Deliberate practice

Learn how to turn off autopilot and move from a practice that is “naive” to one that is purposeful and deliberate.

- NIKKI DAVIES

Self-improvement is at the core of human activity. You want to live a happier and fuller life, have better relationships and achieve your professional best. You want to do better and be better than you were last year, last week or last session. You want to evolve to be who you were meant to be and be able look back with a sense of pride and accomplishment when you’ve achieved a goal. You want a sense of purpose, something to strive for and something to keep you from treading water for too long.

To reach your goals — becoming a great cook, improving your skills to get a better job or mastering a musical instrument or game like chess — you often rely on practice to get you there. Yet the maxim “practice makes perfect” is not necessarily the best and most efficient way to get you where you want to go.

Indeed, if in this practice you are simply repeating mistakes or poor techniques, if you haven’t got a clear goal or aren’t sufficiently challenged, all the practice in the world won’t benefit your efforts in any meaningful way.

Instead, you need to be thinking about the quality and type of practice you do: what are the elements you need to concentrate on? How do you bring it all together? Simply put, you need to move from a practice that is “naive” to one that is purposeful and deliberate. One that encompasses measures, proper technique, challenges and goals.

Deliberate practice is a theory posited by psychologist Anders Ericsson in the 1990s that suggests that the development of skills occurs best when you incorporate a self-reflective feedback loop into the process of improvement rather than simply performing a task repetitively until you think you’ve mastered it.