What’s deliberate practice? We’ll get to that in a moment.

You see, the first thing to get about learning any skills is not all forms of practice are equally effective. Just like not all learning methods are equally effective. There are superior ways to do both.

Erickson distinguishes 3 forms of practice:

• Naïve Practice: This approach is the one used by 99% of people who try to learn new skills. It presumes that time spent learning a skill leads to mastery. Bad news - it doesn’t. It leads to initial growth followed by a big plateau. No further development of the person’s abilities. In fact, over time one’s skill level will decline.

• Purposeful Practice: The second approach to practicing is focused on the achievement of specific well-defined goals. It involves getting outside your comfort zone to learn a new skill in a focused way with clearly defined goals. A plan for achieving those goals and a way to monitor your progress. The quality of the practice matters much more than the quantity of time you do them.

Finally we have…

• Deliberate Practice: This is the highest level of practice. It involves all of the elements of purposeful practice but includes leveraging the experience of superior performers to help you fast-track skill acquisition and progress.

According to Erickson, the most important aspect of deliberate practice and one that is most underutilised by students who want to learn a skill is:

WATCHING EXPERT PERFORMERS AT THE TOP LEVEL.

For example, if you want to really get good at a skill such as asking great questions, asking questions isn’t the most important aspect in the early stages. Sure, you’ve got to practice asking questions and trying them out but if you want to get really good watch top performers ask questions of their clients.

This is how you build your MENTAL DATABASE. Which plays a huge role in elite level performance.

But what should you watch for?

We’ll that’s where NLP brings an advantage that no other field has. A superior path. Specifically, by learning how to model top performers, what in NLP we call outliers, you can learn a tremendous amount quickly and dramatically reduce the time it takes to acquire new skills.

And the great news is, you don’t need to become an expert modeler to dramatically improve your ability to learn skills quicker. It starts by learning the foundations, key skills like how to identify a true outlier, pattern detection and trying someone else behaviour on.

Skills very few NLPers ever learn but you can.

Stay tuned.

To your success,

Tom

What questions do you have about modelling or rapid skill acquisition? Let me know here.