Make being silly & making mistakes part of our daily purposeful practice.

How does purposeful practice look in everyday life?
Be willing to be like a child. To make mistakes — a lot of them.
And to reinterpret mistakes as the most useful information we have to find our next right move; to push the boundaries of our practice with.
To play full out, every time we practice; at the edge of our current skills & capabilities, always (well, aiming for always).

Show up daily.
Repeat specific, defined actions.
Be Playful & Imaginative.
Be a copycat — model world-class experts and steal ideas & behaviours and claim them as our own.
Be willing to be silly and
Play the fool.

Why? In doing this, we are ok with being with fear; we may even lose our fear. We aren’t afraid of making mistakes.

As skilled as we are, we need to push the boundaries to learn and grow continually. The only way this happens is when we build new connections in our brain, which means we are pushing, reaching, failing, failing again, looking silly, dumb and even stupid.

Feeling and being playful feels awesome. Feeling stupid doesn’t always. However, being willing to show up and be silly and risk the emotional pain of making mistakes is critical. Why? It bears repeating: reaching and failing are the way our brain forms new connections, and when it comes to developing our talents and skills through purposeful practice mistakes are not really mistakes, they are our guiding light.

More how-to execution guides and strategy on purposeful practice and behaviour design; these are my blog topic for tomorrow & this week — models, maxims & methods on purposeful practice applied IRL.