https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qYaYcSzZWRM
Welcome everybody to Voices with Reveke. I’m joined with my friend Nick Wickleman. Nick and I met at the movement summit organized by Rafe Kelly and others and we hit it off quite significantly. We’ve had a couple of a meet, I think actually three conversations we’ve had so far together and it’s been really, really good. And we were also on a panel together and I’m really excited to have Nick here. Some of the work he’s written a book called The Language of Coaching. It’s really good. My son keeps picking it up and going through it and what is this book? And he’s really, really thrilled by it. And the work that Nick is doing is so constant with my own. So welcome Nick. It’s just wonderful to have you here. John, it’s a true honor. As you said, Rafe has kind of been this common point of intersection. He’s like, Hey, have you ever heard of this guy, John Verveke? I think he talks about words as well. And I think you might find him interesting. It could have just absolutely passed by in the conversation I had with him. But so few people look at words and meaning and how we use them to transfer meaning and make meaning. And so I’m like, let me check him out. And as I told you, some 20 hours later, I felt I’d earned the right to shoot you an email. And so far our conversations have been great. Thank you, Nick. I agree. So maybe you could start just by introducing yourself a bit, like say what it is you do and say how that sort of intersects with the broader themes of embodied cognition and things like that. And as you’ve already invoked it, meaning making, how it’s relevant to the meaning crisis, et cetera. But where you’re coming from and how you got here, I’m sure my viewers will be really interested in hearing that story. Yeah, it’s quite a, well, I don’t know if it’s an odd background. I think meaning is important to everybody. So I guess all backgrounds are universal here. But my specific journey as a strength and conditioning coach now, so bigger, faster, stronger for about the last 17 years, as long as I have been working, so I got my first gig at 15 years old, I was working in a gym. So rightly or wrongly, that’s the context I found myself in. And a lot of it was driven out of my own personal journey to find myself in a way. And only now through reflection can I understand it. And what I mean by finding myself is I never felt, and this might sound superficial to some, but I’m still working through it. I never found that the way that I appeared on the outside was the way that I felt on the inside. It’s all football player and a basketball player. And so like everyone call it a body image. But for me, I wanted to do something about it. So a lot of my entry into the movement space, into the strength and conditioning space was through my own journey of, yes, losing weight, but I think gaining strength in the control, in the discipline that came along with it. And so there was a number of key players when I was in high school, let’s say starting this journey. But one of them, his name was Rudy. And he was a strength conditioning coach who worked at Costco during the day and on his own back opened up the gym every day at 2 30. And he would come in, he literally, John would write up pretty much the same program on the board every day. But that wasn’t the real value he brought. He started to teach you how to be a person alongside of physically preparing to be a player. And again, I could only fully appreciate this as I grew towards adulthood. And so Rudy taught me that through movement, I could develop the whole person. And again, I would not have used those words even in college. But I think emotionally, that’s what I was drawn to. And so fast forward, I got into the strength and conditioning space, ultimately as a context, but my I would say my deeper purpose is to help people in the same way that I had been helped. And thus it was a physical path, but very much so it has deeper psychological meaning within it. And I reflect on that journey. And the journey I still feel that I’m on from there. And so that just kind of gives you a sense of if you would, how it all started. Now fast forward to today, I primarily work in professional sports. And so some might even look at what I do is it will have you actually leverage your your skill set your entry to to the broadest community possible. And I would say not yet, but I still consider myself not that we ever shift out of students, but very much so on a journey of earning the right to be listened to by the world. And I honestly mean that. And so for the last 15 years, I was working in NFL primarily, helping athletes go from college to the NFL via the NFL combine, running professional education for other strength coaches and fitness professionals. So the transfer of knowledge, helping use words to make meaning in both my athletes and the coaches has always been part and parcel to what I do. And now I find myself in Dublin, working in another culture in another sport and I work in professional rugby in a slightly different role, more of a leadership role, a high performance type role where I work across, you know, 34 amazing individuals in strength, conditioning and sports science. Again, I find myself in a position that demands clarity of communication, building shared meaning and helping other people find meaning in their path. I do quite a bit of consulting with individuals. A lot of my colleagues are on, hey, where do I go with my career? You know, strength and conditioning is very volatile. And so that’s a concern, especially at the moment in time we find ourselves. And so that, let’s say one level of my journey within that, within that language has always been important. I guess it started when my mom said, you talk too much, right? You’re destined to be a lawyer or something. And so she probably, she’s probably right. So maybe I had something with language, but the key thing for me, the first time I came into contact with language and I became aware of it. That might sound really odd to many people, but think about it, we use language all the time, but how often do we come in contact with it? How often can we stop and notice it? You know, I’m going to put a footnote on this comment. My wife and I, likely because of our shared interests, will always comment to each other when we phrase something in a way that brings joy, whether it’s metaphor or analogy. And John, you talk a lot about savoring. And even though I haven’t explicitly engaged in that practice, knowingly, I think very often around language, my wife and I do that. And actually throughout our life, we try to stop when something really brings us joy and share that with the other person. And so that’s just an interesting footnote. But for me, the first time I came in contact with language, I was pretty, you know, general moment. I was learning to become a personal trainer and I was following another trainer on the floor. And I’d been following him for weeks now. And I was trying to understand why was he seen as the lead trainer? Why was he seen as being somehow more skilled at training and developing others than maybe some of the other individuals on the floor? And I started with the obvious place. And that was the obvious salient things. His program. Well, what exercises does he do? How many reps and sets? How does he