The Practice of Letting Go

Steering blind

In a coxless four, the bow seat steers. With small movements of one foot, linked by cable to the rudder, I am responsible for getting an expensive boat and three other men down a winding creek in the dark. I also cannot see where we are going. Everyone in a rowing shell faces backwards.

The obvious solution is to turn around and look. It is also the wrong one. Turning around to look is awkward and throws the set off; the whole boat feels it. So you learn to steer by other means. You know the waterway. You know where the other boats tend to be. You catch the bank in the edge of your vision, you feel the current through the hull, you trust what years on the same water have left in you. In the early dark, when sight is limited, the other men are relying on your instinct. The question is how to see acutely when you cannot see. The answer, it turns out, is that you feel and sense.

I have come to think this is the whole problem of the series in miniature. The thing we most want to do when we are uncertain — turn around, check, grab hold — is the thing most likely to destabilize the boat. Rowing is a sport of feeling and sensing, then applying as much power as gracefully as possible. Both halves of that sentence matter. Nobody gets down the creek on grace without power. But power without feel just puts the boat in the bank faster.

The first three articles described what flow is, what tends to make room for it, and how fear and doubt can block the door. This one is about the hardest part: what to do when the answer seems to be try less, and trying less is not something you can try.

The trap of trying not to try

The psychologist Daniel Wegner spent much of his career on a simple, maddening observation. Try not to think about a white bear, and you will think about a white bear. In a 1994 paper he called this the ironic process of mental control. Any deliberate attempt to steer the mind needs a second, quieter process that checks whether it is working — and that checker is always looking for the very thing you are trying to avoid. Under stress or mental load, the checker can win, and the unwanted thought, mood or movement shows up more, not less.

This is why relax is such poor advice before a race, and don’t be nervous is worse. It is why the golfer told not to miss left misses left. And it is why flow, approached head-on, retreats. Am I in it yet? is the checker, standing in the boat with a clipboard.

The seventeenth-century Zen monk Takuan Sōhō, whom we met in the first article, had already spotted the bottom of the trap: thinking “I will not think” is still a thought. The way out is not a better kind of trying. It is a different place to put attention.

Learn deliberately, perform freely

None of this means effort is the problem. The skill has to be built first, and building it is deliberate, effortful, frequently boring work.

In 1993 Anders Ericsson and colleagues published a famous study of violinists, arguing that what separated the best from the merely good was accumulated hours of deliberate practice: focused, effortful work on specific weaknesses, usually with a teacher’s feedback. The idea became a popular rule about ten thousand hours. The full picture is more modest. When Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra repeated the study in 2019, practice still mattered: in their sample of violinists, it accounted for about a quarter of the differences between skill groups, roughly half the size of the original result. And the best violinists had not practiced more than the good ones. That is one group of musicians, not a general law of expertise, but it is enough to retire the ten-thousand-hour rule. Practice is necessary. It is not the whole story, and anyone who tells you it is has a book to sell.

For skilled performance, deliberate practice and flow can complement one another. Practice builds the ability. Flow sometimes allows that ability to emerge with less conscious interference. Practice is where the second rower earns his keep: noticing the late catch, naming it, asking for something better. Performance is where he needs to step back. The same attention that builds a skill can strangle it later. Learning a movement and executing it fluently are different jobs, and they want different amounts of supervision. The line between them is a matter of emphasis, not a wall. Skilled performers keep learning while they perform, and good practice can contain flow of its own.

My own left hand is the clearest example I know. After a childhood stroke it answered more slowly than my right. Once the movement had been repeated enough times to stop needing me, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. When I watched it, it tightened. The practice was the price of the freedom. The freedom was the point of the practice.

Where to put your attention instead

If watching the body interferes, what should we watch? One of the most consistent findings in motor learning offers an answer.

Over more than fifteen years of experiments, the researcher Gabriele Wulf and her colleagues found that people generally learn and perform skills better when they attend to the effect of a movement — an external focus — than to the movement itself. A golfer thinking about the swing of the club head tends to do better than one thinking about the wrists. A swimmer attending to pushing the water back tends to swim better than one thinking about the hands. Wulf’s 2013 review covered dozens of studies across skills, ages and levels of expertise. The effect is not universal in every case, but it is one of the steadier results in the field. An external focus is not a magic instruction, and some stages of learning still demand close attention to mechanics. The useful question is which kind of attention the task needs now.

