One of the most noticeable differences between professional athletes and knowledge workers is the prevalence of deliberate practice. Athletes are admired and celebrated for their intense dedication to honing their craft, be it a baseball swing, a jump shot, or a wide receiver running the perfect route.
This type of consistent, focused practice is typical in any performance-based arena: sports, music, dance, or comedy. Yet for knowledge workers, it’s easy to go through our entire professional lives without deliberately practicing any of the skills we need to maximize success in our careers.
I think we’re collectively leaving a lot of career potential on the table by not explicitly identifying the skills most impactful to our success, and using coaches to aggressively train those skills.
Why Should We Practice?
Professionals need a finite set of skills to thrive in their careers. For many of us, we need to communicate well in written form and verbally; create excitement and buy-in about what we’re doing; make great decisions about how to tackle complex problems; understand our domain well; execute well on our plans; do all of this as quickly as possible.
Most people are really good at one or some of these. We all have our natural skills, and hopefully are in roles and companies where those shine. Some people naturally communicate and persuade really well, others have amazing technical skills or possess rare technical knowledge, while others have a knack for generating great ideas.
But most of us have plenty of room for growth in the skills and competencies that are most important to driving success in our jobs and careers. And I think it’s common to go through the years without a true self-appraisal and gathering honest feedback about how effective we are in these areas.
It’s even rarer to deliberately practice the skills we know we could improve, and that would positively impact our career. Why? It’s hard, and our environments aren’t set up for it. It takes a ton of motivation to pause our daily responsibilities and proactively work on skills that aren’t directly impacting what’s on our plate at the moment, even if these are skills that will be a critical part of our jobs for the next several decades. Furthermore, there’s rarely an immediate payoff, so any sustained effort must be buoyed by the belief that a payoff down the road is worth the trouble today.
I’m a big believer that we learn by doing, but just doing something isn’t enough. The world is full of golfers that are no better today than they were 50 rounds ago. The book, Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise, provides a great look into the science of gaining expertise, be it poker, coding, or sales. The thrust is that improvement comes from challenging, focused practice beyond one’s comfort zone, with consistent feedback on whether the practice achieved the desired outcome or not.
Deliberate practice and focused reflection speed up the learning curve. We don’t need to wait until we make mistakes “in the game” to learn lessons. For many things, we can gain battle scars, learn what works, learn what doesn’t, and build up confidence all through more focused practice, where the risk of negative consequences is zero.
If we’re always waiting to learn lessons from “game reps,” we’re at the mercy of how many reps we actually get. And for the decisions, situations, and opportunities that have the biggest impact, we don’t get many swings of the bat.
What Should We Practice?
If you accept the premise that deliberate practice and reflection make sense, the most important (and most difficult) decision to get right is figuring out what to practice. We can’t spend all of our time practicing and not doing, so we want to make sure our limited time and energy are producing force in the direction that leads to the largest payouts.
Deciding what to practice often boils down to whether we spend time bolstering the skills we’re already great at, at the expense of things we’re not great at, or whether the value of improving a weakness is so great, that it makes sense to invest our time and energy there.
This decision is highly context-specific, both to the industry and individual. Helping guide this decision is one of the two main value adds I see for coaches. The great coaches I’ve worked with have a crystal clear picture of the domain they work in, and the individual they’re working with. They understand industry trends, and most importantly, they’re able to identify what skills are important for success today, and in the future. They know what their students’ aspirations, capabilities, and limitations are, and how those match up with the demands of their jobs.
In making the decision of where to invest time and deliberate practice, the graph looks something like this:
The goal is to pick something as high on the Impact scale and low on the Energy Spent scale as possible. A coach’s experience working with other students — and judging the relative difficulty of improving certain skills — helps them calibrate this scale accurately.
Baseball is a great example of a situation with a lot of variables and uncertainty when deciding what to practice. Take a Major League hitter that has trouble handling high pitches due to the shape of his swing, which is better suited to hit low pitches. As a coach, do you try to redesign the swing to handle high pitches better? Or do you focus on the existing strengths and try to help the hitter swing at as few high pitches as possible?
This is a partial list of some of the considerations: will a focus on mechanics disrupt the hitters confidence and athleticism? How well do they handle the low pitch? Are they bad on all high pitches or just some types? How consistently can pitchers actually locate a pitch in the top of the zone? If the batter doesn’t change his swing, but never swings at high pitches, what would be his estimated production? How long would it take to redesign a swing? Has he tried before? Have other players done this successfully? Why is his swing the way it is? Is he physically capable of changing his swing? Is he motivated to? If it takes a year of bad overall performance to get to the desired swing, is that an okay outcome?
These are complex decisions with a lot of variables, and a coach’s judgment and experience are huge in getting to the right strategy.
