the left, the instructor does not tell them to aim for the middle — instead, they have them DELIBERATELY hit a little too far to the right.

If you teach them to hit the middle, the racket will probably still pull a little too far left. But if they practise the opposite extreme instead, over time they develop the right gut feeling for exactly where the middle is.

Over the past year I have practised this in my own life very often; the logic feels sound. When I notice something crooked in my behaviour and want to tune it, I make an EXTRA effort to do the opposite extreme, so that over time I develop a feel for the “golden mean”.

One of my goals for 2015 was to move further towards not needing other people to like me... I will never get rid of that need completely. :) Why? I feel that when I chase other people’s approval, I end up chasing things that are slightly foreign to me — and perhaps neglecting what my heart actually wants.

One big little area inside that larger goal is publishing my own thoughts. I have a “voice in my head” that usually stops me from saying or writing them and blocks the great majority (I will talk about the reasons later).

That is why, in recent years, I have posted very few of my thoughts on Facebook; most of them were not approved by the “voice in my head” and, as far as I know, remained...

How do I get rid of that block... or at least soften it? Yep, the tennis method. If I have kept most of my thoughts to myself all my life, now I will DELIBERATELY take the opposite extreme and let most of them fly. At first, an irrelevant or uninteresting thought will probably slip out too — but so be it. The goal is not to publish everything unedited, but to stop strangling every thought before it ever sees daylight. Besides — real life happens in Real Time, without extra thinking time.

So... from now on I will hit a little too far to the right. On purpose.