The deliberate practice relies on small, achievable, well-defined steps that help you work your way toward meaningful improvement. These steps should take into account your current knowledge and skill level and push those boundaries little by little, consistently expanding your abilities.
With deliberate practice, goal-setting isn’t like making a New Year’s resolution and hoping you’ll stick with it. It involves thoughtful planning, identifying areas for improvement, and creating a specific game plan for building on top of your current abilities.
Like most worthwhile pursuits, developing proficiency in any skill — whether sewing, software design, or surfing — isn’t easy. If you want to push past the hard parts of skills growth — the frustration, the failures, the periods of slow progress — you’re going to need to be motivated.
Without the motivation to push past obstacles, when improvement stalls, the natural inclination will be to give up. So if you’re picking a skill to improve with deliberate practice, make sure it’s something you care about and are willing to devote considerable time and effort to.
Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while, we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.
This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.
Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing, again and again, is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
We’ve all had to practice a skill at some point — piano lessons, school sports teams, or on-the-job training. You might associate the word “practice” with rote, never-ending repetition — piano scales, sports drills — and the frustration of not making much progress. There’s a reason so many people give up on learning a new skill or only reach a middling level of competence: inevitably, improvement stalls.
You see, just repeating a skill or task, even over a period of many years, doesn’t build expertise. That’s because once you reach a reasonable level of competence and are able to do what you need to do, the skill becomes automatic. At best, you’re maintaining your abilities, but not improving them.
For many day-to-day tasks — driving, typing, cooking — this baseline, “good enough to get by” level of skill is fine. But if there’s something you really want to excel at, you have to push past that comfortable stage and challenge yourself.
Clinical psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor says, “Grief is a universal experience, and when we can connect, it is better.”
O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, studies what happens in our brains when we experience grief. She says grieving is a form of learning — one that teaches us how to be in the world without someone we love in it. “The background is running all the time for people who are grieving, thinking about new habits and how they interact now.”
Adjusting to the fact that we’ll never again spend time with our loved ones can be painful. It takes time — and involves changes in the brain. “What we see in science is, if you have a grief experience and you have support so that you have a little bit of time to learn, and confidence from the people around you, that you will in fact adapt.”
O’Connor’s upcoming book, The Grieving Brain, explores what scientists know about how our minds grapple with the loss of a loved one.
When we have the experience of being in a relationship, the sense of who we are is bound up with that other person. The word sibling and the word spouse imply two people. And so when the other person is gone, we suddenly have to learn a totally new set of rules to operate in the world. The “we” is as important as the “you” and “me,” and the brain, interestingly, really does encode it that way. So when people say “I feel like I’ve lost part of myself,” that is for a good reason. The brain also feels that way, as it were, and codes the “we” as much as the “you” and the “I.”
Ever wonder why you keep attracting specific people with similar circumstances or needs to yours?
It might be for a reason- to teach you and take you to the next level!
Similar to any video game, it’s about learning how to conquer the challenges and obstacles that keep confronting until you “win”, and then you’re on to the next level.
The next level could be more difficult, yet once you get the hang of being fully aware of these obstacles or challenges, it won’t feel that way!
If you rush through this stage, you risk making mistakes or wasting your time and energy.
Take the tree for instance: by aiming to cut it down straight away, without first thinking to sharpen the ax, you have skipped the “preparation” stage. But if your tool is poorly suited to the task, you are highly unlikely to get the desired result. However, by taking the time to think about the appropriate method, you will in fact save precious time later on while ensuring that your action is effective.
The required preparation is, therefore, both physical and psychological.
You can work hard, hustle, put in the hours, do the work, etc., etc., but the magic happens when you aim to perfect your skills beforehand.
Students who engage in active learning learn more — but feel like they learn less — than peers in more lecture-oriented classrooms.
That’s in part because active learning is harder than more passive learning, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Based on their findings, the researchers encourage faculty members to intervene and correct what they call students’ “misperceptions” about how they learn. “It is not to suggest that students don’t like active learning,” says lead author Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior preceptor in physics. “In fact, the data shows students liked active learning and they felt they learned from it. But it just happened that students felt more positive about a highly-polished version of the same lecture.”
The bottom line here is, are you here for learning or for the feeling of having learned?
Some scientists would call these experiences transformational learning experiences.
Others call them “disorienting dilemmas.”
Others have simply called them “peak experiences.”
The main idea is that, while growing up, a person often has powerful and emotional experiences that inform their worldview and personality development.
According to the Heath brothers (and all the research they cite in their book), most of these “paradigm shifting” experiences happen during a person’s teens, 20’s, and begin tapering off during a person’s 30’s. They become almost non-existent for people over 40. And thus, people become frozen at a certain stage of their personality — and assume that’s how it’s supposed to be.
However, the Heath brothers explain that this doesn’t need to be the case. You can actually manufacture these experiences regularly, and throughout your entire life.
The reason most people stop having “peak experiences” — which according to Dr. Abraham Maslow, is required to become fully actualized as a person — is because they settle into societal norms.
They stop growing.
They stop putting themselves into wildly new and demanding situations. They stop exercising faith after having life experiences — and grow to become skeptical or cynical.
Most people are a direct reflection of those around them. If the people around them have lower standards, they drop theirs’ as well. If the people around them have higher standards, they raise their game.
You’ve been around people who, simply by being around them, elevated your thinking and energy. Those are the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with. Those are the kinds of people you need to be like yourself so that others are better simply by being around you.
The quality of your life and the quality of your work is determined by the standards you have for yourself and the standards of those around you. If you’re fine doing mediocre work, then those around you are as well.
If you genuinely want to become better, you must surround yourself with people who will hold you to a higher standard than you currently hold yourself. You want to be around people with a higher and better vantage point than you have so that you can quickly learn from them.
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