On November 30th 1979 Pink Floyd’s The Wall was released, a friend of mine invited me over to his house to listen to it. It was a period in time that will probably never be recreated, there was so much great music, it was being released almost daily but this(?), this was different in the way it moved me.
You may or may not know that I was born in England and moved to the states in the early 70’s as a young (very English) boy, unlike my wiser five-years older brother, I tried to fit in, to assimilate to American way and lifestyle as soon as possible, losing my accent (much to the disappointment of my father) and forgetting about England and embrace bombastic America …then, that fateful day, I listened to The Wall, it stopped me dead in my tracks as England came flooding back in such relatable detail, it was the story of a child my dad’s age, growing up during the blitz of WWII (story’s of swirling contrails in the air from dogfights and air raid sirens), and later his experiences with the isolation and stoic cruelty of British schooling (something I could relate to). It affected me, some ways positively and in some ways negatively, it made me remember who I was (not just the American kid I pretended to be).
The Wall…it’s all about the wall, not the album, the premise that we build a wall, we all do and we live behind it. Just as in the concerts for the album they built an actual wall on stage between the band and the audience when they toured in 80 and 81. On that wall they built brick by brick over time they projected images for the audience to see. Images of how they wanted you to see them, they were right there present but they isolated you from the real them. We all do this. You might not think you do and that’s because we don’t consciously do it. If you read my prior blog on consciousness you might remember that we are ruled by our subconscious, it’s 95% of our cognitive bandwidth leaving just 5% to our conscious selves, almost everything we do is just automatically engaging a subconscious program based on what we are dealing with at that moment (leaving our conscious 5% to flit around and ponder whatever). Starting at beating our heart to breathing to walking but all the way up to most conversations, all with autopilot engaged and conscious us off in dreamland (where we’d rather be, our happy place).
A subset of those programs is what we’re projecting on our wall. We are always doing it, not always with the same level of thoroughness, it depends on who’s around and how concerned we are about the judgement and perception of others around us in any given situation. We get very good at this and again it’s an automated program that doesn’t require any conscious thought. The issue with this is that it’s obviously disingenuous, it’s like when I instantly revive my English accent when meeting people from England, there it is, bam, but it’s not actually me (anymore) but I’m worried about them judging me for my American assimilation (oh and they rightly do, turncoat!). This spills over into everything and we subconsciously effortlessly bounce subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) from one persona to the next. It’s whatever we’ve deemed our best foot to put forward in that scenario. Again, I remind you we do all of this without an inclining of conscious thought. Our subconscious monitors all of these interactions and is constantly refining, reprioritizing, doing it’s (your) level best to improve each slightly different version of us. Yea, I agree, this is weird but remember it’s not just us, this is basic survival instinct. Think of how animals act differently is different situations, often mimicking the animals around them to blend in, to not draw negative attention to themselves (sound familiar?).
Ten Minutes of Truth:
So, we project on a wall we build around ourselves. Now I’m instructing someone on the racetrack, I go to corners for observation, I coach them through a live video/audio feed while they are driving (thank you GPX), in the car we have a comprehensive data suite gathering gigabytes of data about everything they are doing sampled at least 100 times a second (100hz). There is nowhere to hide, I know just about everything about the driver right and wrong in that session, then they come in (and this is where it gets interesting), I get roughly ten minutes to get the honest, stripped-down, no projecting on the wall, no wall at all them. The more comfortable they are driving the shorter the time we have to actually get them to honestly interact without the wall and the projections, as soon as the magical chemical cocktail that draws us to activities like this ebbs the honest, moldable wholly cooperating them disappears and we are left with awkward excuse making them until we repeat the cycle once again. If the feedback is delayed for any reason I’ll never get the ten minutes from that session. When you’re giving feedback to them after the walls back up the “awkward” is them playing along to the best of their ability to seem like they are present (they’re not) and grasping and onboarding all the points you are making mixed with excuses of why they didn’t correctly implement your prior feedback (usually something vague about the car or situation or instruction not being quite right). They speak in vagaries because they don’t dare to get too detailed because they would be able to recite the issue accurately, they’d instantly get called out and corrected in no uncertain terms by the much more knowledgeable coach. This is their coping mechanisms kicking in to protect their ego, when I say “they”…you know I mean “we”.
Therefore, I cherish the ten minutes, I realize it is because our sport is so intense that it gifts us this rare honest time together. Over my decades of coaching I have come to the conclusion that this ten minutes is where all of the concepts of Optimum Drive come from and also explains why greatness is so rare, we are so rarely honest and present enough to actually implement actual change and improvement, that wall hurts us, stifles us while it subconsciously thinks it only protects and helps us. How do you extend the ten minutes? Yes! Remember it’s a defense mechanism, if the relationship has genuine honesty and trust then the walls stay down until there is a perceived threat (that can be as simple as a single poorly chosen word, facial expression or gesture).
This is why there are cool quotes from people like Eleanor Roosevelt like “scare yourself once a day”. Getting out of you comfort zones, while risky for our frail egos, is they only time you can actually grow (not just making a better projection which is the lazy persons short sighted goal). This concept of our duality is scattered all over different cultures all over the world, it’s part of “Yin and Yang” or very accurately in Japanese culture as “Honne and Tatemae”, it also features in Greek philosophers and modern psychotherapy. When a patient is just sitting on a couch it takes months, years and sometimes it never happens to get a person to be that honest about themselves and start making progress. I realize my ten minutes are a precious gift and of course opportunity to make some real progress with who they really are. As Roger Water’s screamed and demanded once Pink had realized what was holding him back and causing all that misery… “TEAR DOWN THE WALL…TEAR DOWN THE WALL…” and the wall fell at the feet of a better us.