How to teach optimal learning and why it matters

The scariest landing I ever saw happened on a beautiful blue sky day in the middle of June, 2011. It’s one of those memories that I’ll never forget, even though I can’t tell you how it happened. I was on duty as an LSO (Landing Signals Officer, a godlike pilot among mortals who ensures every pilot gets home safely), standing on the back of the USS Ronald Reagan, watching planes land. It was something I’d done thousands of times before. An F-18 Hornet was on final, in what I can only describe as a textbook position for an OK landing¹. But something just didn’t feel right. To this day I have no idea what I didn’t like: whether it was his position, a weird sound, or just the way the wind blew over my skin. Whatever it was, I told him to wave off. He added full power, but kept falling. Fast. Within seconds he was below the deck of the carrier, in a position that still gives me nightmares. By this point we were all screaming to add power and climb. Finally his airplane changed trajectory and missed the back of the boat by less than 3 feet in a near vertical climb. If I had reacted a split second later, he would have died.

I think about that day often. I think about pressing the red lights and squeezing the radio transmitter. “Waveoff, 303.” But until that moment, there’s no logical reason why I should have waved him off. The weather was great, the seas were calm, and his airplane was in a good position in the sky. Nothing about that pass says “this is wrong.” Yet my body decided it didn’t like something, and before I could process it I had told him to wave off. That intuition saved his life.

It turns out that experience isn’t unique.

Blending the single-mindedness of a research psychologist and the range of a passionate polymath, John Coates is a former wall street trader turned neuroscientist and risk expert. He has intense blue eyes and an encyclopedic knowledge of how our bodies drive our decisions in high risk situations. In his 2013 book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Coates writes about asking traders on a trading floor to identify when they felt their heart beat. Contrary to stereotypes of traders as being brusque and overly intellectual, he found that traders were more aware of their bodily signals than average. And more interesting, the traders who were more aware of their body had the most success. Those people who were the most sensitive to their own body made the most money in high stress, high risk situations.

Whatever happened on that day in June, something in my body decided that the airplane wasn’t safe. It was, I imagine, the same feeling that world class athletes feel when they just know a play is going to work, or the electricity star performers feel during a career-defining performance. Doctors feel it during an important surgery. Call it the zone, call it flow. Whatever you call it, it’s ubiquitous among high-performers.

I never thought of myself as particularly sensitive, or a particularly talented LSO. But in the five months that culminated in that one moment, I had undergone one of the most intense learning periods of my life. I had devoted myself to understanding what a good landing looked like, felt like, even smelled like². In those five months, I studied videos, I memorized regulations, I watched thousands of landings, I critiqued almost every one, and I talked to every pilot after every landing. Some landings I talked the airplane down, even before I was ready. Other landings I controlled the flight path manually. And still others I watched, usually silent but always supporting. There was always a team helping me, always critiquing my development, and always making sure I respected the gravity of the consequences.

Calling it intense doesn’t do it justice. It was the best learning experience of my life. It’s what I want to recreate for kids everywhere. Starting with mine.

When I grew up, school was for learning the basics. If I wanted to perform at a really high level (and I did do), I was on my own to figure it out. School wasn’t there to help, unless maybe a great sports coach took me under his wing (none ever did). It’s not that I want to push my children to perform at a really high level. But if they do decide to push themselves, I want to teach them how. I want them to know what it’s like, to feel the adrenaline coursing through their bodies while the world slows down, to know that they’re going to figure it out far before they know how, to experience that flow moment again and again and again. Whatever their choice, I want to make sure they understand the choice they’re making. And I want to teach them that they can do things they never imagined possible.

One of the most interesting findings of Coates’ line of research is that our sensitivity to our body can be trained. It’s not static. Through interoceptive learning protocols, we can teach people to sense, label, and regulate our internal signals and draw connections between the sensations we feel and the pattern of events we encounter in the world. We can even teach our kids to work with their body’s neurochemistry to get in the best possible state for optimal learning.

