In the late afternoon after a full day of teaching, Tim Gallwey, Country Club Tennis Pro, was trying to teach a player how to hit a topspin backhand. He was a little sick of his own voice, so instead of his normal instruction about where their feet should be placed and how high the racquet should be swung back, he simply showed the player how to hit the backhand and then quietly tossed balls to them.

He did this for three or four minutes and then something amazing happened – the player started to hit topspin backhands. No instruction, just the opportunity to hit balls.

As a coach, it's a great result – the player has learned the skill you were trying to teach. But the first thought that popped into Gallwey's head?

"You lazy bum, you missed your chance. If you had only taught him before, then you would have gotten the credit for his topspin backhand."

That was quickly followed by this realisation:

"Wow... I'm more interested in teaching than I am in this student learning."

Supporting player learning is one of the core roles of a coach. On any day and at any given time when working with players we are faced with questions like:

When a player is struggling, or the team's performance drops, our instinct is often to look for something to add. It might be an adjustment to the game plan, another piece of feedback, or a new cue that we hope will resonate with the players.

Interestingly, this seems to be a human bias. When faced with a problem, our default tendency is often to add. In a famous study, participants were asked to work out how to best stabilise the top of a Lego structure. They could add new bricks at a cost or simply remove a single brick. Despite removing a brick being both the simplest and cheapest solution, 60% of participants chose to add more bricks instead. The researchers found this "more is better" bias held across a variety of experiments, suggesting that doing less is consistently overlooked as a strategy.

When we start to think about doing less as a form of support, it brings to mind this Push-Pull continuum.

On the left-hand side of the model are coaching approaches that are more of a "Push" – think instructing, giving feedback and advice. When we push, we're trying to solve someone else's problem for them. 

On the right-hand side of the model are approaches such as listening to understand and asking questions. These are more of a "Pull", where we're trying to help someone solve their own problems.

Through the lens of the human bias towards addition, it's easy to see why many of us spend a lot of our coaching time on the Push side of the continuum. Instruction, feedback and advice feel like action. Observation, listening and inquiry can feel passive by comparison. Yet Gallwey's experience suggests that some of our most powerful coaching moments may come when we resist the urge to immediately solve the problem and instead help the athlete become more aware of it.

For Gallwey, that afternoon coaching the topspin backhand was his "Eureka" moment. It eventually led to him writing The Inner Game of Tennis, a book I believe to be one of the best coaching books ever written.

Not long afterwards, he was invited to speak to the Houston Philharmonic about his ideas on performance and learning. At the end of the session, the conductor challenged him to demonstrate his approach in front of the orchestra and a tuba player volunteered.

What made the situation fascinating was that Gallwey knew absolutely nothing about playing the tuba. Rather than pretending he had expertise, he started with a simple question – one that he knew wouldn't ruffle the ego:

"What do you find most difficult in performing at your level?"

The musician replied that he struggled with articulation in the upper register. Gallwey had no idea what that meant, so he simply asked him to play. When the musician finished, Gallwey asked how he knew when his articulation wasn't quite right. The player explained that he couldn't always hear it himself, but he could feel it. His tongue would become dry and start to feel thick.

Instead of offering a solution, Gallwey simply asked him to play again and pay attention to that feeling. The musician played the passage again and, to Gallwey's untrained ear, it sounded much the same. To the orchestra, however, the difference was obvious. They rose to their feet and gave the pair a standing ovation.

Reflecting on the experience later, Gallwey said:

"I know nothing about tubas, nothing about classical music. I got everything from him as I needed."

To me, that last line is the most important insight from Gallwey's story.

"I got everything from him as I needed."

Gallwey wasn’t the expert in the room. He couldn’t solve the problem for the musician. What he could do was help the musician become more aware of what was already happening.

Perhaps this is a form of support we overlook as coaches. Gallwey's experience, and the research on our tendency towards additive solutions, suggests that when players are struggling we may sometimes be too quick to move towards instruction, feedback and advice rather than helping them notice, reflect and solve the problem themselves. In doing so, we may overlook the opportunity to do less, and move further along the Pull end of the Push-Pull continuum.

So if doing less can sometimes be the best way we can support learning, how far can we take that idea? As you do less and less, eventually you hit a point where you are doing nothing. Surely that can't be good?

Yet there is a concept built around exactly that idea: Masterly Inactivity. Its premise is that, often in complex situations, the best course of action is no action at all. Taking action can often end up making situations worse, while many situations will resolve themselves without you needing to meddle in them.

It has popped up in a few different settings:

But I get the pressure we can feel as coaches to do something (or at least to be seen to be doing something).  How can we be doing our job if we’re not actually doing anything?

 I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had coaches try to send a message down from the coaches’ box to the ground to change a match-up or adjust the positioning of players, only for the players to recognise it and solve it themselves. Then the coaches are scrambling to cancel the message so as not to confuse them!

The key thing to understand with this concept is that it is not just doing nothing. Not intervening is an active choice. Eighteenth-century poet William Cowper described it as "Doing nothing with a deal of skill." That is what puts the "masterly" in "Masterly Inactivity." You are choosing to do nothing because you have the deep understanding that your players are better off in this situation if you don't intervene than if you do.

Take Medicine as an example. One of the key tenets that the medical profession is built on is "First, do no harm." Masterly Inactivity is one of the ways physicians can ensure that their interventions do no harm. As coaches, it might be worth applying this same lens to our own interventions. We should be asking ourselves - If I intervene here, what are the potential benefits, and what are the potential issues that could come from it? Then you can make the decision to intervene, or decide that this is the time to be masterfully inactive.

Coming back to Gallwey, his eureka moment wasn’t a special new way of delivering his message, or a new cue that unlocked everything for his players. It was realising that he didn’t always need to add. Sometimes the best thing he could do was step back, stop intervening, and allow learning to emerge.

Archimedes once said that "he who knows how to speak, knows also when." Perhaps the same is true of coaching. Expertise is not simply knowing what to say. It is knowing when instruction is needed, when questions are needed, and when learning simply needs space.

So the next time you feel the urge to step in, perhaps the question isn't “What should I add?”

It might be:

“Could I do less?”

Or perhaps even:

“Could I do nothing?”

Tim Harford in his Cautionary Tales Podcast discusses Masterly Inactivity in the episode Do Nothing, Then Do Less

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