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Become Better At Anything Through Deliberate Practice

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Deliberate practice is the path to getting better results in any field. It’s a specific method that makes the difference between an ordinary performance and an outstanding achievement. These are some guidelines for engaging in deliberate practice and specific applications for how to use it in your daily life.

General Guidelines for Deliberate Practice

1. Be patient. A large body of research confirms that it takes about ten years before most people develop into a virtuoso, whether you want to be a pianist or a titan of industry. Plus, that ten year figure seems to be a minimum rather than an average.

2. Aim for consistency. As you would expect, you must practice regularly. Just like kids forget their course work during summer vacation, you may squander your efforts if you take prolonged breaks.

3. Understand the learning curve. It’s natural to enjoy dramatic results when you first take up anything new. Then, you hit a plateau where you need to become more strategic if you want to keep advancing.

4. Hone in on specific areas. Identify the areas where you want to improve and focus your practice there. For example, you may have acquired an extensive vocabulary in French but need to spend time listening to native speakers to improve your pronunciation.

5. Be prepared for lots of repetition. The willingness to endure repetitive drills is what distinguishes the best performers. Keep in mind that the most productive methods may not feel like a lot of fun.

6. Keep your sessions relatively brief. Researchers have found that three to five hours a day is the absolute maximum for most people, spread over individual sessions of ninety minutes or less. Pace yourself according to the amount of time during which you can maintain an intense level of concentration.

7. Set specific goals. Use a blend of goals related to both outcomes and the process itself. The important thing is to approach your usual tasks with the mindset of becoming better at them.

8. Expand your mental model. Try to identify all the factors that go into your chosen experience. Keep adding to the list and experimenting with new combinations. For example, keep a journal so you can spot what conditions support or sabotage your healthy diet.

9. Seek feedback. Outside observers may spot weaknesses that you fail to see. Partner up with a more experienced friend or hire a coach.

10. Evaluate your progress. Check in regularly to review how you’re doing. Ask yourself what is going well and where you need to make changes.

Specific Applications for Deliberate Practice in Your Daily Life

1. Enhance your exercise routine. Sports are one field where deliberate practice has been studied extensively. You can use the same techniques as professional athletes to get the most out of your yoga classes.

2. Get creative. Music and other arts are also areas where practice obviously matters. You may want to resume the piano lessons you started as a child.

3. Move ahead in your career. Any occupation can be broken down into tasks where you can make continual improvements. Brush up on your financial management skills or take a more systematic approach to making successful sales calls.

4. Enrich your relationships. Even interpersonal relationships have many aspects that respond to practice. Experiment with delivering constructive criticism more tactfully with your family and co-workers.

Deliberate practice requires time and hard work, but anyone can reap the benefits, regardless of whether you think you have any special innate talent for the activities you care about most. Focus on the areas where you want to improve and be patient. Over the long term, diligent repetition and targeted feedback will pay off.

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Renew Fading Friendships

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A function of maturing and making your way through life is that you’ll occasionally leave behind someone you really care about. It might be your best friend from high school, your old neighborhood buddy, a college dorm roommate, or even a past co-worker you connected with.

Over time, you may find yourself yearning for another conversation, a lunch out or evening spent with a long-lost friend. But after so much time has passed, how can you renew fading friendships before they disappear completely?

Consider these suggestions to re-connect with a friend from your past:

  1. Give your friend a call. You might freeze up at the thought of calling because, after all, it has been so long. However, the only way of renewing your friendship is to make contact. Just do it.
    • Tell her you’ve missed her. Mention you’ve been thinking about the fun you had shopping and playing tennis together and that you want to maintain your friendship. Listen to how she feels about the relationship. Inquire about what’s going on in her life.
  2. Persevere. If you don’t have your friend’s telephone number, call his parents or drive by the last residence where he lived. Knock on the door and inquire of the residents if they know what happened to him. Contact a mutual friend and ask where your old friend is living now or how you might get in contact.
  3. Set up a rotating commitment. Once you contact your friend and discover he wants to continue your friendship, suggest the two of you get together on an ongoing basis to keep your relationship going.
    • For example, meet for dinner every other Wednesday evening. Get together one Saturday a month for lunch. A standing appointment keeps you both looking forward to spending time with one another.
  4. Be willing to make the extra effort. If your friend lives 90 minutes away by car, when you call, say you’d love to drive over and spend some time with him. Show you’re willing to do what’s necessary to see your friend occasionally. Hopefully, your friend will eventually be willing to drive over to see you as well.
  5. Write a letter and send it by snail mail. A hand-written letter shows you put some time and thought into what you wanted to say. Plus, your friend will have a tangible representation of your attempt to contact him, which means he’ll notice your efforts to get in touch.
    • This method is particularly helpful when you don’t have the person’s telephone or cell numbers.
    • Send a letter every other month for 6 months or so and include all your contact information, such as your cell phone number, home phone number, e-mail address, and home address. Doing so will make it easier for your friend to contact you using whatever method he prefers.
  6. Once you’ve established initial contact, use technology to stay connected. Find out from your friend if he uses e-mail and texting. If so, send him an e-mail every few days. If your friend prefers a quick text, use texting to stay in touch.
  7. Consider Facebook. After you’ve made your initial contact, find out if your friend is on Facebook. If so, “friend” him and use Facebook to keep in touch.

