Tag: practice

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Why Practice is Essential for Mindset Training

What’s the one thing people fail at around mindset training? PRACTICE

 

A software engineer doesn’t take on an innovative challenge without having learned and practiced the coding techniques she will use. She studies and becomes so comfortable with her available skills that she can invent around them under pressure.

 

A presenter doesn’t walk onto stage without rehearsing his speech. He becomes so versed in the content that he can relax and weave a compelling tale.

 

An athlete doesn’t enter a competition without refining her skills and planning the way she’ll take on her opponent.

 

So why are we surprised when our unpracticed mindset breaks down at critical moments?

 

The Difference Between Attention and Mastery

 

Paying attention to mindset is an important step. It means you are moving beyond pure physical technique and upping your game.

 

To get to an elite level, however, it is critical to master mindset with as much rigor and intensity as you mastered all the other skills.

 

But how can I master mindset when it’s only needed at crunch time?

 

How did you master the idea of solving a seemingly unsolvable problem? How did you master the idea of summoning a commanding voice during a speech? How did you master scoring a goal?

 

You practiced.

 

It wasn’t minutes before your project needed to be delivered. It wasn’t live on TV in front of millions of people. It wasn’t in the finals of the world championships. You mastered the skills you needed in spite of it not being the critical moment.

 

You rehearsed, and sometimes you even created games to up the stakes. “If I make this catch, we win the world championships.”

 

Mindset training is the same. A winning mindset is not just going to appear at the perfect moment. It needs to be trained. It needs practice.

 

It needs learning about what works.

 

It needs failure, to understand how to recover quickly.

 

It needs variety, in order to know how to click into it wherever you are.

 

When I work with athletes and leaders on mindset training, practice is an integral component. Motivators and frameworks and visualization and even a robust support network have limited power unless we do the work.

 

Without practice, mindset is a just a nice idea, an untrained muscle.

 

It’s (Not) So Easy

 

What about those people for whom winning mindset is natural? They are far from their potential winning mindset. They are fortunate that it comes easy, and settling for easy is dangerous. They may continue to be fortunate, but just wait. Inevitably, any top performer hits a plateau or a dip. New competition emerges, performing at a higher level. Or their thoughts start getting in the way of their own performance. By settling, the natural gave up the opportunity to be nimble. They don’t know how to discover their next gear yet.

 

Don’t settle, however easy it comes to you. Do the work.

 

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Creating Deep Mastery from Repetition: Discipline

Repetition Creates Discipline

There’s a leap from having raw talent to doing something about it. That’s where repetition (aka practice) comes in. Raw talent will lead to incredible peak moments, but the practiced expert is going to win out in the long run. Natural brilliance is no match for strong skills developed deep and wide. It’s why the wily veterans are able to overcome the cocky upstarts so often.

When we look at practice in terms of training vs working out, we look at our experience of the activity in the moment and how it connects to what matters to us. Another way of thinking about it is repetition. Through a lens of repetition, we can see all the strikingly different ways we can be in the moment.

Repetition is a core component of practice. If we are doing something about our raw talent by practicing, we might assume there’s a simple relationship. Put in the reps. Get better. Turns out there’s more than one way reps help you get better. Some give you moderate payoffs. Others transform you and expand what was thought to be possible.

I see a four level model of the payoffs from repetition. I call it DEEP Mastery. In this series, we will explore how each level transforms repetition into different flavors of mastery. Level 1 is Discipline.

LEVEL 1 – REPETITION CREATES DISCIPLINE

Level 1 is counterintuitive, a bit of a paradox. We need discipline to do our repetitions. We can’t even start shaping our raw talent without it. It makes us show up and be focused toward completing the mission.

That’s not the discipline of Level 1. We need to flip it around to see discipline really driving us toward mastery.

Mastery emerges when we use repetition to build discipline.

When we repeat, we get bored. In that moment of boredom, one of our choices is to bail. I do that often with running. Only a few minutes into a run, I can’t wait for it to be over. That’s why I am not moving toward being a masterful runner.

Another choice is to keep practicing. If we make this choice, we expand our commitment to the goal. We build our capacity for discipline. We skew our reaction to boredom from quitting toward continuing, we can apply that discipline throughout our life.

“There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach (or Paula Abdul, depending on who you believe)

Your breaking point is where you set yourself apart. At the moment you’re bored or exhausted or out of ideas, being willing to go one more step gives you the edge.

I was confident at this year’s world championships. One important reason was that my team had put in reps. We had often chose to go more rounds of practice than we wanted, sometimes in laughably poor conditions. We knew what our performances felt like when we were physically and mentally exhausted. Great training for a mentally demanding world championship held in the thin, mountain air of Medellin, Colombia! It paid off. My team won, and I was rewarded with my 16th world championship title.

You know what repetitions look like when you’re fresh. Looking at it from the point of exhaustion is a different level of discipline.

Next time you have a choice to continue or bail, make a conscious choice. Another repetition may just create the discipline that takes you to your next victory.