Don Siegel
Recently, I ran a module in Project
Coach that entailed teaching coaches about how people get good at something.
Using the framework popularized by Anders Ericsson,
we discussed the essence of deliberate
practice, his term for spending time advancing one’s skill on a task. As
discussed in a previous blog, deliberate practice, requires
someone to commit to regular practice, and to work on task elements that they
find difficult in order to acquire an advanced level of skill. As conveyed, deliberate practice, takes discipline,
and willingness to spend time developing skills that will ultimately result in
achievement. Yet, the process itself may not be particularly pleasant, as it
requires pushing oneself beyond current capabilities. As many have conveyed,
most folks prefer to replicate what they do well, rather than practice what
they do poorly in order to improve.
In any event, after discussing deliberate practice with a group of
eight adolescent PC coaches, I challenged them to follow the tenets of it by
learning to juggle 3 balls with the criterion being to do so for 10 seconds
without a mishap. During the session, I demonstrated what the juggling pattern
looked like, showed some videos from Youtube of individuals juggling and teaching
juggling, identified where videos could be found if they wished to refer to
them at home, and gave them each three tennis balls to practice. Coaches were
given four weeks to meet the criterion, which was extended to six weeks, due to
changes in PC programming. During the six weeks, I checked in with coaches to
see how they were doing, whether they were making progress, and to encourage
them to stick with it.
What Happened?
On week six we met to find out what
happened. Being conscious of individual differences in learning a challenging
task like juggling, I asked who in the group would like to demonstrate their
newly acquired skill. One coach raised his hand and came forward with his three
tennis balls and quickly demonstrated his juggling prowess by keeping the balls
going for one minute. He did not know how to juggle when we started this experiment.
I asked him how he had learned to juggle and he responded that he watched the
videos that I had identified in the first session, and then practiced for 15
minutes at a time twice each day for the first week until he had acquired a
reasonable amount of skill, and then practiced intermittently thereafter. He
seemed quite delighted in meeting the challenge.
The other coaches in the group were
less enthusiastic and less successful. One attempted to juggle the balls, but the
balls quickly went off in different directions, while others did not even try
to demonstrate, indicating that they could not juggle at all. When I asked them
what happened, the most common response was that they did not have time to practice or that the task was too difficult for them. We then discussed the time
issue, and it was difficult to understand how finding a few minutes to practice
every day was impossible if it was a priority. The difficulty explanation also
was also problematic, as the whole point of the exercise was to learn a
difficult, but achievable skill, if following the principles of deliberate practice.
My Takeaway
As I contemplated what happened in
this little experiment and what it teaches us I came to realize that the tenets
of deliberate practice were not
enough to guide most of the PCers to acquiring juggling skills. Surely,
acquiring complex skills requires substantial practice over time, and the
guidance of a coach who can provide feedback and direction, but as important,
it requires the motivation to continue to work at it when frustrated, when not
intrinsically interested in the challenge, when consumed by other
responsibilities, or when just plain tired. Consequently, my takeaway and
prescription for re-teaching this lesson of how people get good at things is
not only to invoke the principles of deliberate
practice, a pedagogical strategy, but to also identify and deploy motivational
strategies that promote perseverance. My three takeaways are:
1. People
are attracted to different tasks differently. The PCer who achieved the
juggling criterion appeared intrigued by the task, and needed little prodding
to start practicing as soon as he understood what was involved. On the other
hand, another PCer, after seeing the task, immediately told me that she could not do that and was not good at hand-eye coordination tasks.
Interestingly, both individuals did not have prior experience with juggling,
but each had a different psychological starting point, and interest in pursuing
the activity. I do not know why this was so, and suspect that it had something
to do with prior experience with sports containing ball manipulation, but I have
no definitive knowledge about this. From past observations of children being
introduced to different activities, irrespective of peer, sibling, or parent
interests and involvement, kids just seem to have differential intrinsic
attraction for some activities. Evidently, starting-off liking and wanting to
be able to do something is a much better way to enter deliberate practice than disliking the activity and feeling
incapable of success and fearing failure from the outset. Consequently, how I
introduced the challenge to PCers could have been better and, perhaps, more
playful. Yet, individual differences are important, at least initially, in the
attraction or repulsion people have for engaging in different activities.