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When I agreed to build an airplane with my son, I thought of it as a cool project that maybe I could tie in to his schooling. In other words, I imagined it might help him learn geometry, algebra, physics, or (as a stretch of the imagination) material science. But as usual, he surprised me.

He and I read on our overstuffed brown striped chair at least three times a week. We read history and Greek myths. And as we read, I’m never quite sure if he’s absorbing anything. I’ll ask him what we just read, and he’ll recite the events in short, staccato sentences. There’s no music in his summaries, no love or beauty for the ideas, and rarely any opening for a deeper conversation. It used to frustrate me to no end.

But then we set up in our garage. With a rivet gun in his hand and the small metal pins protruding from the airplane skeleton, he’s a different child. Without prompting, he’ll tell me what he thought about Alexander the Great, and how he can only imagine what it must have been like marching into India and suffering his first defeat. He’ll profess curiosity about Zeus and Hera and the Hecatoncheires and what must have led the ancient Greeks to imagine such deities of awesome and terrifying power. He’ll even ask about the difference between the Gods’ behavior on Mount Olympus and the Christian God his faith formation teachers talk of. When his hands are moving and he’s focused enough to drop his guard, that’s when I see what my boy is capable of.

This intuition, this body awareness, and these moments of conversation all point to the secret of optimal learning. That is, we’re taking the lessons of flow and using them to learn how to learn. How to perform. And it isn’t just the airplane — or our academic lessons — that holds the magic.

I’ll admit, all of this teaching feels a bit uncharted. I’m not sure I have it nailed yet. Then again, I’m not sure anyone has. Most of what we’re doing is based on my intuition. I am following my gut, trying a lot of things, and listening to him. This isn’t a program, but a set of experiments. I’m not sure it could be any different. And there’s something poetic in using my intuition to try and train his intuition.

Boxing helps my boy to focus and open up. He straps on the black 14 pound gloves and it’s like the weight of the world drops from his shoulders. I’m learning to harness that. While he’s working the mitts, I’ll ask him what his body is feeling. He’s suddenly able to talk about his tough days, even his meltdowns. We try to notice when his heart beats. We work on recognizing when adrenaline or norepinephrine is surging, what that feels like, and we practice increasing or decreasing them to reach an optimal arousal state.

My son loves to shoot. Behind the metal sights of a BB gun, he’s as calm as an oak. So we set up a target, and as he sights in, we talk about breathing. We practice box breathing and vagal breathing, teaching him to flood his body with CO2, downregulate his fight or flight mechanism, and decrease his heart rate. These breathing techniques help his body get into an optimal state to perform well (and recover after that performance).

At draw with a bow and arrow, we talk about the experience of shooting. We notice what the tension in the string feels like, how it feels to trust his body through the pull, even how hard it is to shoot instinctively and trust where the arrow is going to go. When he’s got a target sighted in, he’s more aware of the world around him even when he’s hyper-focused.

These activities give us an avenue to talk about training his body. We set goals that will support optimal learning (about 4-10% outside of what he is capable of). We talk about what feedback helps him learn in the moment. I share what I’ve learned about the benefits of fidgeting and movement. He listens better, if only because he gets to shoot or box or be physical afterwards.

These are not just skills of optimal performance. They’re the basics of what it means to be human, at our very best. I’m trying to teach him to control his inner states, and give him techniques to work with his neurochemistry. I want to help him get into states of optimal learning and peak performance, before he’s in a high risk situation. I want to teach him what it’s like to be really, truly, alive. To live.

I am trusting that these lessons will transfer over into our other work as well, that work when we’re sitting around the kitchen table doing math or playing chess. I can’t point to any research³ that says they will, but my intuition tells me they might.

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1. An OK is the best landing a pilot can hope for in normal conditions. A pilot who flies an OK pass makes very minor deviations from a perfectly on and on landing.

2. A bad landing smells like a mixture of burning rubber and jet fuel. It stings in its rancid odor.

3. The best I can find are this Peak Performance Guide for Teachers and this Ultimate Guide to Flow Coaching for Peak Performance, neither of which have been especially helpful.