Practice

We all have no choice but to work with what we have. Luckily, our skills can be improved through practice.[1,2,3] Experience alone will show you this. Further, countless scientific studies have found that the human brain has a remarkable capacity to learn and adapt.[2]

Anyone who ever got good at anything, practiced, period. You will need to do the same with your thinking skills and with whatever else you want to succeed at. Natural talent can only take you so far.

In a nutshell, to practice is to regularly work on improving a specific skill. What separates individuals who actually make progress from those who do not is how they practice. Research on experts in a wide range of fields, including chess, sports, music, and medicine have found that the people who improve and also reach the highest level of mastery are those who practice deliberately.[1] Deliberate practice is when one engages in a practice activity with full concentration on improving a specific aspect of their performance/skill.[4] These types of practice regimens are often designed by teachers, mentors, or coaches, but it does not have to be this way. In fact, solitary deliberate practice (i.e. practicing by yourself) has been found to be a crucial, if not deciding factor in skill acquisition and improvement in a number of disciplines.[1,4] Why not try it?

The main characteristics of deliberate practice can be broken down in the following way:

- work on what you're bad at, not what you're good at.

- seek expert feedback or honestly and critically evaluate your own performance. i.e. Learn

- repeat the above until you've mastered your target goal.

- choose a new goal (what you're bad at) and start process anew.

[1,5,6]

What I'm really trying to make clear with this is that, with whatever you're pursuing, it doesn't matter where you're starting from. YOU. CAN. IMPROVE.

As you might guess from what I've said in my earlier posts, I believe you'll get the most bang for your buck if you focus on improving your thinking skills. i.e. If you become a better thinker, it has the potential to improve all other aspects of your life. But how does one practice thinking? There are many ways to do this but two simple strategies that research has found to be effective in improving critical and creative thinking are reading and writing. We'll go over these in the next posts.

References

1. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406.

2. Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2008). Exercising your brain: A review of human brain plasticity and training-induced learning. Psychology and Aging, 23(4), 692-701.

3. Willis, S. L., Tennstedt, S. L., Marsiske, M., Ball, K., Elias, J., Koepke, K. M., . . . Wright, E. (2006). Long-term effects of cognitive training on everyday functional outcomes in older adults. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 296(23), 2805-2814.

4. Ericsson, K. A. (2007). Deliberate practice and the modifiability of body and mind: Toward a science of the structure and acquisition of expert and elite performance. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 38(1), 4-34.

5. Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner/Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.

6. Rousmaniere, T. (2017). Deliberate practice for psychotherapists: A guide to improving clinical effectiveness. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, New York, NY.