Deliberate Practice as the Only Way to Reach your Full Potential
Naïve practice is thinking you will get better only by putting in more reps.
Deliberate practice is the intentional repetition of and carefully plan process in the pursuit of a specific aim.
Practice purposefully by following those three steps:
- Establish a precise and challenging goal for your practice.
- Place all your focus on what you are practicing at the moment, eradicating distractions that get in the way of doing your best work.
- Analyze your performance and adjust with those feedbacks.
“What good practice really requires is a constant stream of effort: a sustained, persistent approach based on long-term commitment. For this reason, practicing properly, even for short periods of time, is the best way. The emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity.” – Dalai Lama.
Practice under pressure
Compete with your limits during some essential training. You don’t need to recreate the same stress, but you need to make sure the pressure is high enough to enter your stress zone. You aim to simulate a competition-like environment to train the optimal response.
To enter your stress zone, alternate and modify your training stimuli so you can find new ways to create discomfort. If you always do the same things, you create the fluency illusion, making you believe that you are improving considerably when in reality, it is not the case. To avoid this problem, replicate competition-like situations that force you to get out of your comfort zone. Leaning in that way doesn’t feel as great but will produce better results in competition.
Pressure is a privilege; it forces you to go out of your comfort zone and unleash your full potential by giving the best possible response. “No Pressure, No Diamonds”
Prevent choking when competing under extreme conditions
As a high-level performer, you must switch your desire. Embrace the discomfort that occurs with being unsure you are going to succeed or not. Create desirable difficulties that force you to meet the challenge fully and thus develop new skills. Risking failure in training is the more effective way to learn.
Get the most out of yourself by being attached to the outcome of the training. Understand that you will need to give everything you have if you want to succeed.
“An amateur practices until he can do a thing right, a professional until he can’t do it wrong.” – Harold Craxton.
Find a rival to use stress to your advantage
Stress is how your body prepares you for something you care about. To readily generate it, find a competitor who can challenge you in training. Having a rival is crucial to get the extra 4% of intensity & grit of yourself. To deliver that extra effort that most performers are unwilling to provide consistently is where you will find your edge.
“With competition, everyone has to try harder.” – Harold Greene.
Be thankful for rivalries; they empower you to give your absolute best.
View deliberate practice as a way to hang out with your highest self
“A practice implies engagement in a ritual. A practice may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will, and focused intention aimed, on one level, at the achievement of mastery in a field but, on a loftier level, intended to produce a communion with a power greater than ourselves” – Steven King.
Be the world champion in purposeful practice. Commit to the highest quality, so your level of training outshine the level of the competition.