This is what I stumbled into as a young coach without knowing the research. Pull harder with your back sends attention into the body. Move the boat between strokes sends it out into the water, where the result lives. The second cue almost always produced a better stroke, and it did something else. It gave the second rower nothing to grade. There is no way to audit your lower back while you are watching the puddles your blade leaves behind.

The research is mostly about movement, but the principle seems to travel, and these are applications I would expect rather than findings anyone has tested. A speaker who attends to whether the audience understands tends to do better than one attending to their own voice. A cook watching the color of the onions does better than one thinking about the knife. A caregiver attending to the person in front of them does better than one monitoring whether they are being a good caregiver. Letting go of control, in practice, often means moving attention outward, to where the work meets the world.

The cook who stopped seeing the ox

The Daoist text known as the Zhuangzi, compiled more than two thousand years ago, tells of a cook named Ding who carves an ox for his lord with such ease that the work looks like a dance. Asked how, Ding says that when he began, all he could see was the ox. After three years he no longer saw the whole animal. Now he works by spirit rather than sight, following the natural spaces between the joints, and his knife has stayed sharp for nineteen years because it never strikes bone.

The story is usually told as a parable of effortlessness, and the Chinese ideal behind it, wu wei, is often translated as “non-doing.” But the detail that matters most is easy to miss. Ding’s ease came after years of looking very hard. The scholar Edward Slingerland, who has written about wu wei and modern cognitive science, calls this the paradox of trying not to try: the effortless state is real, and it cannot be reached by aiming at it directly. It is the residue of a long apprenticeship, and of a relationship to the work that is no longer about the self doing it.

A warning belongs beside the parable. Some of the most famous stories of effortless mastery have been romanticized well past the facts. Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948), which Csikszentmihalyi himself cited, has been shown by the Japanese scholar Yamada Shōji to rest heavily on misunderstanding and loose translation. Herrigel’s teacher had no Zen training of his own. The story of letting go is so appealing that we are prone to believe it in its most mystical form. The truer version is plainer: practice, then trust, then practice again.

What I had to let go of

In the first article I said that what held me back in the boat was never my arm, and that the lesson had a longer story behind it. Here is the short version.

By the time I got to Cal I had spent nineteen years being trained, mostly by circumstance, to be completely self-reliant. That served me well in a great many places. In a boat it had a ceiling. I had effort in abundance. What I lacked, and what a boat also asks for, was grace and feel. Self-reliance tends to grip. It assumes that if the outcome matters, I had better be the one holding it. And a shell does not respond to gripping. It responds to eight people trusting the same rhythm closely enough to let it carry them.

Self-reliance had protected me long before it began limiting me. That is what makes certain habits so difficult to release. They were once the reason we survived.

I do not think anyone learns this by deciding to. You learn it, if you learn it, in boats where gripping does not work and loosening does, often enough that the body believes it before the mind does. I do not always manage it, on the water or off it. But I recognize the feeling of the grip, which is most of the battle. You cannot let go of something you cannot feel yourself holding.

Mindfulness, without the incense

Mindfulness training is the most common answer offered to all of this, and some of it is good. In a small 2011 study, Cian Aherne and colleagues gave thirteen university athletes either a brief mindfulness program or nothing. The athletes who trained reported improvements in two flow dimensions in particular: clear goals and sense of control. It was a small, early study, and it should be read as one. But it points in a sensible direction.

What it does not mean is that you must empty your mind. That is the white bear again. In my own practice, which is mostly sitting quietly in a chair, the aim is not to stop thinking. It is to watch the thinking without being dragged by it. That is the same skill the boat asks for: noticing the second rower without handing him the oars. My advice is the same as for most things worth doing. Do not overcomplicate it. Sit down. Start.

And do not let mindfulness become another performance to grade. A person who sits for ten minutes evaluating how mindful they are being has invited the clipboard into the one place it was meant to stay out of.

Letting go is not giving up

Before this gets too serene, a correction. Letting go of control is not the same as letting go of standards. Flow does not replace coaching, correction or learning. Good crews are ruthless about technique in practice and trusting in races, and they know which is which.

Readiness also has a body. Tired people grip. Stressed people grip. Underprepared people grip, and it is hard to blame them, because they do not yet have anything trustworthy to let go into. The grip rarely helps. But trust has to be earned through preparation; it cannot be decided on the start line. Sleep, recovery and preparation are not the boring part of flow. They are the floor it stands on. You cannot trust a skill you have not built, or a body you have not let recover.