Big goals always require us to learn new skills along the way, and one of the key drivers toward achieving a big goal in your life is your relationship to practice.
As we go through another lockdown, what if you took the opportunity to deepen your relationship to practice?
There are several carry-over benefits of deliberate practice. so I’ve used drumming as my example, but it can be any tactile skill – whether, in sport, music, art, or trade.
So here are eight benefits of deliberate practice…
- Practice helps your brain reacquaint itself with longer-form concentration, it keeps you in touch with how difficult and slow real progress can be, thereby helping you set reasonable expectations and timelines for other areas of your life.
- Practice is frustrating but in a good way. Practice trains us to go to the frustration, meet it, and overcome it. It takes you out of reactive mode and puts you in the driver’s seat.
- Practice helps clear your head. If your mind is a garbage truck full of random youtube, Instagram, or LinkedIn videos, practice can be the hydraulic compactor that creates room for steady thought.
- Practice instills continuity in your life. Sure the world changes fast, but your practice keeps its own course and pace, so long as you sit down and do it.
- Practice helps you expand self-awareness. Record and review your practice, watch and listen to it, it’s brutal, but it’ll keep you focused on the reality of cause and effect.
- Practice makes you choose, and so it gives your life focus. Focus leads to tangible results, hard-fought-for, and earned, so the result of your effort is vastly more meaningful than political posturing, conniving, ingratiation or other lower means could ever hope to be.
- Practice gives you hope. Hope for possibility, for your own emergence toward some future state that may feel far away from you right now, but is actually within your reach.
- … I forgot eight! We don’t have eight, so put in your own eight.
If you want to get better at practice, it’s up to you. Only you can apply the specific focus required to take your skills to the next level. So here’s to a month of finding the opportunity in lockdown, and a renewed focus on practice.
I’m Jeremiah Brown, helping you reach your podium performance.
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