Don’t Call it Studying, Call it Practising…and do it Deliberately!

Growing up, I played in the school band as well as on the school soccer team. I would go to soccer practice after school or I would go home and practice on my instrument. However, if I wanted to prepare for a test then I went home and studied.

But isn’t it just one in the same?

I would have never said I have to study my instrument now or I have to go study soccer. At the end of the day school subjects, instruments and sports all require a person to do one thing — learn. And learning requires practice. If I want to get really good at one of those things then I need to learn a great deal which in turn means I need to practice a great deal.

I’m talking expertise here. Something I touched on in my last post on active learning methods in university classrooms. So is quantity of practice the most important element in creating an expert? Does the quality of the practice matter?

I’ve coached soccer for 30 years. Some people hear that and go, “Wow! You must be an excellent coach?” There was a time when I would have probably blushed and agreed with them. Now I politely nod and simply acknowledge I’ve been at this a long time. I really don’t know if my 30 years of experience equates to 30 years of expertise. To paraphrase a saying I’ve heard before, maybe I just have one year of experience repeated 30 times. Experience is not the same thing as expertise.

Case in point. I’ve been driving a car about as long as I’ve coached soccer. I’ve got roughly 30 years of driving experience. But that doesn’t make me an expert at driving. Why? I don’t focus any effort at improving my driving. I just do enough to get me safely from point A to point B. Now, when I first started driving, I would have been motivated to learn and put in the effort and focus necessary to become a competent driver. But then my efforts to continue to improve became less targeted. I could drive now so I didn’t really need to practice being a better driver. At that point, I stopped becoming more of an expert and simply started compiling driving experience.

When I moved to Toronto, I again had to work hard, focus and get better at my driving in order to learn to safely survive the 401. I developed some more expertise but then settled back into my comfort zone again once I had enough. I think that our professional lives are often like this too. We do enough in the beginning to get educated and then to learn to do our job but then we stop working at it. We build experience but not necessarily more expertise. We learn but we aren’t maximizing the learning or our potential.

So quantity of practice is important if you want to become really good at something but it’s not the only thing you need. How you practice — the quality — is what really determines if your future level of expertise in something matches your experience in that thing. And so if I play an instrument or play soccer or take a college course, I put in the time to practice and I get better.

If I want to get really good then I practice deliberately. This is a term used by Florida State psychology professor and human expertise researcher Anders K. Ericsson. In fact, he’s probably the world-leading expert on expertise. To practice deliberately is to do things very differently from what the average student or athlete does when practising.

Deliberate practice involves

· Practice of skills that have been well studied and have standards for what perfection looks like.

· Practicing outside of your comfort zone which means applying maximum effort to learn to do things that you aren’t good at.

· A set of well-defined goals and steps that makes improvement (or failure) very explicit and tangible.

· Your full attention and focus — deliberate practice is mentally fatiguing and cannot be sustained in large doses.

· Feedback which helps you see the difference between your future state (i.e., where you want/need to be) and your present state (i.e., where you are now) and also helps you close the gap between those two states.

· The need for mental representations. A mental representation is a mental structure. It is how your brain can hold onto the massive amounts of knowledge that you need to know and remember if you want to be an expert at something.

Deliberate practice is uncomfortable. It’s mentally and physically fatiguing. It requires you to do things you’re not good at, which means lots of failed attempts. It means learning to be okay with feedback, much of which is telling you that you aren’t there yet and you need to change this, that or the other thing to get better. In other words, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It’s not something that we do because it’s fun.

That then may explain part of the reason why there are so few experts and/or exceptional people in the world. The work it takes to get to that level — to make it to the top — is just too much for most of us to endure or even contemplate enduring.

I always liked the idea of becoming exceptional at something. The pursuit of excellence is an area that I’m passionate about and have written about previously here. And when you realize that becoming better at anything is a matter of deliberate practice, which we are all capable of doing no matter our age or experience, then it becomes a matter of motivation. How willing am I to make the bumpy and uncomfortable crossroad shift from the highway of experience that I am on back to the highway of expertise that will truly help me get better?

The end goal of using deliberate practice doesn’t have to be the attainment of expert status in something. As Ericsson suggests in his book Peak: How to Master Almost Anything, get as close to deliberate practice as you can. Don’t be scared off by the daunting nature of the quantity of practice needed. Instead focus more on the quality. Practice more deliberately and you will get better.

Next time let’s look at how the principles of deliberate practice can be applied to school, the job and just to every day life.