How to get more out of every single day… the power of purposeful practice.

Whether we are the parent or child, teacher or student, business owner or employee, we all want to make the best use of our time. And our energy. But how do we do that? It isn’t like most of us have owners manual on how to develop our talents or upgrade our skill level to create tomorrows future today on hand.

We all possess abilities and skills we would like to develop, but how do we efficiently and effectively develop them to our full potential and capabilities? Through Purposeful Practice — Deliberate Practice.

Deliberate practice is to a specific type of practice that is both purposeful and systematic.
While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and to improve our performance and capabilities. The greatest challenge of deliberate practice?
Remaining focused and indistractable.

To begin with, showing up each and every day and putting in our reps is the most important thing. Why? To begin to form habits — our brain works by transforming repeated behaviours into automatic patterns — meaning we don’t have to think about them — we kind of go on autopilot.

For example, remember when we first learned to tie our shoes? Or drive a car? We had to think carefully about each step of the process. Now — assuming we can either/or tie our shoes or drive — after many repetitions our brains can perform the tasks seemingly without effort or thought — they have become automatic; the more we repeat a given 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 we may inaccurately believe progress is happening; we stop focusing on our results, we stop noticing what we are getting. Often we think we are getting better because we are gaining experience, but in reality, we are only reinforcing our current habits, not improving them.

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.

How-to execution guides on purposeful practice; that’s my blog topic for tomorrow & this week—models, maxims & methods on purposeful practice.