The Intention Boost: How practice and time are just part of the learning picture
Learning a new concept and then seeking to practice that new concept over time is often not enough to materialize the desired outcome. This article explores the critical boost that showing up with intention lends to your practice, resulting in the desired outcome.
If you were drawn to read this, you’ve probably had the experience of having taken a course or read a book or article to learn new ways to become a more effective leader. After you learned “the things,” what were you hoping would happen immediately afterward? Many of us sometimes find ourselves wondering why we don’t immediately feel like the leader we imagined we’d become when taking the course. Why might we be experiencing this?
It depends.
Jonathan Rozenblit and I, drawing from what we have learned working with our students and coachees in the Leadership Practitioner Program, arrived at formula which could help you understand why you might feel this way (and what you could do about it):
Effective training that asks learners to go deep into themselves in order to shift how they understand change-making often builds time to practice into the course work. In training programs that don’t build these breaks into the flow, you may have found yourself inserting this time naturally — taking a level, taking a break, then returning to take another level.
But it’s not the break itself that gives what’s needed for the next level. Learning something and then letting it stew for some period of time won’t give you the desired outcome. It’s obvious, right? You need to practice. You need to take that newly learned skill into the world and try it out, repeatedly, in various contexts, until you’ve mastered it.
Practice and time are not enough
But practice and time, on their own, still won’t give you the optimal results you seek. We’ve often seen coachees get hung up here, frustrated. They’ve learned a technique and after “installation” of the idea want to “turn it on,” with the expectation that, over time, ease in using that skill will just kick in. Time passes and they practice (some) and get results (middling). Then motivation for practice slips, and can even fade away.
Jonathan and I have learned to help our coachees discover the transformative element that not only gets them over this hurdle, but helps them avoid it entirely: intention.
Show up with intention
Showing up with intention creates the context though our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and our actions, for the experiences that we are about to have to be meaningful. When the experiences we are about to have are meaningful, we are intrinsically motivated to have them.
Say you want to learn a musical instrument. First, you “install the information” — you can read a book, watch a video, take a class or learn from a friend. If you stop at installation, you probably don’t end up having learned to play an instrument: you also need to practice. So you create a calendar (or whatever technique of accountability you prefer) and check the boxes on the days you practice (or whatever means you use to track your own accountability).
After some time something will have happened: you can now play some notes, or maybe you gave up and the instrument is getting dusty in the corner.
If the instrument is getting dusty, intention was probably missing. Was your intention to play notes? Or was your intention to make music? There is no right or wrong intention. The key is that your intention is the right one for you.
The right intention jiu jitsus the hurdle
For many of us, an intention of “playing notes” might not create the right context to fuel the thoughts, beliefs, and emotions that intrinsically motivate our actions. Instead, we find ourselves struggling with trying to boost our motivation extrinsically, looking for the right technique to push ourselves over the hurdle that is between us and the desired outcome. We might find ourselves promising ourselves a treat after every hour of practice.
We might be better served with the intention of “playing music.” Now, when we end a practice still making terrible sounds, we are drawn to the next practice by what “making music” means to us. With the right intention, we don’t need a bag of tricks to overcome the hurdle: there is no hurdle to overcome.
It’s your intention that guides you in what you do when you practice, and thus makes the practice meaningful — and thus makes the desired outcome far more likely.
For deeper exploration of this topic, including how to align and right-size your intentions, join us (no cost) in the Leadership Practitioner Connection — our professional network dedicated to equipping and empowering anyone, regardless of job title, with practical skills and tools to practice leadership.