understand the client’s goals? How does he document? How does he make notes? All the things that I could touch and feel, and frankly, were part of my textbooks that said, this is the knowledge necessary to be a personal trainer and train other people. And I couldn’t find the answer there, John, because I’m like, well, he’s doing bench press on Monday. He’s doing bicep curls and he’s doing all the same things. But there’s something different here. I can feel it. And one day I narrowed in on his use of language in that he was a very clever, witty guy as is, but he always protected the moment before the client would move to give them one idea, to give them an idea that could be salient, that could dominate their mind, be a passenger, if you would, guiding how they move. I like to call it the address in the GPS gives them that one central thought. And I’ll never forget, I was struck by what otherwise was a basic moment in time. And I’ll never forget, a day or so later, I went to another kind of senior mentor. And I said, what this guy is doing, I don’t even know if he realized it. But one day I got to write a book called The Form Within, nobody’s talking about this. It’s ever present. We talk and communicate all the time. And we know intuitively, it makes this profound difference in ourselves, how we think, and how we use language to think, but also how we interact with others, I got to do something about this. But you know, it was one of those ideas that I was not prepared to action. And so it was over a decade later, that these ideas started to mature again, I started to find the resources that had something to say about how our words impact thinking, and how what we think, while we move, ultimately impacts how we move. And anyone who’s played tennis, or golf, who’s had the bad day out, they know the dark side of what thinking can do while we move. But I think we’ve also enjoyed the ahas, as you and I have talked about, or the light bulb. And so there’s this this meshing between thought and movement. And that starts to start to tap into this embodiment, how will they’re all connected? And that’s how do I as a coach, how do I as a teacher, how do I insert myself in that loop, in that process? Well, I’m not a puppet master, I don’t have strings on their body. But I do have language, I can put words into their mind with the hopes that if they’re unpacked, they could make a meaningful difference that ultimately in my world, changes the way they move for the better, which tends to converge with why that person is there, they are pursuing a goal that has a movement basis. And so I’m helping them achieve an end, as many people had helped me achieve an end. And so fast forward now to 2016, I start writing the book 2020, the book was published in the book lives basically on on 15 years of curiosity, a decade of thinking and practicing with a PhD stuck in there just to make sure I was on the right course. And for and four years of writing. And where does that bring me today? Today, I realize, and I mean today in a broader sense, not literally today, and this starts to converge on why what you and I are talking about is so important. I’ve been saying this now for years to my wife, I came to realize that strength and conditioning is not my purpose. It is my context. It is my arena to use your word, John. Right. Right. I find that my purpose, I don’t know if I’ve shown you this, but I have truth tattooed on my form. Right, right. That is quite it. You see here that the you in the middle is red, the red almost like blood, the lifeline is to respect that the truth is still fluid to the degree that there’s personal truth, a truth that cannot be objectively concrete like an object. There is what we might hope there’s a reality, there’s a direct contact, a realism, as we might get into with Dreyfus and Taylor. But then there’s this ever search for personal truth. And so I don’t think I’ve shared this with you yet. But that is my core value. That above all else is what I pursue. And so when Rafe Kelly says this guy, John Verveke, let me watch the videos. And I start to get in there, I see a person who is is enacting his own journey, even though you’re much farther in your journey. I, if I can say this, I see your pain, I see your struggle, I see your pursuit of something. And that resonates or reverberates inside of me. And what I’ve realized in these discussions and in partnership in the broadest sense, I believe I can start to take what I’ve done. And I can share it with the world, I can give it a broader platform, I can do what I know is inside of me. And in the process, better understand myself, my own truth, and the meaning that I seek to make in this world. And so that’s where I’ll maybe end and allow you to sharpen the conversation from here. But I think that that gives you the journey and how we came into contact. That was excellent. So here’s a place that I think resonates with me right away, especially with that, what you just said, truth. Yeah, I have the tattoos too. I’ve got meditation and concentration. I got know thyself here. So yeah, tattooing is a good way to create the talismanic reminders of what you’re committing yourself to. But so the way the idea of truth there, because let’s zero in on a term that sort of bridges, I think, this notion of realization when people realize things, which is both the like you said, those aha moments, but also the way in which their own bodies and the world is disclosed to them in a new pattern. And then it’s that new pattern that affords them transforming how they’re moving, how they’re moving, how they’re even inhabiting their bodies. And you’ve given me several examples, which I’m requesting that you would share one of those examples of how you’ve gone in. There’s somebody and they’re trying to correct their movement, right? Like you did the example of somebody who’s sprinting, you’ve done examples of, you’ve given me several examples and I found each one really tasty, right? And then what you did is the way in which you found that, you know, that you found the analogy that, you know, bridges between the propositional and the perspectival and it affords that aha realization and an affordance opens up for them. And then they start to move in a new way. And it’s very different from them knowing that they need to move in a new way. And like you say, just practicing, there’s something that you did that transforms, right? Their perspectival knowing so that you start to inhabit the world and their body in a different way. And so it’s the language borders on like on one hand on like on poetry on one side and it’s almost like magic, right? And on the other side, because it’s actually sort of making something possible for people. First of all, is that a fair description? Oh, no, completely, completely. It’s I know exactly what you’re talking about. And I have, I think, a good example for which we can, we might be able to go through others in a different angle. But let me use a simple one that everyone can relate to. And I think I’ve shared the one of my son learning to ride his bike. I think this one probably more than the others eloquently articulates what you’re describing there. And so it’s a long story. So I’m gonna share the latter half. It goes something like this during the COVID period, my son was learning to ride his bike. And as he was learning to ride his bike, I