Feedback and Demystifying Talent
What is "Talent"?
We’ve all been there. When you witness someone perform a particular task, whether it is in a sporting setting or at work, in school maybe with some assessment or homework and you either think to yourself or you hear the phrase “What a talent!” or that someone possesses “talent”. You’re in awe of how they successfully completed that task or displayed “talent” by performing with a musical instrument for example. I believe on some level, we all look at this display and make our own judgement of it; whether that’s against our own abilities or at least how we perceive them to be, or from more of an understanding/appreciative sense of wonder.
Pattern recognition, identification and classification is something we all do fairly instinctively (logically speaking, this can be seen universally with skills we all take for granted like speaking and listening. In fact, your understanding and reading this text is evidence in itself). Hopefully “Pattern recognition” should be easy enough to guess what it means in context here but by “Identification” I mean the ability to look, hear or generally sense an object, idea, concept, person etc and think “Ah! I know what that is!” to some varying degree. By classification, I mean after seeing said object to be able to make the cognitive process of “That is like…I’ve experienced something like that before” or “These ideas/concepts belong together/they are like each other” and group those observations together.
Logically speaking, the way in which your Pattern Recognition and Identification skills work to decipher the stimulus of seeing another’s performance will determine how you react/feel to/learn from seeing that performance.
Experiencing performance
Consider the following, suppose you have observed a particularly breathtaking piece of music played on a musical instrument (and this will be particularly the case if the performer is young). If the piece is suitably complex and played with to a high standard you may experience the following on the right:
In the top left box, this is where experts/appreciators are experiencing other experts and meaningful critiques can be shared. Assuming the performance was of good quality, the observer can either exhibit positive feedback such as appreciation and praise to more negative stemming from insecurities such as jealousy, pettiness. There is little to no mystery for the observer and the experience is catalogued in their mind with a whole host of other performances.
In the top right box, we have experts but not necessarily in the field/art that they are experiencing performances that may have skills they recognise. In the musical example, you might have a classical pianist observing a jazz pianist (assuming the classical pianist doesn’t practise any jazz/is relatively unfamiliar with the jazz norms/feel/mood). The observer can appreciate the finger dexterity and intricacy of playing but may not recognise all the patterns/norms of Jazz and might not feel a sense of satisfaction from the way the music resolves/ends because the performance may sometimes go in a different direction to the patterns associated with classical music.
In the bottom right box, this is just pure ignorance and unfamiliarity. The observer doesn’t know what is going on and has no set of similar experiences in memory to compare it to. Banging on all the piano keys at random, seems as skillful to them as a concert pianist as not only can they not tell that the skill needed to produce the music isn’t the same but the result is indistinguishable to the observer too. It’s an extreme example and all of the quadrants of the box above are to be seen more as a spectrum than discrete “one of four options”.
The bottom left box is where the observer can’t identify the skill used but understands the pattern that is the beautiful music in this case. As if by magic they are hearing this music, while they may appreciate that they are experiencing it, they don't appreciate the skills being demonstrated or the time and patience it has taken over a long period of time to develop those skills. What seems to happen is this skill gets identified as “talent”; a unique, innate ability someone possesses or displays and we feel that is a sufficient enough classification.
What you say and how you say, matters!
In many ways, it’s seen as a deep, personal compliment. “You’re so talented” can feel like high praise as not only are they complimenting you for the task you have just demonstrated but it is implied that you yourself are superior in this regard innately to others who don’t seem to be so lucky to have been “blessed” with this “talent”. To me, not only is this misrepresentative and misleading but also potentially dangerous and harmful.
Athletes, especially younger ones that haven’t developed many social/life skills let alone athletic skills, may see the gap as too wide for them between themselves and “talented” youngsters or high level athletes and may very well just give up.