It’s a great feeling to discover an old friend wants to renew your relationship. Go ahead and be the one who takes the first steps to rekindle an old friendship. Use these methods to re-connect with that wonderful friend from your past.

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Could You Use an Attitude Makeover?

January 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In this day of personal makeovers, we’ve seen people lose 100 pounds, get a nose job, and finally go after their dream career. But for many, an alteration of attitudes alone can bring transformative life experiences.

Changing how you approach daily living might help you achieve your ultimate goals. Even if you don’t think you’re in need of a total attitude makeover, check out some of the ideas below to discover positive approaches you can take to get the most out of your life.

Are you “Stuck” in a Dominant Attitude?

If you find yourself feeling the same way about a variety of situations in life, maybe you’re hanging on to the same attitude. If you have a particular, less-than-positive approach that dominates your life, it may be time for a makeover.

Reflect on Your Feelings

Take time to think about how you feel most of the time. How would you describe your dominant attitude? Is it contentment, sluggishness, happiness, annoyance, satisfaction, resentment, peace, envy, joy, worry, inquisitiveness, or even anger?

Examine Your Attitude Type

As you can see, some attitudes are positive, optimistic and motivating. If you’re blessed with a naturally positive dominant attitude, you’re in solid command of your life. You’re most likely already living the good life you deserve.

But if you notice that a less positive attitude is pervasive, make the decision now to alter how you think and feel.

Consider the following regarding these more challenging attitudes, and the ways in which they can detract from the quality of your life:

  • Sluggishness. If you have a sluggish attitude toward life, you’ll find yourself simply plodding along, doing barely what is required to get by. You might take little interest in anything and prop your feet in front of the television at every spare moment. Chances are, you set few, if any, goals.
  • Annoyance. If you find yourself consistently annoyed, you probably rarely feel satisfied with life. Something is usually amiss. When you’re annoyed, you may often sit in judgment of others, whom you see as unable to “do things right.”
  • Resentment. Being resentful involves feeling rankled, troubled and worked up most of the time. When resentment is your dominant attitude, you may feel challenged to manifest positive events in your life or enjoy the ones that do occur.
  • Envy. Feeling envious of others can include wanting what someone else has or feeling spiteful toward or competitive with others.
  • Worry. A prevailing attitude of worry means you often experience nagging feelings that things are not quite okay. In advance of an event, you construct many possible scenarios, with few of them leading to a satisfying finish.
  • Anger. An angry attitude is exhausting if you have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s your own attitude or someone else’s. When this attitude is dominant, usually there is a general sense of unhappiness.

Make Over Your Attitude

Once you determine you might benefit from an attitude makeover, you can get started right away. As an adult, you most likely already have all the skills you need to change your challenging state of mind.

Try these strategies to experience the joys of a more positive dominant attitude:

  1. Make a decision. Decide to rid yourself of the attitude that brings you down.
  2. Use reminders. Post reminders on your mirror and refrigerator and in your car to “catch” and let go of your old attitude.
  3. Replace the old. Select a more uplifting attitude as your dominant one. For example, happiness, joy, peace, satisfaction, or contentment as your chief attitude will strengthen your passion for life. When you notice your old attitude creeping in, replace it immediately with a more optimistic, motivating one. Refuse to surrender your power to that old state of mind.
  4. Affirm your new attitude. Apply your new frame of mind. Every day, say to yourself, “No matter what, I am [your new attitude].” Remind yourself that you’re stronger than your old, ineffective attitude.

If you identified any of the above challenging attitudes as your primary emotional state, you might get a lot of pleasure from an attitude makeover. By following these suggestions, you can begin to enjoy the good life you’ve always wanted.

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How to Get Up When the Alarm Goes Off

January 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When the alarm clock first wakes you each morning, do you have difficulty getting out of bed immediately? Do you usually find yourself pressing the snooze button, rolling over, and going back to sleep? Well, you’re not alone. Most people do this.

But imagine if you could get up every morning right when the alarm went off. You’d have an extra ten or twenty minutes in every day, or maybe more. How would you like to hear your alarm, turn it off, take a nice deep breath, and then get right out of bed? Believe it or not, this really can be you!

Unfortunately, most of us have tried to do this before using our conscious will power. You already know what happens. At 10:30 P.M. you decide that you should get up at 5:30 A.M. Then 5:30 A.M. comes along, and you make an executive decision that it would be wiser to get up at 7:30 A.M. instead. This happens to the best of us, and most of us give up afterward.