find as someone who studies learning, quite literally professionally, that understanding how and why learning takes place becomes quite important to me. And so these are beautiful, natural time points as a parent to see it in action. And also oftentimes see where you are miserably wrong, at least wrong in what you think. And so it got me thinking about what what underpins learning, which is to say, why do we need coaches? You know, you alluded to, I was able to use language to intervene to positively disrupt, I might say, and allow for a new reorganization that this person desired. But we also know that people learn things all the time without coaches without teachers. Some people might say that’s where the greatest learning takes place. And so for me, I’ve just been thinking about, well, why do we need coaches? And by no means am I saying this is 100% accurate, but at least pragmatically, I’ve started to observe that the four conditions, if met, allow learning and here I’m talking about movement learning, but I do believe this transcends movement, the four conditions, if if set, learning will occur, call it naturally. But certain disruptions with these conditions, without intervention, might either result in the neutralization of the flatlining of progress. So I stay the way I am. And for an elite person, that might be great. But in other instances, right, if you don’t use it, you lose it. If I stop engaging with the practice, I start to see erosion. And so the four preconditions for learning for me were the following. One, there needs to be a clear goal. It needs to be salient at some level, it doesn’t need to be salient at the propositional level. It’s not like that the four or five year old needs to be able to clearly articulate the goal of riding a bike. But the goal still needs to be self evident to them from a perceptual perspective. So it needs to be a goal. Number two, there needs to be a feedback loop. I mean, there needs to be immediate feedback that is obvious, again, that is salient to the learner. Third piece is there has to be a desire, there needs to be a desire to achieve the goal. If there is no desire, there’s nothing motivating the pursuit in the practice. So it’s not likely to begin. And then the fourth and final one is they need to have the capability of achieving this skill. And so my son, for example, when riding the bike, he would literally have to be tall enough and strong enough to pedal the bike. If those preconditions were not met, it doesn’t matter if the goal is clear, the feedback is there and the desire is strong. And so I think you could extend these four conditions to other things. But here we are, he’s learning to ride his bike. And sure enough, early on, he’s coaching me. He’s like, Dad, let me go, hold on, let go, push faster. He’s orchestrating the whole thing. And so fine, he learns the training wheels come off. Happy days. The goal is clear. In my case, he wants to beat his sister on the walk. So he wants to be this thing needs to not fall over. So the goal is quite clear. He has a desire to beat his sister around the block and the feedback. Well, gravity is a heck of a teacher. Yeah. And he had finally matured to a physical stature. He could ride the bike. So four preconditions are there. Happy days. He’s learning on his own. He’s coaching me more than I’m coaching him. But we then reach a critical juncture whereby when he tries to speed up, he’s over correcting with his handlebars, causing him to swerve and fall. Now I allow him to work through this, but I start to notice something in the morning. He’s not as excited to get on the bike. Right. Right. He’s not as quick. He in fact might even push back. Oh, Hey buddy, you want to go ride? Yeah. Okay. And so what do I start to notice? Oh, well, I start to draw a possible correlation between him reaching this, this, this progress gap and his motivation, his desire. And so that as a coach brings in an interesting point when failure reaches a certain level and frustration follows, we start to possibly see a reduction in desire. And so it’s not that the goal is gone, still there. Gravity hasn’t gone anywhere and he hasn’t lost his strength overnight. So in his case, I saw it as desire. So I said, okay, so my, my job now is to go in and see if I can provoke desire, but not by motivating him. Cause that wasn’t working, John. I said, Hey, come on buddy. It did not work. And so I’m scratching my head. Well, how do we do this? I can’t change the goal. Ah, feedback. What he’s suffering from is he’s not aware of the feature of his environment that contains the information needed to make the progress towards his goal that he desires. Okay. Okay. Where’s that information? The information for me was in his handlebars. The motion of his handlebars is what was ultimately causing the thing that was causing his desire to a road. And so I step in now we’re a musical family and I gave him a very simple question. I said, Madden, show me what your handlebars are doing when they’re loud. And he kind of looked at me and he moved his handlebars very, very quickly in a big exaggerated motion. And I said, show me what your handlebars are doing when they’re quiet. And all of a sudden he stopped and he helped him still very proud of himself. I said, okay, now when you’re speeding up to catch your sister, do you think you should keep your handlebars loud or quiet? He looked at me the big time and said, quiet. So he’s four, right? And he’s getting the analogy. He’s getting the comparison. All the while, what I’m doing is I’m drawing his attention to the handlebars, but I’m doing it in a way where the handlebars don’t become all consuming. They don’t become the only focus. I believe you use the term, they become a soft focus over the background rather than the foreground. And so now we created a very simple mechanism for when he was writing to either, you know, affirmed himself, keep it quiet, or for dad to say or mom to say, keep it quiet. And I’m not saying this is the only reason, but within a few days he was speeding past his sister uphill, down the hills, and he was corrected. And in that example, I find the heart of coaching, really. It’s knowing when to step in. It’s knowing what we are stepping into in terms of the change. But then here’s the kicker. It’s knowing how to generate the change such that the learner feels that they’re almost the author of it. So that was beautifully said. That was beautifully said. And so can we zero in now on, like I want to really zero in on, like this, this, this, you know, I get it. There’s this kairos, right? You’re sensing, like when’s the time to intervene and what’s the context of the intervention? You really have to sensitize yourself to that. The Greeks had a great word for this. They have two words for wisdom. One is Sophia, the other is Phonesis. And Phonesis is exactly that wisdom of like, when should I intervene and what’s going on here? You know, that contextual sensitivity that gives you the optimal point of intervention, right? The finesse that Pascal talked about, right? So that’s, but that’s continuous. Like, it’s not like, although I’m using two words, that that zeroing in and the intervention, it seems to me like it’s continuous, or at least it’s in dialogue with this process of an emerging, right, analogy of an emerging. And it’s more than just, I granted you use the word