How to Get Better at Getting Better

If you want to be a record breaker, dedication’s what you need.

Roy Castle

 We get better with practice. While my conscious brain strongly believes this statement is true, I don’t always make good on it in my day to day actions.

Practice can seem irrelevant in the ‘fixed mindset’ identified by Carol Dweck. If you believe that talent is innate, why would even try to learn and improve?

A similar conclusion could be drawn from the notion popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, that geniuses in all fields need to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice before they reach their peak. This intimidating fact could also lead you to wonder why to bother practising if 10,000 hours seems a little too much.

A first step out of this unproductive hole is to adopt Dweck’s ‘growth mindset’. From this perspective, there is always scope to improve our capability at any given task. And as an economist, I tend to believe that the marginal returns from practice diminish and that the payback is highest when you are least experienced.

A more important truth is whatever amount of time you can commit to practising, you can reap huge benefits from doing it well. As the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter recently reported, the time spent honing a skill correlates only weakly with the degree of mastery and level of performance.

In Learn how to do anything in 20 hours, Josh Kauffman argues that getting better requires ring-fencing regular time for focused practice and then breaking down tasks into their component parts, each of which can then be individually mastered. Putting his own recommendations into practice, Kauffman reports how he was able to learn and put into practice a basic yoga meditation within just 10 hours. This is pretty inspiring to me, given how long a similar aim has sat on my to-do list without progress.

In Bounce, Matthew Syed observed that the top sports performers not only practice prodigiously, they also do so in a particular way he terms ‘purposeful practice’. This comprises two elements:

• Practising specific tasks that push the athlete to their creative and physical limits
•  Creating conditions that provide clear, objective and rapid feedback.

He cites Tiger Woods as an example, who will practice the same shot over and over again, perhaps hitting 100 balls from an identical bunker position.  Woods will observe the results himself and use a coach to provide further feedback from another angle.

Insightfully, Syed observes that purposeful practice appears to be adopted far less in normal working lives than in sport.  This is a pity when so much of the improvement in sport is zero-sum (an ‘arms race’), while in our working and personal lives it can be positive sum. If an athlete becomes the best in the world, he squeezes a competitor out of the medals. If I get better at my job, or as a friend or husband, this should have a positive effect on those around me.

So, how can we make use of these insights?

To improve as a coach

• Breaking down coaching into its constituent parts and practising those parts (or trying new techniques) that stretch me to my limit
• Obtaining clear and regular feedback, by recording and listening back to sessions (with the client’s permission of course).

To help clients

• Help them to identify the specific elements of tasks that they find challenging – and encourage them to practice these.
• Enable and encourage clients to obtain clean, precise feedback from themselves and from me as their coach, and to seek it out from others

As a civil servant

• Again, trying to identify specific components of my job to see which would benefit from specific practice (eg presenting or speaking effectively in meetings).
• Obtaining clear, constructive feedback from others immediately after practising new methods (eg directly after the meeting or presentation)

As a runner

• I have been trying my hand at running drills which seek to improve my running style and efficiency.  I find these very hard – which reinforces the value of practising them!
• Strength and conditioning work to provide core strength to support the running action.

A final, radical thought, arises from Syed’s description of the time-honoured learning process of aspiring chess players. They study old games between grandmasters, recreating each move and challenging themselves to think about what to do next. Syed reports that doctors have benefited from a similar technique where they study warning signs repeatedly over a short time period and learn what happens.

Why not do this in coaching? In theory, you could create a database of anonymised master coach conversations and enable aspiring coaches to consider what they would ask next. Of course, good coaching relies on building rapport, but this could help us to learn about techniques.