The Irrelevance of “How Does It Work?”

I’ve been working on back summersaults on the trampoline for several years, doing them in safety lines. Lately, my coach has told me that I’m getting close to where I can take them out of safety lines.

It’s not the first time I’ve been here.

Each time he tells me that I’m close to taking them out of lines, I panic.

Even though I’ve been working on this skill for years, and even though I’ve done hundreds (if not thousands) of repetitions, I still can’t wrap my head around how I actually initiate the trick.

I don’t cognitively understand how my body is doing what is doing. All I know is that I bounce up, and somehow I initiate a backward rotation. When I see the trampoline, that’s my cue to open.

In my mind, I have tried to slow it down and follow my body as it goes through the movement, but I seem to lose the thread until it’s time to open and land.

My trampoline coach insists he is not doing anything with the safety lines to help me initiate the rotation.

I am already doing the trick on my own.

Even if my mind doesn’t quite understand what is happening and “how it works,” my body knows what it’s doing.

It’s up to me to trust my body to do what it knows, and to keep my mind out of the way.

This isn’t only about the back summersaults.

The False Belief in the Power of the Mind Over the Body

As a child and young adult, I was conditioned to believe that my mind was the most powerful part of me. Parents and teachers taught me to trust rationale and logic over the wisdom of the body.

Perhaps because of this conditioning, I developed a curiosity (and possibly a compulsion) to understand “how things work.”

I learned to value what my mind “knows” over what my body knows.

This is the product of a culture that values what seems logical and rational over what appears to be intuitive and embodied.

I’ve seen in myself and others how often this conditioning can cause us interfere in our natural process and get stuck in overthinking, analysis paralysis, and indecision.

The thing that is most often in our way is not that we don’t understand how something works; it’s that we believe that this understanding will somehow help us take better actions.

Understanding “How it Works” is Irrelevant

Although it can be helpful to understand “how things work,” cognitive understanding doesn’t necessarily lead to taking better actions. In fact, as I’ve seen in myself and clients, it often can be the barrier to taking any action at all.

On the flip side, we work every day with systems that we don’t fully understand.

Every day, we use technologies and tools without fully understanding how they work.

• Do you understand every aspect of how your car operates when you get into the vehicle to drive it?
• Can you explain exactly what’s happening in your computer when you use it?
• Can you detail the exact mechanism by which your oven cooks your food?

Yet we don’t stop using things just because we don’t fully understand them. You still drive, you use your computer, you cook your food.

Scientists have been studying the body for thousands of years, and many diseases and illnesses are still a mystery. They still are figuring out how the brain works and how it directs movement in the body.

That doesn’t stop us from moving and using our bodies.

The missing link that keeps us stuck is not that we don’t understand the mechanics. It’s that we don’t trust the system even when it shows us the results on a consistent basis.

The Conditions for Moving Forward

At some point soon, I’ll take off the safety lines for the back summersaults.

That point won’t come when I’ve finally “wrapped my head around how it works,” but when I’ve decided to trust that my body holds an intelligence far superior to the intelligence of my mind.