Personal Best

An intriguing article in the October 3rd issue of the New Yorker describes Atul Gawande’s decision to hire a coach. Dr. Gawande, a surgeon, offers a smartly worded inside look at the benefits and risks of being coached.

Early on, Dr. Gawande makes the distinction between the medical understanding of expertise and that of the professional musician and the professional athlete:

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself…

Doctors understand expertise in the same way. Knowledge of disease and the science of treatment are always evolving. We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind. So the training inculcates an ethic of perfectionism. Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection. It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own. One of these views, it seemed to me, had to be wrong. So I called Itzhak Perlman to find out what he thought.

Dr. Gawande discovers during the course of his exploration what those of us who have worked in the performing arts already know: coaching is a regular part of most professional performer’s lives. People who sing for a living work with vocal coaches throughout their career. Turns out even Itzhak Perlman has a coach. During the course of the article, Gawande explores coaching in musical, athletic, and educational settings as well as sharing his own journey working with a coach in the operating room.

After exploring the benefits of coaching for musicians, athletes, teachers, and the potential benefits for surgeons like himself, Dr. Gawande takes the distinction between pedagogy and coaching a step further:

Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer [as coaching] is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual. It’s also riskier: bad coaching can make people worse…

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

What extraordinary things are you responsible for? What could you achieve with the kind of guidance Dr. Gawande describes?