This reminds me of some martial arts philosophy I heard. It was basically that there were three stages to mastery. In the first stage you fight intuitively but know no techniques. In the second stage you practice techniques, and use your conscious mind to choose which of them to use, and how to execute it. It feels forced, and in this stage it is harder to use novel solutions, because you focus on your list of techniques. In the third stage you have internalized all the techniques and can once again work intuitively.