The River Taught Me to Swim. The Pool Taught Me to Unlearn

grew up in Deraniyagala. No swim school. No coach. No chlorine. Just the river, a bunch of cousins, and the urgent need to not drown. That was the curriculum — and it worked. By the time I was done, I could swim. Nobody gave me a certificate, but I was swimming.

Then I came to College in Mount Lavinia, and someone pointed me toward the pool. I was excited. I already knew how to swim — how hard could it be?

Harder than I thought. Because here’s the thing nobody told me: the river and the pool are not the same sport wearing the same name.

In the river, you keep your head above the water. You navigate with your eyes. You read the current. You breathe whenever you want. In the pool, you put your head under the water, and you turn it sideways to breathe — rhythmically, deliberately, on schedule. And if you are doing the butterfly or the breaststroke, you come up to breathe at precisely the right moment — not whenever the mood strikes you.

I didn’t need to learn to swim. I needed to unlearn how I already swam.

My first two inter-school meets? I was a star. Because raw ability still counts for something. Everyone else was still figuring out how to not swallow water. I was already comfortable in it.

But the wins didn’t last. They never do when your technique is built on the wrong foundation.

As the competition grew up — as others were drilled properly, corrected early, coached consistently — my river-born habits began to cost me seconds. And in swimming, seconds are not small things. I tried to fix it. I drilled. I practised. I watched others. But the muscle memory had calcified. The body remembered the river even when the mind wanted the pool.

I eventually got there. But by then, the window had closed. Others had caught up, then pulled ahead. The advantage I once had became the liability I couldn’t quite shake.

The pool moved on. I kept thinking about what had happened in it.

I have thought about that story many times since — not because I had ambitions of competitive swimming, but because the same pattern keeps showing up everywhere in life. In management. In leadership. In the way we raise children. In the way organisations try to change.

Two things, learned the hard way in a pool in Mount Lavinia.

First: how you learn something the first time matters enormously.

There is a seductive comfort in figuring things out yourself. The self-taught swimmer, the self-taught manager, the self-taught leader — there is real pride in that. And it is not entirely misplaced. You develop instincts. You develop confidence. You develop a feel for the water.

But instinct built on wrong technique is a trap dressed as competence. It works — until it doesn’t. And the longer it works, the harder it is to fix when it finally stops.

I am not saying you should never try anything without a teacher. I am saying that when the stakes are high, when this skill will carry you far, when others will depend on how well you do it — pay attention to the how from the very beginning. Because the body learns. The mind learns. And what they learn first, they hold onto with extraordinary stubbornness.

“The longer it works, the harder it is to fix when it finally stops.”

Second: unlearning is harder than learning. Much harder.

We talk about learning all the time. Workshops. Courses. Degrees. Reading. There is an entire industry built around it. But we barely talk about unlearning — which is the other half of the equation, and arguably the more difficult half.

Learning something new is additive. You are building. You have the pleasure of accumulation. Unlearning is subtractive — and subtraction, it turns out, is deeply uncomfortable. It asks you to acknowledge that what you have been doing was not just imperfect, but actively working against you. That is a hard thing to sit with, especially when it worked well enough for a while.

And the body — whether it is a physical body learning a swim stroke or an organisational body learning a new way to make decisions — does not unlearn easily. It defaults. It reverts. When under pressure, when tired, when the stakes feel high, it goes back to what it knows. The river always calls.

This is why so many change programmes fail. Not because people are unwilling. Not because the new way is worse. But because nobody budgets for the cost of unlearning. They train people in the new skill and assume that is sufficient. It is not. You have to actively dismantle the old wiring, not just install new wiring alongside it.

I still swim. Still love the water. But I swim differently now — and the discipline it took to get there is one of the better teachers I have had. Not because it was pleasant. Because it was honest.

The river taught me to swim. The pool taught me that knowing how to swim and knowing how to swim well are two entirely different things — and that the gap between them is not just talent. It is the willingness to do the uncomfortable work of starting again.

TWO THINGS TO CARRY

Learn things right the first time, even when learning them wrong is faster. The time you save up front, you will spend twice over later.

And when you discover you have been doing something wrong — don’t just add the new skill. Make space to let go of the old one. Unlearning is not a by-product of learning. It is its own work.

Everything teaches. But only if you’re willing to unlearn