analogy, it’s fine. But I want to say that it’s something more like it’s like it’s an enacted analogy. It’s almost like it’s not this, but it’s like what people are doing when they’re doing a ritual in religious practice, right? They’re not just thinking of an analogy. They’re enacting it, and they’re enacting it by committing themselves to a process of transformation within it, right? And so you have to get, you have to get the, you know, the Phonesis of the Kairos, and then you have to come up with the analogy that the person that’s going to catch the person that they’re going to internalize, right? That they’re going to enact, right? That they’re going to commit themselves to. I mean, so there’s an amazing art there. And so I’m just like, it seems to me like you’ve zeroed in on how this language, this, I wish I had a better term, but the enacted analogies, right? How they are bridging between the propositional, the procedural, and the perspectival. Like, it’s clear your son, your son had the pieces, right? Like, because as soon as you asked him, he knew, he knew. But there was, it was almost like, you know, there’s the like metaphor bridging, right? It’s almost like the connection, what you did is, right? He’s got this, he’s got this and this and this. And then it’s almost like we talked about in the cognitive science literature, you did problem finding, you found the, you found the problem of, you know, how to connect these things that are not yet connected. And then you gave him an enacted analogy that somehow puts the procedural and the perspectival and the propositional together in a way that he can commit himself to it right away. And so the interesting thing for me is, again, I know I’ve asked you this before, and it’s an unfair question. It’s an unfair question, but it’s a question between friends. And so it’s more of an invitation to more conversations. Like, how do you do that? Like, what’s going on? I mean, right? Because I mean, and to be fair to me, I’m not trying to put you in a, I’d like you a lot. I’m not trying to put you in a hard, bad spot, but you did say, and so I’m calling to you on that, you know, you want to transfer this, you want to, you want to learn how to take this and make it available for responding to the meeting crisis. So this is to my mind, like the key question. And again, this is a socratic question. I don’t, I don’t expect you to say, well, here it is. Here’s the algorithm, blah, blah, blah, blah. But maybe by getting into discussion, we can induce, we can draw. So I think we started to get into to the schema. I am starting to formulate and it’s the schema in the book. So, so it is a first, it is a first attempt. And so, so a number of things here, I want to kind of start at one thousandth of you that will go to the hundredth of you. And so the thousandth of view, I actually believe it was during our, our panel discussion. It was one thing that I know that stood out in my mind because I never said it before, which is why I love these kind of dynamic conversations for me that the flow state that emerges allows some of the best thinking and cogeneration. But what I said there is, is analogies almost by their very nature, allow you to collaborate with your former selves. Yeah. Yeah. I like, I’d like, I really like that, that, that linkage to aspiration, right? And, and distributed cognition across time. Yeah. And the reason I thought of that again, by analogy is because when people said, well, why, you know, many people write a book and they say, he’ll never do it again. But when people say, will I do it again? I’m like, I will do it for the rest of my life. Right. Exactly. They’re like, why, why? I’m like, because I realized writing allows me to collaborate with myself. Every time I finish a draft and I set it down and I go away for a couple of weeks and I come back, I’m like, what was I thinking? It’s almost like I’m reading someone else’s book. Each time I went back, I found the voice was getting closer and closer to the one I wanted, the one I was aspiring towards. And so that thought was already floating in my mind. So when we were on the panel, like, Holy smokes, that’s why that’s what analogies are. They’re a collaboration because analogy, right? It’s a comparison between something you’re familiar with and usually something you’re less familiar with. Not that you can form analogy between two familiar things, but normally in a teaching context, I use an analogy because I think the thing I’m going to say is something you’re familiar with. And I’m going to take your knowledge of that familiarity and your implicit understanding of that thing. And I’m going to map it onto this thing you’re not familiar with. And with that, you carry the knowledge, the structure, the schema. So one I’ve used last time we spoke, an analogy we use in sprinting. We’ve all seen people sprint, the person that kind of looks hunched over when they’re running almost falls on their face, right? No, we use the analogy of when you get off the line and for people watching listening, imagine Usain Bolt, you know, gun goes off, bam, and he sprints forward. We say drive off the line like a jet taking off. Now, nobody consumes that analogy and says, I am now physically my matter has changed into a jet. But are there are there characteristics we can map? Well, low to high is a characteristic of motion, a very fast characteristic of motion, a strong position from toe to tail, right? Or from nose to tail and from head to toe, right? So strong. And so there’s all these features that we can map over. And so for me, very early on, it’s this idea of feature mapping. And we talked that we talked about Deidre Gentner, structure, structure mapping, her work really inspired a lot of my own. So you ask, how do I go about generating analogies? And you’re not the only one to ask this question. I get asked it all the time. And I try to tell people to be very clear that this is not something that I feel I was naturally attuned for. Okay, I would not say if I go back and look at the the Nick 12 years ago, was I using analogies as fluently as I am now as quickly as I not even close. And so something happened. The first thing that happened is I recognized, right, the invisible became visible. I recognized that language was important. And this specific attribute feature of language that we call analogy seems to be exceptionally important. Right, right. And the way I would argue that if you listen, if you recorded a conversation between yourself and a five year old, a 15 year old, a 25 year old and a 50 year old, that obviously the concepts you were talking about are different. But if we just look at the structure of your language, I argue that the analogy use and the kind of analogy use you are using is going to be very different. And it’s likely to be different based on the age of the person. That’s only using analogies that they have experiences they could relate to. And obviously, analogies that you feel will somehow connect to them as an individual, independent of their age. And so I started to notice this. And at first, it was like brute force. Let me just let me try to generate more. But I kept running into these blockages. And so when you’re when you’re coaching professional athletes, you can’t sit there and say, Hey, can I have a 10 minute intermission to come up with some better cues to give you, you can