Performance Excellence: Deliberate Practice and 3 Models of Mastery

This post includes additional detail to support my post at ActiveGarage blog: Origin of Leaders Pt 3: Learning - Growing through the Crucibles in your life.  It is worth reading that post first for the background and context for this post.

How do we achieve mastery?

Gary Kasparov

An entrepreneur friend recently commented to me an early conversation he had with a mentor:

"Alex, you have great potential".
"Thanks."
"Do you know what great potential means?"
"Huh?"
"You ain't done nothing yet". 

What does it take to turn potential into mastery?

Malcolm Gladwell has made famous the concept that 10,000 hours of practice leads to world class performance in his book Outliers.  I say this is not true.  There are plenty of people who have amassed over 10,000 hours and they are still poor or mediocre at what they do.  The truth is that these 10,000 hours need to be "Deliberate Practice" in order to achieve excellence.

What is deliberate practice? 
“For starters, it isn’t what most of us do when we’re practicing” Geoff Colvin. The key piece of scientific literature on this subject is “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance” by Anders Ericsson.

There are five things that characterize Deliberate Practice:

1. It is designed specifically to improve performance
2. It can be repeated a lot
3. Feedback on results is continuously available
4. It is highly demanding mentally
5. It is not fun

There are three fields of human performance where methods for becoming world class have been developed and honed over hundreds of years.

Musicians, Sportsmen and Chess players have found practice models that lead to world class performance based on the inclusion of the 5 aspects of deliberate practice. We can bring these styles of practice into the world of business and leadership.

The Musician Model
Great musicians become great by repeatedly copying others and comparing their results with the results of previous great musicians. Musicians spend much of their life reading and practicing music that is written on sheets.

Barry Douglas:
Ireland's top Pianist

How does the Musician Model apply to learning to lead?

• Get to know inspiring community leaders.  How do they live their lives?
• Read biographies and personal accounts (and blogs) of leaders you respect.
• Practice reading speeches out loud and get a feel for how great speakers use words and structure

The Chess Model
Excellent chess players play lots, have deep knowledge on openings and expert play, have studied extensively the decisions taken by grandmasters – “what was he seeing that I don’t see?”. It is important that you not only copy, but also reflect on why the master followed this series of moves, what was the underlying strategy?

How does the Chess Model apply to learning to lead?

• Review the decisions taken by great leaders.  What were they thinking?  Why did they take this particular decision?  What other options did they consider?
• Always ask a question when in a conference or formal presentation.  
• Formulate your opinions on everything – news, stocks, impact of the iphone on society, most important values for children, role of the MBA, etc
• “War games” Practice scenarios, what if? How would I respond to X, Y, Z? Prepare.

The Sports Model
Sports success requires intense physical and mental conditioning – keep your mind and body fit. Sports people repeatedly practice the basic physical skills; but this is not enough.  It is vital that performance on the big day of the competition is as high as during the practice.  Sports people need to work on their mind so that their performance under the glare of lights and pressure of competition does not reduce.

There are 4 ways to handle anxiety - top sports stars need to use the mature 2 methods: tolerate or enjoy - in order that their performance is not impaired by pressure.

How does the Sports model apply to learning to lead?

• Enjoying anxiety or high pressure situations requires a belief system that sees your life as a continual journey of growth as a human being - whether you succeed or fail each pressure moment is an opportunity for growth.  Do you treat pressure moments and critical decisions as opportunities for reflection and growth?
• Performance under pressure requires that you have practiced the basic moves to a degree to which you can trust yourself to perform - if reading financial statements and making quick judgements is important to your job - practice making these judgements on a daily basis - don't just wait for your boss or client to ask your opinion.
• Keep fit - athletes need to be fit, leaders need all the energy they can get.
• Eat well - fruit and veg better than pizza and beer.
• Sleep enough - I need 7 hours. I need to read 20 minutes to calm my mind to sleep.

What will your 10,000 hours be?
I take decisions every day, every hour. The decision to play it safe. The decision to be like all the others. The decision to copy how someone else would do it. The decision to work hard at being the same. These are perfectly fine decisions, but they have consequences. The least safe decision in the long term is to seek comfort now. The world will keep changing. Web 2.0, globalization increase the pace at which change is driving through all of our lives. My grandfather’s competition were the other males living in his town. My competition is every Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Spaniard in the world. There will always be somebody able and willing to do the simple, commodity tasks for less pay. This is inevitable. There is no escape. A sinking ship will eventually sink. I can bail a little. I can pray. I can put up bigger borders. But I cannot stop that the boat will eventually sink. The effort that I put into delaying the sinking is effort that could have gone into making myself not a commodity, into being valuable for me.

What do you want to be doing 20 years from now?  In what domain are you going to accumulate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice?

The Most Important Question for a Speaker

I was asked by Irina Kremin to give her a tip for speakers.  I gave her "The most important question for a speaker".  Video here and summary on Irina's blog: Best Conference Tips.



It was a fantastic experience to spend a weekend with Europe's Toastmasters organisation.  Irina has provided a nice summary of my educational session: Leadership in Turbulent Times.  I met 300 people who all share a passion for excellence in speaking.

