its maddeningly true that knowing to do all the simple things does not result in actually doing them in the heat of the moment. i'm interested if anyone has don

its maddeningly true that knowing to do all the simple things does not result in actually doing them in the heat of the moment. i'm interested if anyone has done some work on why that might be the case- what is the barrier that prevents the way we know we should be doing something from actually happening? the simplest example of this disconnect from my experience is keeping my gaze on the golf ball as i putt, and not turning to watch it as i hit the ball. my guess would be the disconnect is that while doing any one thing consciously is easy, there are several things that have to happen at the same time for it to go right. if i have to spend my energy thinking about looking at the ball, it draws bandwidth away from other tasks like aiming, timing, tactile sense etc. so it needs to happen more automatically, which is what practice seems to create. i think the key idea is efficiency i.e. how little effort it takes to do something the right way. i guess you need to get your mind and body to do the right little things by default, not by conscious effort. i wonder if the difficulty in getting yourself to do something "the right way" is that you unfortunately have an opinion about how to do it already. its like you have a bunch of little processes that already think they are optimizing the action, and you somehow need to convince them there is a better way. i guess the convincing comes from experiencing the positive results, but i can see how its tricky because you generally have to temporarily get worse to get better.