On one of my trips last year, when looking for something to read on the plane, for a change I browsed the business section of the airport bookshop instead of the fiction section. I picked up a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith. The author is an executive coach, and the book describes the techniques he uses to help high-ranking corporate executives get to even higher levels. It was an interesting read. Its theme is that it's possible to be very successful and reach a high level (in the working environment, but it could apply to any activity) despite significant flaws in behaviour, management style, working practices etc,  but that eventually these flaws become barriers to further progress. In other words, you can't conclude from your present success that you are doing everything right; at a certain point you need to re-examine your approach, identify the problems that are holding you back, and systematically eliminate them.

What does this have to do with handbell ringing? Simply that there might be new techniques and approaches  that would help us to ring certain methods better, even if we can already ring those methods reasonably well with our current techniques. We might infer the existence of these techniques by talking to better ringers, or we might begin to glimpse them in our own ringing. Perhaps by systematically identifying and practising new techniques, we can improve more rapidly.

To be more specific, here are some examples of ways in which I would like to improve my ringing techniques.

• Ring Stedman with greater awareness of the nature of the sixes. At the moment, I rely on a combination of trying to remember which way each of my bells will go in next, making use of the fact that a bell goes in the same way as the bells that it dodges with went out, and looking or listening for right or wrong leading when one of my bells is in 6-7 down or 4-5 down. I think it would be preferable to have a little counter in my head ticking off "quick, slow, quick, slow" at the six-ends, just as I am aware of the lead ends and half leads when ringing Surprise, but I have not yet managed to apply this idea.
• Absorb the structure of Surprise Minor methods. For most Surprise Minor methods, I have a choice of how to ring them. I can ring by place notation, by which I mean that I explicitly concentrate on the sequence of places: e.g. for Norwich, x, 34, x, 14, x, 12 and so on. Or I can ring by the blue lines, which is how I ring most other methods. In either case, I have to concentrate quite hard on one technique and don't have much awareness of the other view. But for a few methods, especially Cambridge, I seem to have internalised the structure to a much greater extent. I can ring according to the position of the treble, making the correct places at each point in the lead without needing to consciously work my way through the place notation. If I want to, I can note which part of the lines I am on, or I can pay more attention to the places being made in order to check that the other bells are working correctly. If I could absorb the structure of the rest of the Standard 41 in the same way, I would be able to ring them much better and more easily than I do at the moment.
• Make friends with more coursing orders. It was said of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, by his collaborator John Littlewood, that "every positive integer is one of his personal friends". When conducting, I find that it takes significant concentration to remember the coursing order, except for a few old friends such as 52436, 54326, 32546, 65324 etc. In those cases I can remember which coursing order we are in, without having to remember what that coursing order is. I feel that if I could  add more coursing orders to this list, I would find conducting easier.
• Take a more structural approach to ringing methods that have a clear structure. Many methods have a regular backwork and a regular frontwork, which jump out at you when you look at the grid. This is more likely to be the case on 10 or 12, where there is room for a regular frontwork or backwork to last longer. For good musical reasons, many of the currently popular maximus methods are in this category: for example, Phobos, Ariel and Zanussi. There are also older classics such as Newgate, as well as Bristol in which the frontwork is the reverse of the backwork. I don't expect to be ringing these methods any time soon, but even the more relevant Cambridge Royal has a clear structure based on boxes around the treble. The idea for ringing these methods more structurally would be to use the position of the treble as a cue to change direction, or to dodge, or to move between the frontwork and the backwork; to avoid having to count the number of dodges in a treble bobbing section, or the number of times going to 4th place and back. A couple of good methods for practising structural ringing on 8 would be Selborne and Kenninghall, so maybe we'll try ringing them one of these days.