Should we all have coaches?

NBA players are professionals who have put in tens of thousands of hours honing their craft. When most of us reach the point where we have been doing something that much for that long we move beyond further instruction.

Surgeons and lawyers and Wall Street executives, for instance ... after some hard training, it assumed they don't need much more in the way of teaching or coaching.

But even when NBA players are 35 and have been elite players for two decades, they still have somebody watching and giving feedback.

Which approach is smarter?

Atul Gawande is a surgeon, and an extraordinary writer, and he has recently come to think that the NBA approach may be better -- and has even recruited a retired surgeon to act as his own personal surgical coach, with good results.

As Gawande writes in The New Yorker, his eyes were opened to the power of coaching by a chance tennis game in Massachusetts:

One July day a couple of years ago, when I was at a medical meeting in Nantucket, I had an afternoon free and went looking for someone to hit with. I found a local tennis club and asked if there was anyone who wanted to play. There wasn’t. I saw that there was a ball machine, and I asked the club pro if I could use it to practice ground strokes. He told me that it was for members only. But I could pay for a lesson and hit with him.

He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate who’d played on his college team. We hit back and forth for a while. He went easy on me at first, and then started running me around. I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. You know, he said, you could get more power from your serve.

I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. He had me pay attention to my feet as I served, and I gradually recognized that my legs weren’t really underneath me when I swung my racquet up into the air. My right leg dragged a few inches behind my body, reducing my power. With a few minutes of tinkering, he’d added at least ten miles an hour to my serve. I was serving harder than I ever had in my life.

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every �lite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

Source: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/32161/should-we-all-have-coaches

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