Taking Life Skills To The Soccer Pitch

In our conversation with Joey Garah, the topic of taking your diversity of experiences into everything you do came up. Joey has theories of learning around parallel thinking and parallel problem-solving. The idea is that you can take a concept from one field and apply it to another, and this allows you to learn more about the second field because of the contrast between the two things and the possible relationships between them.

“All of us that have had more than one hobby in our lives have found ourselves finding a metaphor for learning in one that comes from another.”

According to the author L. V. Kaié, this is not a unique concept. In Kaié’s book ‘Parallel Algorithms for Machine Intelligence and Vision’, they describe parallel problem solving as, “Problem-reduction based problem solving is a technique that is used when there are multiple methods that may be used to solve a subproblem, and more importantly, each method may involve solving multiple subproblems consistently.”

So how can a young soccer player take this complex idea and help them become a better player? It is simple. They can stop looking at everything they do as individual tasks that they forget about once they finish, and instead, use that knowledge to carry over into other tasks. For example, you have to be on time for school or else you will get a lower grade. You can use the lesson you learned from getting on time to school and the fear of getting a lower grade to create a habit of being on time for soccer practice.

Let’s get even more specific. Let’s say you learn how to block another player in basketball. That blocking skill can easily transfer over into blocking an incoming offender who wants to score a goal in a soccer game. There are many examples of this, if you take the time to look for them.

Watch our video with Joey to learn more!