I’m reading Adam Grant’s latest book, Think Again, which, if you have not read it, I highly recommend. Grant is an institutional/organizational psychologist at Penn and a thought leader on how organizations can treat their employees more like humans and less like resources, with the CV to support that concept.
Think Again is all about how our biases are like a minefield for our decision-making, relationships, and perspectives. It’s almost impossible for any aspect of our lives to be unaffected in some way by our biases, to be honest. Grant’s premise in Think Again is that a more mindful approach - my interpretation, not his - to thinking would yield tremendous individual and societal benefits. He talks repeatedly about “confident humility,” which is essentially the quality that enables you to be comfortable being wrong.
Here is a list of concepts, mostly training-related, that I’m comfortable being wrong about:
FMS-based prep work: I used to do corrective exercise based on Functional Movement Screen scores with my groups religiously, but I found that these interventions were not particularly effective. They generally felt more prepared to train with a RAMP-style warm-up than by spending 10 minutes “correcting” patterns that weren’t dysfunctional for their sport.
Thinking I was or need to be an “expert,”: expertise is a word that’s thrown around too flippantly, I’m not even close to being an expert and I’m actually fine calling myself an amateur in the field of athletic development. I’d prefer to continue to learn from actual experts in my field and I’m comfortable also calling them colleagues.
Conversely, just because a practitioner has more experience than I do, does not mean they are more competent. Many coaches with 25 years of experience have had the same experience 25 times, while other, more enlightened coaches have had 25 experiences one time.
Thinking that because I lucked into “training” a handful of genetically-superior athletes early In my career that I played a role in their success; I did not. This is fundamental attribution error at its finest!
Thinking that Olympic weightlifting was THE BEST WAY to improve power production; there are so many methods to improve power production and Olympic Weightlifting is only one method.
Thinking Olympic Weightlifting was worthless because it’s time-consuming to coach; yea I’ve vacillated a bit on OWL…
Thinking back squats upset lumbo-pelvic rhythm and cause lumbar spine issues/injuries; they do not, poor/inattentive coaching does (experiential learning here)
Thinking professional credentials (CSCS, DPT, USAW) are a license to practice; they are not. Renowned physical therapist and thinker, Doug Kechijian, said it succinctly on his podcast, “credentials are a license to learn,” and they are the minimum allowable standard to practice.
Thinking that because someone is a “giant in the profession” that they are infallible; this is a naive perspective because obviously everyone is fallible.
Thinking that research is too disconnected from practice to be relevant; turns out the irrelevancy was because I generally turned to the same journal(s) and did not seek out other sources of research to inform my practice.
I hope this list of re-thoughts helps you evaluate your own biases in some way!