For sure it is a lot easier to say “Talent” to compliment someone quickly and politely upon a good performance than praising them for “Extended periods of time spent developing skills that are replicable given certain conditions, of which I’m not entirely sure of how you did it…to the extent that I can’t tell it if it was some divine intervention/gift”. I’m not even 100% sure of the alternative myself, although I am mindful of trying to attribute successes and failures as accurately, specifically and truthfully as I can when giving feedback to an athlete at their performance or current stage of development. This can have all sorts of long-term positive effects.
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Positive Reinforcement
For example: I may be working with a young athlete who is experiencing all sorts of social issues and is looking to get into athletics for the first time. Although they have only just started athletics, they are in their late teens and are constantly made aware from training sessions within the training group or from observing other athletes that their current performance level is not as high (i.e. they can’t run as fast, jump as high/long or throw as far as other athletes younger or older).
Should the “talent” word be used? If you try to explain the differences between the other athletes and the one you are coaching, the conclusion that can be drawn is that the other athletes have “talent” and they do not. Even if you try to mop it up with they’ve spent more time training, received coaching, have more experience etc, the damage has already been done as this idea of innate talent has been sown and a tremendous amount of confidence, arrogance or just stupidity and pluck is needed to get their head around that challenge. It’s also not very helpful in the sense of what would a follow up question be: “If I don’t have talent, how can I get talent? Can I become talented?” and the whole point of talking about athlete development has been delayed when really that should’ve been the first, and truthful, answer. The truth is those athletes that seem to have a higher performance level have a mixture of predominantly higher levels of skill acquisition (i.e. they have acquired the necessary movement skills to perform the athletic event efficiently) but also may be optimising their biomechanical advantages (Being taller, longer limbed, bulkier, slimmer etc depending on the event).
Biomechanical Advantage?
Biomechanical advantage isn’t something you train for. It’s not something you can easily influence other than trying to optimise natural growth while you’re young with a variety of sensible procedures/habits like eating a healthy balanced diet and having regular, uninterrupted sleep patterns. Once you’ve reached adulthood, your skeletal structure’s size is more or less as it is and the only positive physical change in size you can affect on yourself is body composition of fat/muscle.
In that sense, if it can’t be trained and you have little to no control over, it is not worth worrying about. What can be worked on is your skill acquisition and general physical fitness for the combined events. “Ideal heights and weights” are fairly loosely defined in combined events as top level decathletes and heptathletes truly do come in all shapes and sizes. The one thing they do all have in common though is a high level of skill across all of the individual events from years, even decades, of specialised training. For example if a particular coach turned away female heptathletes because they were too short or had a policy of “5’9”/1.75m or taller or won’t make it on the international stage/not worth coaching/taking on”, this would at best alienate athletes and lower their self-esteem unnecessarily and at worst you overlook those that could go on to greatness.
Classic example is Jessica Ennis-Hill, 6955pt PB in the Heptathlon, Olympic Champion, World Champion, European Champion, British record holder at the time…her achievements are truly impressive and any coach would be lauded as an expert were they to have her in their group. I personally don’t know her, but it speaks volumes about her personality to have time off to have a child, then come back and win the world championships the next year. Truly a paragon of commitment and hard work. Were a policy of “5’9”/1.75m or taller” in place, she would’ve been discounted and never given the chance to develop. To conclude, “talent” although a relatively harmless term to praise or admire someone, to me often belies the skill, commitment, sacrifice and support that the athlete has demonstrated, received or is lucky to possess. To build a training group that puts progress first, through enjoyment, commitment, consistency and an ethos that encourages supporting each other in training and competition is the aim of a combined events coach. When all this is in place, performance will follow. To use the label of “Talent” can divide the group into “are '' and “aren’t” and sadly sometimes they can’t even appreciate their own successes or the other way around overestimate themselves. It can put young or less confident athletes off the sport and the “talented” athletes become harder to manage, competing in high level competitions they aren’t ready for and can’t accept sincere, constructive feedback or even worse get frustrated/injured chasing unrealistic qualifying scores for those competitions.