move faster over 1010 yards, not going to happen. And so let me fast forward to today, where I got to. And so it started with Deidre Genter’s work. And she talks about from a mapping perspective, let’s stick with my analogy, because hopefully people can visualize the sprinting and a jet taking off. Right, right, right. He talks about two things being mapped. We map actions. And we map attributes. And so generally speaking, the way in reading her work, I took this in a movement context. And this is where john I feel we’re within this conversation and the ones that will follow, we can start to then transcend movement and bring this analogy into the world of concepts beyond movement, but actions and attributes actions. I took that as dynamic. It’s a feature of the movement that if my leg can be in position A and B, I’m looking at how it moves from A to B. That’s what we’re going to call action. And then attribute is something more a static. It’s a feature of the body. So if I was to make the analogy during a push up, keep your back flat like a table. I’m taking static flatness of a table and I’m mapping it onto what should be the static flatness of your back in a push up. That’s an attribute. But if I say, when you change direction, explode off the ground, like a bouncy ball off the ground, I’m invoking something of more of an action. There’s a speed motion element to it. And so what I started to realize is, okay, when I’m coaching, I need to identify is the thing I’m trying to change categorically, a action, dynamic motion, or is it an attribute? So is it an attribute of the body? They’re flexed and they should be neutral or an action. Their leg needs to come up faster than it is right now. Once I’ve identified that, then I can say, okay, that means I’ve identified the thing that I need to change. Now, how do I go about doing that? I have to identify an analogy using language, using experiences they are familiar with. And so to summarize the schema, if I can identify the feature of the movement and make sure the feature of the movement is similar to the thing I’m analogizing it against, and that the thing I’m analogizing it against is familiar to you, John, you know, this reference I’m making, you know about it. You’ve seen a jet take off. You’ve presumably seen a table. So sprint like a jet taking off lands with you. If we look at that, then that starts to generate, if you would, an engine for pulling on all the things that they’re familiar with that have this attribute or all the things they’re familiar with that have this action. And in its simplest level, that’s how I approach it. That’s fantastic. That’s very, your talent for explication is very much appreciated by me. So, I mean, I’m also very familiar with Gatner’s work. I teach it in one of the courses I teach on thinking and reasoning. I’ve done work on metaphor, a lot of work on metaphor and analogy. So I want to bring those things to it and see if that will enrich the discussion. So Gatner also talks about, well, before we go to Gatner, let’s go to Artone. Artone has the salience imbalance theory of metaphor. Every theory of metaphor ultimately fails from counterexamples. So you can’t, none of these theories will be definitional, but they’re all helpful. They’re all helpful. And so what Artone says is, so, you know, here’s the target of the metaphor. This is what I want to understand. And here’s the vehicle of the metaphor, what I’m familiar with. And I’m going to transfer from the vehicle to the target, just so we have some language to talk about. And then what he says is, what you do is you find a feature in the vehicle that is highly, that is regularly salient for the vehicle. And then what you do is you map it onto a feature that is regularly not salient for the target. So you find a salience imbalance. And then by doing that mapping, what you’re actually doing, I would say, is you’re, that’s why it’s like an aha experience. You’re altering what you find salient and thereby what you find relevant. And so it seems to me that one of the things you have to do is you have, like, I’m trying to make sense of your son, like he had this information, but it wasn’t salient to him. And then you use, and then use the feature of music that’s very salient to music, it’s loud or it’s soft. And then what that did is it took this non-salient feature and made it more salient. So that sounds like it plugs into your example. The salience imbalance, absolutely going in the next edition. I love that. You’re a hundred percent right. Otherwise they would have changed it themselves. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So it’s like when you have an inside experience, the information’s available to you, like the nine dot, you know, problem. Well, you always knew that there was space outside the nine dots, but it wasn’t salient to you. It wasn’t relevant to you right away. And so now bringing in an idea from Gettner. So Gettner talks a lot about, like she has, she has a sort of a step-by-step decision tree for how you decide what to map. And she says you, you map, like you map, you prefer relations over single features and you’ve, you prefer systems of relations over single relations. So that’s why we like that the, you know, the atom is a solar system because we can map, not only can we map a bunch of relations, we can map a relation between all the relations. She calls that systematicity. And so it’s, it seems to me that what’s also going on in your selection and the artistry of it, and I mean that as a compliment by the way, the artistry of it is that you’re trying to find not just the features, but you’re trying to find the structural functional organization of the features that will, so one of the things the metaphor does, the analogy does, it’s not just giving them a feature list. It’s like, I mean, you’re working, like it’s giving them a feature schema. It’s giving them, right, not only the features, but implicit in the analogy is how the features are all fitted together and are working together. So for example, you’ve got the feature of acceleration and a slow thing, you could, you know, you might give, you might have one thing that has one of the, like a rocket, but it doesn’t have the other feature, right, and right, you have to have something that they put, that sort of gestalts them together so that there’s that systematicity. There’s a structural functional relation, and I’m wondering if what happens is, do you get, like, are there some, are there some, like I’m asking a calibration question, sorry. The idea is, let’s say, like the more comprehensive and dynamically complex the needed intervention, do you find that the metaphor is correspondingly, has sort of a richer systematicity to it? That it, like, you feel that the metaphor is sort of richer or denser, a metaphor? I don’t, I’d have to think about that, that description of it has not crossed my mind from the standpoint of the use of metaphor or analogy for a complex versus, let’s say, a less complex problem. In fact, what I find is, the more complex the problem, the easier it is to find an aha solution by a metaphor because, and I kind of call this the Trojan horse effect, you talk about all the implicit meaning, I can hide, I can hide a ton of implicit meaning and a ton relational meaning inside of an analogy, but if I was to unpack that and make it explicit to allow the warriors