The Benefits of Practice

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 practise.

As we head into another lockdown, what if you took the opportunity to deepen your relationship to practise?

Odds are your livelihood doesn’t depend on tactile skills. But that doesn’t mean practicing a physical skill serves no purpose in your life. In fact, there are several carry-over benefits of deliberate practice.

So here are eight benefits of deliberate practice....

1.  Practise 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.
2. Practise is frustrating but it 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.
3. Practise helps clear your head. If your mind is a garbage truck full of random youtube, instagram or LinkedIn videos, practise can be the hydraulic compactor that creates room for steady thought.
4. Practise 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.
5. Practise helps you expand self-awareness. Record and review your practise, watch and listen to it, it’s brutal, but it’ll keep you focused on the reality of cause and effect.
6. Practise 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.
7. Practise 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.

If you want to get better at practise, its 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 practise.