Deliberate practice
In fields such as chess, music, business, and medicine, high IQ doesn’t necessarily correlate with top-level performance.
So what is deliberate practice?
The following definition might help us further comprehend the concept:
Deliberate – ‘done consciously and intentionally’
Practice – ‘repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it’
And why is deliberate practice extremely difficult?
- The chief constraint is mental
- The required concentration is so intense that it’s exhausting
Yet why do some put themselves through it day after day, decade after decade? The passion of these individuals is related to their intrinsic motivation – whereby they simply enjoy it as an activity or see it as an opportunity to explore, learn, and actualise their potential.
Talent is an innate ability to do something better than others. But without practice, talent alone won’t carry you far.
Practice is what counts – deliberate practice, the following are some examples:
- Mozart’s talent is a myth. He didn’t get great until after he had 10,000 hours of intentional practice.
- Tiger Woods talented? Tiger’s father gave him a putter when he was seven months old. Before he was two he and his father were on a course practising regularly. Both father and son attribute Tiger’s success not to talent but to ‘intentional hard work’.
- London Taxi Drivers – who must learn ‘the knowledge’ (all the routes/roads of London) have areas of their brains that are far more developed than an average person.
We all have the gift of adaptability. The difference between an average performer and an elite performer is deliberate practice. This should be brilliant news for everybody. Why? Because it means you and I can get better at anything we want. The brain and physique don’t discriminate. When you push yourself out of your comfort zone, you will adapt and create a new normal.
So now that we understand what deliberate practice is, the question is where do we start?
The following is an integrated approach which I found worked extremely well for me based on research and Anders Ericsson’s methods:
You need to establish an overall goal for your practice, a purpose if you will. The purpose will provide you with a reason and motivation to train. With an overall goal in mind, further break that down into well-defined, specific goals.
For example, an overall goal may be to climb Mount Everest. Before embarking on this monumental feat, you may instead want to break it down into smaller achievable (specific) goals, focusing on climbing the smaller peaks first (such as Mount Kinabalu in 6 months), and then work progressively by building yourself physically and technically towards a 5000m mountain, 6000m mountain…and so on in 3 years to summit the highest peak in the world.
You need to give 100 per cent to whatever it is you’re practising. No distractions or interruptions allowed. Full focus. High concentration. Staying on the task can be difficult, but it can be particularly challenging when you are surrounded by constant distraction.
In today’s always-connected world, diversions are nothing more than a click away. To eliminate distractions, one way to deal with this is to set aside a specific time and place daily to focus on training/practice. It helps to have a training partner who has a similar purpose and goal.
A coach/teacher can provide practice activities designed to help you improve your performance. Based on research, most successful sportsperson, musician, business professionals have an army of coaches to help accelerate their success. The advantage of having a coach is that your goal becomes their goals too, and they expect you to ‘do what you say’.
You must know what you’re doing wrong and how you can improve. In other words, you need feedback, and the more immediate, the better. A coach will work with you to reframe your attitude and to expand your thinking. Coaches will be able to put you in a position by helping you to clarify your challenges, guide you in how to overcome the challenge or negative self-talk and move forward.
Deliberate practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. According to Ericsson, this is the most important aspect of purposeful practice. If you don’t push yourself, you won’t trigger adaptation, and you won’t get better.
There are no short cuts. To reach an expert level of performance, you have to put in the hours of practice. Anyone willing to go through enough deliberate practice can become great at what they’re doing.
Perhaps you might think that you’re just naturally untalented; bad at maths; terrible at languages. The truth is none of that is true.
Want to get better at something? Here’s a plan. Emulate best performers/ players. Find out how they train and what makes them so good.
Look out for a coach who can help you by implementing training techniques and programs that can propel you to perform as good as or even better than the experts. Then practice with the deliberate practice guidelines:
Written By
TM Nagarajan/Managing partner