out of the Trojan horse, so to speak, then it would dominate, it would create chaos in the mind, ultimately leading to the metaphor ineffectual. If I can highlight something that you said earlier, because I think it’ll add brightness to it, you talked about this salience imbalance, which I love, and just to put it in my own words, the, so to speak, the vehicle, the thing that they are familiar with, that I’m mapping onto the target, the thing I’m trying to teach them or change, I like the primacy of the vehicle is that the thing, part of it, that I need them to be aware of is obvious, it’s inherent inside of it, and the thing I’m trying to change, which has a similarity is not, so that’s salience, I love that. What I find though, inside of that is the more the two things I’m comparing map onto each other, and Gettner talks about this, the less impactful the metaphor is, because that one, let’s say, salient feature that I really want to stand out in the vehicle, that I really want to stand out in the analogy, sometimes can be dampened by all the other points of familiarity, and so they can’t find it, and so let me actually give an example, that’s the first time I’ve said this, that the sprint like a jet taking off, right, right, by itself, oftentimes is ineffective, right, right, here’s why, here’s why in my opinion, I just want to say you’re really asking, you’re really answering the question about calibration that I asked, okay, you really are, you really are, just go, just go, so the reason the jet is ineffective is because there are too many obvious features that map onto sprinting, you can talk about it’s fast, you can talk about again from nose to tail, it needs to be straight, well if you look at the side of the body, it needs to be straight, so there’s a lot, so it’s almost like when there’s a lot of features that map onto each other, the person abandon ship conceptually, because they don’t, one doesn’t stand out, so I always, I always like you get a bag of peanuts, maybe not anymore, but I give them a bag of peanuts as well on this jet, I say listen, I need you to explode off the line like a jet taking off, gradually rising, so I try to bring them to the salience of the gradual rise of the jet, and that’s the piece I want them to map over, let me give an example of an analogy that the salience is obvious, like you don’t, it doesn’t need any translation, because what I did, there were some analogies, there’s a bit of translation, this one doesn’t require it, if I say I want you to line up for your sprint, okay, and you have to imagine, I used to work in Phoenix, Arizona, so desert landscape context will allow this analogy to make more sense, I want you to imagine there is a rattlesnake two feet behind you, reared up ready to bite your calf, I need you to beat the bite, beat the bite, and so again, inherent inside of that, the, I’m almost making explicit the comparison, but I think what we’re revealing with analogy as well, is the benefit of collaborating with a former state is, the the knowledge of what getting off the line fast, that’s great, but what does the analogy also give me, it gives me an emotional quality, there’s a sense embedded in that analogy of how to do this, I’m not just gradually getting off the line, I literally am getting off the line like my life depends on it, and so it’s not only brightening the technique, it’s brightening the energy, the heartbeat of the technique, and so much of movement, so much of movement has a feel, has an emotional quality, you talk to athletes, they talk about feeling and the way energy fluxes, yet so much of our language in coaching lacks that emotional quality, we say extend this, push that, rotate there, but that as if that’s enough, it’s not sufficient to actually help someone wholesale embody a change. So that’s really interesting, that’s powerful, so there is a kind of, there is a kind of logos there, there is a structural functional organization, but what you did was really interesting, you said it’s actually not so much just between features, but also between sort of different aspects or functions of cognition, you’re also organizing them with the analogy, so you’re getting the person’s right knowledge of how to move their body, but what the thing the analogy is doing is actually putting them into an emotional state, it’s giving them a perspective and a motivation, that’s fantastic, that’s really good, that’s really really interesting, so I just want to pick up on another point that was touched on briefly, and this is some of the work I’ve done and my colleague Dan Schiappi has done experimental work on, so you don’t really, I mean people talk about metaphorical truth, it’s more like, it’s truth more like in the sense of al-Athayah, a metaphor is true, or analogy is true to the degree to which it brings about a transformation that connects you to the world in a better way, it’s not true the way force equals mass times acceleration or something like that, but what you do evaluate metaphors on, so the thing that stands in for is it true or false, because we’re actually talking about transformation, not possession or proposition, what stands in for truth is what’s called aptness, like how apt a metaphor is, and what’s interesting about the aptness of a metaphor, and I want to see if this translates back to your experience, so and there’s experimental work showing this, you brought it up with you know, Gettner’s point, other people have noted it, you know if the vehicle and the tenor are too similar, you get all these mappings, but as you said, you don’t know which one is the same way, or the relevant one, so let me give you this example I use from my own work in my lectures, if the tenor, if the target and the vehicle are too similar, you don’t get a great metaphor, even though you’re getting tons of mapping, so if I say to you bees are hornets, you don’t go wow, that’s such a great metaphor, look at all the mappings, and it’s because so many things are familiar, you don’t know how to reorganize what you find salient, so that’s, and then on the other extreme is if they’re too different, the identity becomes so abstract that it’s vague about what the transformation is going to be, well when I say to you, well you know arguments are chairs, because they’re both human made, and they’re structures that support, isn’t that a great metaphor, and you go what, that’s the what, like what about chairs right, and so people don’t like either one of those extremes, and so this aptness, you’ve got to get what’s, there’s a duality to it, you have to, you have to, right, you have to get both a relevant difference, and that’s backgrounded, and then a relevant sameness that’s foregrounded, did that make, did that make sense? Well my slight deviation in eyes here is because I want to make a connection that I feel is right into episode 12, you went through this whole idea of you know trustworthiness, something elegant, is it trivial, is it far-fetched, exactly, yeah, I think when you said you know when something is, let’s see here, profound, there’s this optimization of it’s trustworthy, it’s elegant in its simplicity to explain, but it’s fluid right, we don’t want to take no energy to understand it, and almost for me that profound sense that aha, it is this, I can trust it, it’s elegant in its simplicity, and it seems to be fluid, it takes no effort