The Importance of Deliberate Practice

The definition for talent is ‘an inborn gift for a specific activity, allowing you to demonstrate skill without practice’. However, as you might have seen in a lot of my previous writings, a lot of people have talent, but it is the people that put in the hours of hard work to leverage that talent that come away as winners. This brings me on to the importance of deliberate practice…

The difference between practice and deliberate practice is that while regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. A lot of people that put their mind to a skill often come to a place called ‘Arrested Development’ – a terms used when people plateau when trying to develop a particular skill, finding it difficult to then progress further. This is usually because deliberate practice is not applied.

When applying deliberate practice, I believe there are 4 key points that you need to apply:

1.??????Have a Goal

o??Make it a SMART Goal - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

2.??????Focus on the Basics

o??Every activity comprises of several Key Points. Break these down and simplify how you can master that activity.

o??If you do not follow these Key Points to the letter, you cannot expect to succeed.

o??These Key Points are your BASICS. Your safety net to success.

3.??????Expert Coaching

o??To achieve top performance, you need a coach or mentor – this may just be a colleague, but it always helps if you have someone trying to help you. The more experienced they are the better, but this could also be a friend who just wants to help.

o??In many cases, it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the same time.

o??Coaches / mentors also hold you accountable to delivering your best effort each day.

4.??????Practice Ugly

o??This means making continued improvements, systematically challenging yourself to go one step further than your current performance. As soon as you’ve mastered one thing, it’s time to demand more of yourself and learn something else.

o??The key being that if you practice harder or uglier than it will ever be when doing it for real , when asked to demonstrate that skill it will ?be easier than what you have experienced in practice.

To become great at something, you must demand deliberate practice becomes a regular part of your daily life. This applies to business especially. I can remember when I graduated from University I went to work for Xerox, and I went through a sales course where I had to sell a photocopier. We had to learn the script, word for word, then demonstrate the machine in front of the entire team. If you got any of the script wrong during your test, you were in deep trouble ! It’s probably the most pressurized situation I have ever personally been in and the need to apply deliberate practice here was crucial for success. That experience has never left me and simply you must find ways of practicing that are harder than the real thing.

In sport, I find that 99% of a player’s time is spent practicing with only 1% of their time actually spent competing, but in the business world that's flipped, most people spend only 1% of their time practicing and 99% doing their job. The core of my message here is that to be at your best and to maintain the top spot you must dedicate time to practice, and for us in the business world that is continued learning and development. Since stepping back from sports I have coached some top executive leaders around the world, and I have found that 5% of your time should be spent actively training / practicing on how you can improve - that's only 2 hours a week! How many of us can truly state that we spend 2 hours a week working on how we can improve ourselves? And how many of us can say we do this regularly, continuously and in fact plan to do so indefinitely?

Deliberate Practice is just one of the topics I teach in my course “The DNA of a Champion”. The course takes my experiences from both sport and business and teaches processes that your workforce can implement in their day-to-day life to get the absolute best out of themselves. If you think that your business could benefit, please contact?[email protected] ?for further information.?