A Fundamental Truth About Practice
I don’t have to tell you about the importance of practice. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is why sometimes practice makes you better and sometimes it doesn’t.
Well, today I came across an insightful article Learning to Learn by Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA. Bjork shares a fundamental truth about practice that identifies a key ingredient it must have to facilitate the process of improvement. Bjork writes:
Research shows that doing well during practice under constant and predictable conditions can make us think we’re learning—but that’s often not the case…
…Lasting learning requires incorporating desirable difficulties into training—that is, making things hard on yourself but in good ways…Although the rate of learning may seem slower, this kind of practice improves future performance in a more reliable and versatile way.
In other words, practice must be hard but not hard for the sake of being hard. Instead, it must be deliberately hard as Anders Ericsson describes in his research on deliberate practice. This means understanding what specifically makes the real test/competition hard, then mimicking that as much as possible in practice.
If you find that practice is not making someone you coach better, then this is where you must start. Eliminate the predictability of practice that’s making it unreal. Incorporate the process of making those you coach comfortable being uncomfortable.