to be brought on board, I don’t know, as you’re talking that, yeah, no, no, that’s good, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I like this, oh, yeah, okay, so the idea is right, there, there’s, so coming from the, coming from the vehicle, there’s a lot of familiar lines, and then they converge on the needed thing, the central thing, and then that is the nexus point, that’s the point that gives you maximal intervention, right, and when you, right, oh that’s good, that’s really good, and you have to, you have to structure, oh, I like that, I hadn’t put that together, Nick, that’s brilliant, I couldn’t believe it, I knew you, yeah, because when you went through what makes something, you know, trivial, a lot of convergence with no elegance, you know, far-fetched, elegance with little convergence, my mom’s like, okay, he’s starting to, because for me, I’m nearly obsessed with how to be a better thinker, you know, in a world of noise, how do we find signal, but almost as an analogy, that’s what we’re talking about, how can we communicate in a way to brighten the right signals, that’s what group metaphor is about, so, so, yeah, I even use metaphors when I’m talking about this, because I talk about the elegance of a construct as being multi-opt, right, because it maps into many different, many different domains, but that’s really good, I like that, so the idea is that what I’m looking for is a, maybe we can put the two things together, a good analogy is one that’s going to generate that plausibility, right, in a powerful way, and it’s going to cause a salient, a significant restructuring of the salience of the target, is that, that’s sort of the aha, that’s sort of, yeah, a generated plausibility that generates an aha, because of, right, so you, the trustworthiness makes you trust the, the salience imbalance, right, and change how you think about something, but the elegance is what gives you the sense of it empowering you, so that’s really good, I hadn’t thought about that, those, that, putting those two together, I think is very helpful, yeah, yeah, no, for me, it’s, you know, I find, so, so much of this hangs on their, their deep familiarity with the vehicle, you know, so, I’m, I’m working with, you know, an athlete right now who has been, been trying to solve a movement problem, he just so happens to work in golf, and he’s been working at this for a long time, and he’s been working at this for a long time, right, and so what we’ve done, and this is almost, how do we mechanize this, again, in movement coaching, but also, you know, I think there’s, there’s therapeutic exemplars for using metaphor, metaphor and analogy, to kind of transcend your circumstances, to listen to the words we are using, the, you know, I’m underwater, you know, I’m trained to the ground, whatever it might be, so almost, I was trying to steal a little bit of that intellect into this process, and so my, my steps with him have been as follows, step one, before we can even talk about analogy or metaphor generation, we need to clearly understand that the feature that it, we’re trying to target, the feature that we are trying to change, and so spend a lot of time with him, let’s unpack in your movement what needs to change, and so that’s taken a couple conversations, and even for, for the individual, for them to try to unpack it, because they’ve been of many minds, but once we nailed it, then it was a very simple task, I said, okay, what visual, and this is an analogy, what visual can, can occupy your mind, that you feel by its very nature, would force upon a change, and I’m very clear when I say this, and I don’t want you to feel the change is one of intellectual knowing, that okay, these things propositionally go together, if I think this, that should happen, no, that when you think of this thing, you feel the change, right, right, right, right, get it, I got it, okay, and so I look at that as they download the implicit meaning of the analogy on contact, right, it takes no effort, it’s completely fluent in many cases, with maybe a little bit of translation, and so basically, I armed him with the schema, so to speak, and after a couple sessions, guess what, he found it, he found one, and now it’s a matter of grooving it in, now I’m not saying it’s perfect, we might have to pivot a little bit, but we are, we are building the analogy, right, why do I say we’re building the analogy, because if I am golfing, I am golfing, that’s the skill, I can’t transcend that, I’m swinging a club and hitting a ball, so to transcend that and thus bring something new to it, it’s not like I can change the rules of the game either, right, right, right, I can’t bring anything outside of me, ah, but I have this virtual thing where I can move as if, right, right, right, the big thing, if I move as if I feel this, if I move as if I were there on a cliff, let’s say, all of a sudden, my movement organizes differently, and so for me, this is kind of that process that we go through, and so oftentimes an analogy isn’t a one and done, for me early on, that was the case, but now I talk about a working analogy, yeah, yeah, so that’s what I was trying to convey with the poetry of it, yeah, yeah, right, it keeps building, yeah, yeah, and even if we abandon the structure of an analogy, which is to say it’s words, oftentimes we still contain the meaning and we transfer the meaning to a different structure, which might be a comparison that is more salient, a comparison that they are more familiar with, that they like better, and so for example, I might say to an individual when they’re sprinting, hey, I want you to explode off the ground like you’re sprinting up a set of stairs, and so the meaning I’m trying to convey is more push into the ground with upward forward propulsion, but let’s say that’s not working for them, but I haven’t, they understand what I’m trying to convey, but it’s not affecting them, the analogy isn’t working on them, and so now let’s say I change, okay, instead of sprinting up stairs, imagine you’re sprinting up a hill, right, okay, it’s still forward upward propulsion, but it’s a different visual context, so I have some people, the hill absolutely lights them up, they get it, it works, instant change, other people it’s the stairs, right, right, right, as long as we get the meaning right, the wrapping, the coat of paint, the words, the exemplar we use to contain that meaning, that can change, and so that’s a deeper way to suggest how I think about a working analogy, once we get the meaning right, then we just got to find the packaging to get it to hit, so I noticed that, like when you’re explaining a lot of these examples, the movement seems to be like that you put people, you trigger their perspectival knowing, and even some participatory knowing, right, and then that’s what you’re using to try and train, like, you know, transform the procedural knowing, like when you said, you know, swing your golf club as if you’re standing on a cliff, right, like I got, you get, you immediately get the perspective, right, and then all the implicit, right, in that perspective, right, and then you start to assume a particular identity, you embody, right, and then that sort of triggers which skill set is going to be available to you, is it, like, is it, or even like, even like you said, when you’re doing push-ups, you said, you know, you’re basically