Picture this: A newly graduated physiotherapist faces their third patient of the day—a 45-year-old tradesman with shoulder pain. Armed with fresh anatomical knowledge and a burning desire to prove their expertise, they launch into a detailed explanation of subacromial impingement, complete with laminated diagrams showing the rotator cuff muscles and their precise angles of activation.
Fifteen minutes later, the patient’s eyes have glazed over. He nods politely, takes his exercise sheet covered in technical terminology, and leaves looking more confused than when he arrived. The following week, he returns having done nothing. “I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to feel,” he admits.
Down the hallway, a more experienced clinician sees a similar patient. After a brief assessment, she simply asks: “What would you like to know about your shoulder?”
The patient responds: “Just want to know it’ll get better and what I need to do.”
“Right,” she says, placing her hands gently on his shoulder. “Let me show you something.” She guides him through three simple movements, letting him feel the difference between restriction and freedom. “That’s it—notice how that feels different? That’s what we’re working towards.”
The patient leaves with clarity, confidence, and a sense of what “better” actually feels like in his body.
The Difference? One clinician taught. The other healed.
What Tennis Taught Us About Learning
W. Timothy Gallwey, in his groundbreaking book “The Inner Game of Tennis,” observed something that should revolutionise how we think about clinical practice:
“I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn: that images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instruction worse than none, and that trying often produces negative results.”
Gallwey wasn’t writing about healthcare, but his insight cuts to the heart of what young clinicians struggle with most: the belief that good treatment means comprehensive education.
It doesn’t.
Why Young Clinicians Over-Educate
Let’s be honest about what’s really happening when you find yourself delivering anatomy and biomechanics lectures to patients who just want their back to stop hurting.
You’re scared.
Scared they’ll think you don’t know enough. Scared they’ll question your expertise. Scared that without a detailed explanation, they won’t take you seriously. So you compensate by showing them everything you learned in university, hoping that knowledge equals credibility.
But here’s what actually happens: information overload creates paralysis, not confidence.
When you overwhelm someone with technical details, their brain shifts into protection mode. They stop listening and start worrying about remembering everything “correctly.” The natural learning process—the one that helped them walk, ride a bike, and master countless movement patterns without anatomical textbooks—gets hijacked by performance anxiety.
Images Are Better Than Words
Your patient’s nervous system doesn’t speak anatomy. It speaks sensation, movement, and feeling.
When you say “activate your deep core stabilisers,” their brain scrambles to intellectually process what that means. When you place your hands where you want activation and say “breathe into my hands,” their body immediately understands.
When you explain the biomechanics of a squat, they’re thinking about angles and muscle activation. When you demonstrate a squat and let them mirror you, their movement system naturally organises itself around the pattern.
The most powerful teaching tool you have isn’t your voice—it’s your ability to help someone feel the difference between dysfunction and function.
Showing Beats Telling
Consider what happens in each scenario:
The Teaching Approach:
- Patient receives information passively
- Creates mental pressure to “do it right”
- Generates self-consciousness about technique
- Often leads to overthinking and tension
The Showing Approach:
- Patient experiences change directly
- Body learns through guided discovery
- Creates confidence through felt sense
- Allows natural movement patterns to emerge
The tradesman with shoulder pain doesn’t need to understand subacromial impingement. He needs to feel what pain-free movement is like so his nervous system has a target to work towards.
Too Much Instruction Worse Than None
This is perhaps the hardest lesson for conscientious young clinicians to accept: more explanation isn’t always better care.
Every additional instruction you give creates another thing for your patient to monitor, control, and potentially get wrong. Instead of moving naturally, they become hyper-vigilant about technique, creating the very tension and dysfunction you’re trying to resolve.
Watch what happens when you tell someone to “relax their shoulders, engage their core, maintain neutral spine, and breathe deeply” all at the same time. They become a collection of body parts trying to follow instructions rather than a human being learning to move well.
Sometimes the most skilled thing you can do is resist the urge to explain everything you know.
Trying Often Produces Negative Results
When patients become overly focused on “doing it perfectly,” they create internal pressure that interferes with natural movement. This is why your most compliant, anxious patients sometimes make slower progress than those who approach exercises more casually.
The moment someone starts “trying really hard” to activate a specific muscle or achieve a particular position, they often tense surrounding areas, hold their breath, and move with the rigid quality that perpetuates their problem.
Effort without ease creates dysfunction, not healing.
What Would You Like to Know?
This simple question—”What would you like to know about your condition?”—changes everything.
Instead of assuming your patient needs a comprehensive education, you discover what they actually want to understand. Often, it’s remarkably simple:
- “Will this get better?”
- “What should I avoid?”
- “How will I know it’s working?”
- “Is this normal?”
Show them that you are listening and answer their actual question. Show them what they need to feel. Guide them through the experience of improvement. Then manage your desire to educate further unless the patient asks for more information.
Or try “What else would you like to know about this condition, if anything?”
Trust that their body’s innate wisdom, honed over years of successful movement, is far more sophisticated than any explanation you could provide.
The Confidence to Say Less
The mark of a truly confident clinician isn’t how much they can explain—it’s how little they need to say to create meaningful change.
When you guide someone from pain to freedom through skilled touch and demonstration, when you help them feel the difference between restriction and mobility, when you create the conditions for their nervous system to reorganise itself naturally—that’s mastery.
Your credibility comes from your ability to help people move and feel better, not from your ability to recite anatomical facts.
Your Challenge This Week
Try the “What would you like to know about…” approach with three patients. Before launching into explanations, ask them what they actually want to understand.
Then—and here’s the hard part—resist the urge to tell them everything else you know. Answer their question, demonstrate as appropriate, guide them through it if needed, and stop there.
Notice how they respond when you trust their body’s ability to learn rather than their brain’s ability to memorise.
Pay attention to how it feels to create change through guidance rather than information. Watch their confidence grow when they experience improvement rather than just understanding it intellectually.
The Inner Game of Healing
Gallwey’s tennis players learned to trust their natural ability to hit the ball without overthinking every component of their swing. Your patients can learn to trust their natural ability to move well without understanding every detail of how their body works.
Your job isn’t to create mini-physiotherapists who can recite everything you know about their condition.
Your job is to guide them back to confident, pain-free movement—and sometimes that means having the wisdom to teach less and heal more.
Because the most profound learning happens not in the mind, but in the felt experience of moving well again.
If impactful communication is something you struggle with consider one on one coaching
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