One of my favorite stories in sports is when Tiger Woods worked with Hank Haney to overhaul his golf swing in 2003, with 8 Majors already under his belt, and at the peak of the sports world. The swing that once led to insane success was starting to have an impact on his knee, and leading to inconsistent play. During his swing reconstruction, Tiger struggled mightily for 2 years, with just one Top-5 finish at a Major in 2003 and 2004, but when he finally figured things out, he came back to win 5 Majors in the next 3 years, with 10 Top-5 finishes.
This was his rationale for the swing overhaul:
“I felt like I could get better,” he says. “People thought it was asinine for me to change my swing after I won the Masters by 12 shots. … Why would you want to change that? Well, I thought I could become better.
“If I play my best, I’m pretty tough to beat. I’d like to play my best more frequently, and that’s the whole idea. That’s why you make changes. I thought I could become more consistent and play at a higher level more often. … I’ve always taken risks to try to become a better golfer, and that’s one of the things that has gotten me this far.”
Knowledge workers rarely face the same downside risks that an athlete might when trying to develop or improve a new skill, but we can borrow the framework of bolstering skillsets through focused practice.
Unfortunately, the most impactful decisions we make and actions we take–the ones that present themselves only a few times a year or less–are the ones we get to practice the least. These are the decisions and projects that if we get right, make everything else pale in comparison. Despite their low frequency, they’re the things that we should absolutely be practicing so that when they arise, we’ve already worked out the kinks, we’ve learned from our mistakes on reps that don’t hurt us, and we have more confidence that we’ll make the right decision when the time comes.
Negotiation falls in this bucket. It’s something that few people do on a regular basis, something few people likely spend any time practicing, but something that can have massive impact over the course of a career. Not just monetary impact (though of course there’s that), but also impact in acquiring resources and support.
How We Should Practice?
We obviously live in an era where anything we want to know is immediately available on the internet. Want to be a better public speaker? Learn a new programming language? It’s all there, and with enough time and motivation, we can find what we need to start learning and improving at anything.
Having had some very good coaches in my life, and also going through a lot of my own trial and error in learning new things, I view the second primary value add of a coach as the ability to expertly teach the right skills. Good coaches, having successfully identified what’s worth spending time on, understand the specifics of skill acquisition in their domain. If they’re teaching a physical skill, they know how humans best develop new motor skills and construct drills and practice accordingly. If they’re teaching a language, they understand the techniques that lead to fluency fastest.
Coaches are ultimately responsible for accelerating the learning curve, and they can often do so in a way that we simply can’t as individuals. They have a broader perspective and sample of what tends to work and what doesn’t, which makes pattern recognition much easier.
The ability to suggest the strategy most likely to work right away can significantly cut down development time. It’s not that individuals can’t figure things out–we do all the time–it’s that we don’t always need to learn by making a mistake first. Great coaches see the obstacles ahead before we can, and they help us navigate around them without missing a beat.
Using one more baseball analogy, consider a pitcher that’s trying to gain a little more movement on his fastball. A coach with a reservoir of examples of similar pitchers that have attempted the same adjustment can quickly get to the right strategy, as opposed to the pitcher going through trial and error without the context of what’s worked best for others. For many things, imitating what other successful people have done is a great strategy.
The final component of effective practice and great coaches is good, consistent feedback. For practice to be impactful, there has to be feedback on whether we’re achieving the desired outcome. Unknowingly practicing in poor form does more harm than good. Effort that’s intended to be productive ends up ingraining bad habits.
Conclusion
I think deliberate practice is so prevalent in performance-based industries because success and failure are largely binary. We can measure a wide receiver’s contribution in unambiguous ways, and we know exactly how many downloads of a song an artist gets. These are industries where you’re out of a job the moment you get outperformed, so there’s incredible urgency to continuously improve.
We can take a similarly aggressive approach to training and development in business roles. People are capable of a lot if they have the right plan and consistency. All of this starts with a real understanding of where we are, and that it’s okay if there are skills we need to work on.
That said, there are a lot of things we simply can’t practice. The world evolves and novel situations arise all the time. No one was preparing for how to handle a pandemic, but these situations are the outliers. They’re the unrehearsed joke a comedian tells for the first time, or the new series of chords a musician plays on stage. For the predictable 90% of our jobs, we have the ability to master our skill sets, which makes us even more capable at improvisation on the other 10%.
There’s been a lot written on mastery being one of the key components to meaning, and I’d guess anyone that’s truly tried to master a skill has found it to be an incredible process–at times difficult and frustrating, but ultimately meaningful and rewarding. What I miss most about playing baseball is the daily act of trying to incrementally improve at this one skill, tinkering to find any edge possible. Approaching the skillsets we need in our working lives through the lens of mastery can lead not just to better performance, impact, and outcome, but a deeper level of satisfaction and meaning.