Are you a member of Toastmasters?  Were you at the Barcelona conference?  Looking to find a club near you?  Here is the Toastmasters Club Finder.  Have a great week.

Were you at the Barcelona Conference?
BTW if you are a Toastmaster, and you were at the conference, and you were in my session...  I would love feedback...  you guys are kings of this...  what can I do to make my session more engaging, more impactful, more valuable to you?  Thanks.  Stick it in the comments here below.  My friend Florian says that "Feedback is the breakfast of champions"... personally I enjoy being told how wonderful I am, but I suspect there is a limit to my growth via praise alone ;-)

How to be more Confident

Fake it.

Yes, pretend.

There are three benefits that grow from you "acting" confident:

• Attitude follows Behavior: Over time, you become more like you act—self-assured, confident, and convinced of the truth of what you are saying.
• Emotional Contagion: Walk down an airport corridor and smile, and watch people smile back; change your facial expression to a frown, and you will be met with frowns. Act confident, people respond with confidence in you.
• Self-Reinforcing Emotions: if you smile and then others smile, you are more likely to feel happy and smile. You may have to act confident and knowledgeable at first, but as others "catch" that feeling, it will be reflected back, making you more confident.

The research is laid out in detail in "Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer.  Pfeffer says that in order to be Powerful it is vital that you appear Powerful.  In the words of Peter Ueberroth: "Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken." 

Try acting confident for an hour.  How does it feel?  How do people respond?  Try smiling.  Do people respond with smiles?  How do you feel?  Have a great weekend.

Kill the Cow

A family lives in the outskirts of a remote village on a small plot of land.  The family own one cow.  Each day they live from the milk of the cow.  If there is little milk, they eat little.  It there is lots of milk, they eat well.  The lives of the mother, the father, the children depend on the cow.

One autumn day, a lone traveller stops in the village.  He is hungry.  The family share their milk.  The traveller is grateful.

The traveller wishes to return the favour and help the family.  He doesn't know how to help the family.  He hears that there is a wise man in the village.  He walks over to the home of the wise man.

photo credit: Martin Gommel

"I was hungry and the family fed me.  I would like to help them.  How can I help this family?"

The wise man said "Kill the cow."

"Kill it?  How can that help them?  They depend for their lives on that cow."

The wise man repeated "Kill the cow."

The traveller was nervous about following such strange advice,  but the reputation of the wise man was such that he went ahead and killed the cow.

A year later the traveller happened to pass again through the village.  He noticed new shops and a thriving market.  He saw a new hotel that provided beds and food to the travellers who came for the market.  

The traveller entered the hotel.  Behind the bar he found the eldest son of the family of the cow.  The man was standing tall, smiling and happy.  The traveller greeted him and asked "What happened?".

"We lost our cow.  There was no milk.  We had to go out and do something to eat.  We set up a small market, it grew.  We set up this hotel, it is growing.  Without the milk from our cow, we had to try new things."

Silently to himself, the traveller reflected on the power of the wise man's words.  "Kill the cow."

"Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too." W. Somerset Maugham


What is your cow?

Thanks to my entrepreneurial friend Elena H for the wonderful story ;-)

4 ways of dealing with Anxiety

There are four ways of dealing with Anxiety:

1. Remove the source of anxiety - avoid the stress.  This is a poor coping strategy.  There is no growth in capability. There will always be a reduction of my performance levels when the stressor is present.
2. Manage my level of anxiety - learn to auto-adjust down (relaxation techniques, visualisation) or up ("come on, fight this point! never back down!")
3. Tolerate anxiety - Accept the existence of the anxiety without it affecting my level of performance.  I learn to co-exist with the anxiety.
4. Enjoy the anxiety - Lean in to the stress!  Accept the emotions and feel it 100%  Some sports stars have learnt to deliver more than 100% in the most extreme situations - world cup final penalty, Ryder cup putt on the last green with the whole world watching.

This comes from work of Pep Mari.  Pep is the head of psychology for the high performance athletics center that is part of the Spanish government's plan to help create a generation of Olympic gold medal winners.

How do you deal with anxiety?  Do you manage your stress levels?  Are there any stresses that you have learnt to enjoy?  How did you achieve this?

The Origin of Leaders Part 2: Ambition

On 9th August 2010, Ed Stafford arrived at the sea, having walked the length of the Amazon river. Over 860 days of walking, 20,000 mosquito bites, 5,000 leeches, poisonous spiders and snakes. No boss told him to do it. Nobody paid him for it. Why did he do it? How did he keep going for almost 3 years?

My 2nd post in the series "The Origin of Leaders" is now live at ActiveGarage.com.  I welcome your reflections and comments.

Writing to Reflect. Mindful Leadership.

"Writing is among the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible. Yet it is a skill most writers take for granted. As adults we seldom stop to think about the mental-cum-physical process that turns our thoughts into symbols on a piece of paper." Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing.

I talk regularly about Warren Buffett's 3 most important criteria for success: Integrity, Energy and Intelligence.