A Wiser Decision

You may be thinking, “I just need more discipline.” Perhaps, but you don’t need it at 5:30 A.M. You don’t need an elaborate system of alarm clocks. And you don’t need better or more self-talk in the wee hours of the morning. No one can be trusted to make a good decision when the alarm first wakes us up.

What you really need is more discipline before you go to bed. You need to have the discipline at night to recognize that your decision-making process can’t be trusted at that critical moment in the morning. Your 5:30 A.M. brain is no good for decision-making. Take it out of the equation as much as possible.

Physical Repetition: Practice

The following method may sound crazy, but it works!

  1. Get in bed during the day or early evening. Try to simulate your regular sleeping conditions as much as possible. Make the room dark, get into your normal sleeping attire, climb in bed and assume your favorite sleeping position.
  2. Set your alarm for 5-10 minutes.

  3. Try to just relax and zone out. Fall asleep if you can.

  4. When the alarm sounds, immediately turn it off. Now go through whatever routine you’d like to be able to follow in the morning. Stretch your arms and legs out, take a deep breath, smile, and put your feet on the floor. Now stand up.
  5. Repeat. If you practice this strategy a couple of times each day, within a week you should be getting up in the morning without any problem.

Mental Repetition: More Practice

Getting up when the alarm sounds is one habit in which visualization can really be helpful as you work to develop it. Several times during the day, imagine your alarm going off and yourself immediately launching into your get-out-of-bed ritual. This mental practice is great, because it’s fast and it’s easy, and you can do it anywhere.

However, actually going through the motions is the most powerful tool you have. Even if you mostly practice mentally, do the physical practice at least a few times, because it allows your mental practice to feel a lot more realistic.

Getting up immediately in the morning is a habit that’s actually easy to put into place. The warm covers and thoughts of just 10 more minutes are powerful motivators to stay in bed a little longer. But getting up on time consistently is something anyone can do. Imagine all the extra time you’ll have each day!

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Change Your Life in 30 Days

January 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Significantly changing your life in 30 days really is possible, although not always easy. But even though this adventure is often a big challenge, the payoffs can be enormous.

We’ve all taken on challenges of one sort of another for 30 days. Maybe you tried a diet or an exercise program. Perhaps you decided to give up TV for 30 days. Even if you didn’t stick with the program long-term, the results were great, weren’t they? Now imagine if you expanded that idea to incorporate many areas of your life.

This program includes implementing several 30-day challenges simultaneously. You can use these suggestions or develop your own. Try creating a 30-day challenge from each category, and see where your new adventures lead you.

    1. Adjust your finances. Making more money or spending less is always a good financial theme. Alternatively, you might try balancing your accounts each day.
    2. Kick start your physical health. Diet, exercise, or combinations of both are great places to start. You could begin with something as simple as the doing the 20-minute yoga program that’s on TV every morning or taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator.
    3. Eliminate a time waster. Think about the amount of time you spend watching TV, surfing the Internet, window-shopping, playing video games, or lurking on Facebook. We all know the activities we tend to engage in when we’re bored or trying to avoid dealing with life’s challenges. Try getting rid of just one, and see how much more time you have!
    4. Add in another positive activity. Come up with something more enriching or satisfying than the time waster you’re eliminating. Maybe reading or taking a class would be in order. Perhaps you’ll spend all your newly found time playing a musical instrument.
    5. Commit to something else that appeals to you. Perhaps checking your email only 3 times a week or going to bed by 11:00 every night would be a beneficial habit you’d enjoy.

Tips for Success in Your Program

Now that you have some idea of changes you might want to make, how can you stick to them?

Try these ideas:

    1. Get enough sleep. If you set a challenge of cutting two hours of sleep each night (or even just one hour!), it’s going to make everything else more difficult. Regardless of whatever time-related goals you may set, allow yourself the 7-8 hours a night that you deserve.
    2. Set goals that you can do daily, seven days a week. Creating a new habit with an activity you only do 3 times a week is often much harder. Try to keep all new activities limited to ones you can do every day.
    3. Prepare ahead of time. Have everything you need in advance. Eliminate anything that might get in the way. For example, if you’re trying to follow a specific diet, buy the food you’ll need beforehand and get rid of food you want to avoid. You can’t break down and eat that bag of chips if there aren’t any chips in the house!
    4. Plan on social support. Tell your goals to your friends or family members that will support you in your efforts. Be careful in whom you confide. Changing is a challenge in itself. Success is harder if others are making unsupportive comments.

Trying to change several aspects of your life simultaneously may require other changes as well, depending on your chosen goals. All of our behaviors tend to interact with other behaviors, which can make changing any of them a demanding task.

For example, if you give up TV and junk food, and those are your main coping mechanisms for life’s challenges, you’re going to have to deal with your negative feelings a new way. Or better yet, you can face your concerns head-on. The distractions you’re used to falling back on may have just been ways to avoid the issues at hand.

To work this program, choose the 30-day challenges you can implement and get started. Remember to adequately prepare. If you can create several new positive habits and get rid of a few bad ones, your life will change dramatically for the better.

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