telling the person, be a table, and what would it be like to be a table kind of thing, right, there’s a process of identification that’s going on in perspectival transformation. Nick, are you still there? I am here, yes. Yeah, you’re frozen there for a sec, just wanted to make sure. So, I mean, is that, is that, is that prototypical? Are you almost always, like, like putting people into a particular identity within a particular perspective, and then they use that to transform the procedural knowing? It is, it’s 100%. So, let’s take your Cliff example. You, you, you unlock something there. I’m always interested when people say implicit knowing, right, it’s knowing without telling. Even though I conceptually understand that, I still struggle with this goal. How can you know something if you can’t verbalize it? Well, you know, you can enact it, you can act it out, you can move as if. Yep. And so, take the Cliff example. The Cliff example, where does the information come from? Well, the information comes from, as you said yourself, that direct perception, right, you are able to almost embody and act in the mind. If I were on a cliff, there are certain things I could not, would not do. You know, I would not want to lean back. I probably am going to have more of a forward shifted posture. I might even be aware of the wind, so it might stiffen me up through the middle. And these are not things that I have to propositionally think about. These are things that I instantly feel. And this is that, this is that pursuit. We use words to the degree that they get you the feeling. And so, what you’ve said there is, we use language to literally cue, to cue a memory state that allows you to step into that memory state and say, what would it be like? Yes, what would it be like? In answering, what would it be like? That’s all the information I need you to carry into the present environment. And that, by definition, for me, would be the implicit knowing, the feeling you appropriate from the analogy into the present world. You turn the virtual into the real. That’s very, very powerful. That’s very, very, very powerful. So, this, this enacted poetry, I like that better than enacted analogy, because it, because poesis means making, right? Right? Yeah. So, so this, this enacted poesis, right? Maybe that’s even better, because it captures all of those different things I wanted to say earlier in one term. So, this enacted poesis, it’s really a powerful way, right, of getting people to, like, instead of top down from their proposition, they’re going sort of bottom up from the identities they assume, the agent arena identities within a particular perspectival knowing. And then that shifts the, the skills that they’re trying to acquire, the skills that they’re trying to transform. It reminds me of some of the work that they’re doing at the Enchiapi about how people, the scientists using the rover on Mars, and they, they have to go through this process of identifying with the rover, and then that gives them the ability to, like, look at the pictures and see as if they’re on Mars, and then they can do the field work. They, right, which is really, really, really, really interesting thing. So, we’re almost done for today. So, I just want to lay some seeds for our next conversation. So, I want, I want this to progress through a series. I invite you to join me on that journey. So, I mean, there’s a lot here that, you know, has potential resonance, you know, with what people have been doing, and I mentioned it much earlier, within, you know, within religious ritual, right? People go in, what would it be like to be, you know, you know, the son of God, right? What would it be like? And then you, and you, you know, you, you know, it is not I, but Christ who lives in me, you know, there’s Paul, and he’s assuming that identity, and he’s trying to adopt the perspective, and that’s, that’s what’s actually helping him to transform his skills and his virtues. So, I can see a lot of people listening to what we’re talking about who might have some kind of religious background going, yeah, and, and finding, right, a bridging there, and other people who, who might be, but be hearing it, and it might, it might be sort of the obverse of that. They might be saying, the thing they’re talking about, that ability to, that’s something I’ve been hungering for, but not in movement or in sport. I’ve been hungry for that more comprehensively, and so putting those two together, you see where I’m going with this, there’s a way in which what we’re talking about here is deeply pregnant with this general issue of enabling people, and there’s a metaphor right in the title, to awaken from the meaning crisis, and what I, what I’d like to do is follow this up, and I know you have, you know, you know, broader philosophical points to make about this, you know, we’ve talked about the way you’ve been thinking about, you know, challenging the Cartesian framework and what that means, and so I want to invite you to come back and build upon what we’ve been talking about here today, and, you know, build it out into those larger cognitive cultural issues, so that, I think that’s what we could do next time together. Yeah, no, I think that’s spot on, because since our last discussion, you know, for me, it has been asking the question, okay, how can we extend this approach, and let’s be clear, this is not the first nor the last time people will talk about the benefit and the use of metaphor for many, many different reasons, but I think allowing it to be more accessible, more visible, more mainstream, is what I see this, this journey being so important for. But Nick, you are bringing something important to it, you’re bringing, like, I’ve read a lot of the literature on metaphor, but you’re bringing the, you’re bringing the four-e cogsci, you’re bringing the embodied, enacted aspects, and the distributed cognition, you’re bringing the embodiment, the embeddedness, the enactedness, and the extendedness of metaphor that is not talked about in a lot of the literature of metaphor. And see, I didn’t even know I was doing that, which is why I’ve always said this to people, when I email a professor or an intellectual or whoever, the thing I tend to open up with is, you have answers to questions you’ve never asked, and I guess that’s what I hope here, is that I have answers to questions you’ve never, and vice versa. And so I’m excited through your guidance here to see how we can, yes, I think the word is extend, work well beyond, because you know in our conversation, for me, personally, that’s my own journey. So I’m excited to start, let’s say, parlaying this beyond movement. So that’ll be a fun next chat. Great. So I look forward to that. We’ll set it up and schedule it, and we’ll release this as a series. So Nick, this has been wonderful. Again, I’m always, I get entranced by, like, when the passion takes you, and the fire is there, and then, you know, your explication and explanation of what you do, it just, it starts to flow. It’s really wonderful. There’s an aesthetic quality to it that’s deeply pleasing, and it affords engagement. So I want to thank you for being here, and for, like I said, I’m glad you’re going to come back. I’m going to continue on this discussion about, you know, enacted poesis, because I think it’s really, really cool. The feelings are mutual. Thank you, John.