I have blogged about how to have more energy.  This blog post is about improving intelligence.

How to improve your intelligence
If you want to improve your intelligence, write stuff down.  Full stop.  Write stuff down, and 6 months from now you have the accumulated intelligence of 6 months of notes, ideas, quotes.

More valuable perhaps than increased intelligence is the power of writing to reduce my feelings of stress or overwhelm when I confront uncertain or challenging decisions.

Reflective writing gives me three benefits

1. Writing slows down time (Mindfulness)
2. Writing orders my thought (practice improves clear thinking)
3. Writing allows perspective (separation of subject and object, separation of reason and emotion)

Habits and Rituals to keep writing as a habit
In order to develop a habit of reflective writing I would suggest you start with 5 to 10 minute sessions where you dedicate full attention.  Set a timer and remove all sources of interruption.  Close the door, disconnect internet, put mobile on silent.

I use a pen and paper.  Others use computer.  Whatever you do, the key to getting the benefits is to separate the creative and edit processes.  Reflective writing is about capturing the flow of consciousness as you reflect on the decision, on an error, on a problematic relationship, on how to achieve a certain outcome - and not letting your inner editor get into the process until you have a draft of the ideas down on paper.

There are times when I have to tell my brain "I will keep writing until I have 500 words on this page and if I have to write the word 'the' 500 times then that is what I will do".  Inspiration comes when I tell my procrastination-oriented lizard brain that I am going to go on writing until I reach my goal.

Some starting questions to use for reflection

1. Tell the whole story from other perspectives - put yourself in someone elses shoes and tell the story the way you imagine they might see it.  Improves your imagination - humanity's most important gift.
2. What if? - take a fundamental assumption and imagine how things would change if it was not valid
3. Rants, then reflect on underlying message - let the anger or frustration out and vent on the paper... then review what the source of the anger or frustration really is
4. Practice conversations - script a difficult conversation
5. Keep records - track what has happened today
6. Reflect on your own performance (honestly)
7. Note quotes, ideas, connections - write down words that impact you from newspapers, books, articles or that you hear from people that you speak to
8. List good questions - "what other criteria are important to you in taking this decision?" (old post: How to ask the best questions)
9. Draw diagrams - visually represent the problem, concept, flows
10. 2x2 matrix - do what consultants do (I would welcome a post from any reader who is a consultant on 2x2 matrices...  :-)
11. SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats
12. Political maps - draw a network map, reflect on the true organisation power structure
13. Write about emotion and what the situation looked like when angry, frustrated, dissapointed
14. Persuade yourself - make the case to yourself 
15. Devil's Advocate - be your own skeptic
16. Clear up objectives (realistic, tangible) - what do you really want achieve?  what will it feel like when you achieve the objective?  why is it important to you?
17. Identify other's interests, options, BATNA - how can you help other's achieve their goals?
18. Re-frame messages - historically, politically, scale up or down, viewed from 5 years in the future
19. Capture stories - the best way to begin to remember them (Doorman, Cathedral, Tracks in the Sand, Cemetery of Youth, Geronimo the Apache and Entrepreneurs)
20. Action plans - what are you going to do?  what series of steps take you closer to your goal?  how to engage the people whose support you need?

And you?

What other tools, questions, methods do you have for using writing as a tool for reflection?  Do you write regularly?  Why?  or Why not?

I will finish with Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living".  He was wise.  Although I might add that the over-examined life is a poor alternative - best to experience life than to think about experiencing life.  Reflection on experience is 

The 5 Proven Paths to Failure

I am up in the mountains an hour from Barcelona with the Entrepreneurs' Organisation local chapter.  the sun is shining. Yesterday we spent the day on a horse ranch called Hipica Can Vila working with the horses.  Today, we have had a full day with Jordi Vila-Porta, author of the recently published book: "Success" ("¡Exito!").  He shared some fine thoughts:

The 5 proven paths to failure.

1. I don't know what I want
2. I don't know what to do
3. I don't know how to do it
4. I don't believe I can do it
5. I am not willing to pay the full price (in time, work, effort, discipline)

At what point are you bailing out?

Other news...

The first of my 9 part series on "The Origin of Leaders" is now up at the excellent ActiveGarage.com blog.  "Imagination: How to develop your most powerful human talent". Have a read, would love your comments, reactions, thoughts and general link-love ;-)  Have a great weekend

6 ways to really use a day

I had a shower this morning and in the moments of pause between shampoo and soap it hit me. Another day gone. Another shower. Another day beginning. Where are they all going so fast?  What am I doing with all this time?

My little late night brainstorm:  Six ways to make sure today is not another indifferent 24 hour step towards the future:

1. Travel - get out and see something new. A new sight. 
2. Teach - help another grow and learn
3. Create - a product. A drawing with my daughter.  A YouTube film.  A Thai curry (with cashews).
4. Connect - call and really talk to an old friend.
5. Help - pick someone and really go out of my way to help them achieve something
6. Write - words.  Might lead to a legacy? or an insane asylum...

This post was inspired by a recent post by Sean Platt at pickthebrain.com.