2. A
second point, that does not come directly from this exercise, but from many
stories about athletes who have achieved at high levels is the motivation and
sustenance that they derived from a coach. Brutus Hamilton, a former US Olympic
Track and Field coach conveyed to his athletes, irrespective of their event,
that engaging in a program of self-development that was difficult and took many
hours over many years was a noble endeavor, and by such pursuit was ennobling. This
philosophy framed what athletes did during practice every day, which often was
mundane and not appreciably interesting, but necessary for development. His
athletes understood that spending hours sharpening their acceleration off the
blocks, or changing the angle of release on a throw was important because
development came from the array of nuanced changes that emerged from endless
hours of practice over many days. To Hamilton and his athletes, it was the
commitment, discipline, and improvement trajectories that, as an aggregate,
made engaging in the activity, or any complex activity, meaningful and
ennobling. For many, there was nothing particularly intrinsically enjoyable
about the activities themselves. It was the pursuit of excellence and their
association with Hamilton that provided the enduring motivation to come back
each afternoon and strive for every small performance increment.
Clearly, coaches can be
transformative to athletes. Their technical knowledge can be used to guide
athletes along the path from novice to expert, but equally important is the
power of the relationships they form with them. When such a connection is made
between coach and athlete, motivational issues, such as I observed in my
juggling challenge, become a non-issue. Athletes may go to unusual extremes to
please their coach, and in turn, coaches will do whatever is necessary to help
their athletes fulfill their potential.
3. A
third perspective, that also does not come directly from this exercise, but
from other observations about individual achievement and deliberate practice, whether it is called such, is the importance
of the community in which one spends hours developing expertise. As the saying
goes it is much easier to swim downstream
than upstream, meaning that when everyone around you values the same
activities and goals, and attempts to behave in accordance with them, it is
much easier to jump on the bandwagon and move in the same direction. We see
this in athletic families with father and sons/daughters such as Archie Manning
and his sons Peyton and Eli, Joe Jellybean
Bryant and son Koby Bryant, Ken Griffey Sr. and son Ken Griffey Jr., Muhammad
Ali and daughter Laila Ali, and Nate Williams and daughter Natalie Williams One can look at the long list of father and
son combinations in the NBA here
or father and daughter pairs in the WNBA here.
Such examples provide support for fathers cultivating the skills, behaviors,
and attitudes of their sons and daughters from an early age.
On another tack, we also see coaches shaping environments in which
athletes grow and thrive in a very deliberate fashion. One well known example
of this is when Vince Lombardi was hired as head coach of the Green Bay Packers
in 1959. In 1958 the Packers had a record of 1-10-1. Given such a record, they
were considered the doormat of the
NFL. One of his first declarations to the ownership and team was that losing
was going to be a thing of the past. He asserted, as would be expected from a deliberate practice adherent that: The price of success is hard work,
dedication to the job at hand, and the determination
that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task
at hand. He also conveyed to the players he had inherited, including five
future Hall of Famers, that There are
trains, planes, and buses leaving here every day, and if you don’t produce for
me, you’re going to find yourself on one of them. In 1959, the Packers were
7-5, and subsequently went on to win five NFL Championships in Lombardi’s seven
seasons with Green Bay.
Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden provides another example of a
coach shaping the environment within which his athletes pursued excellence. While
not as overtly authoritarian as Lombardi, he too was uncompromising with regard
to what he expected of his players. Various observers reported that Wooden was
as detail oriented about showing his players how to put on their socks and
sneakers (to avoid blisters), as he was about teaching his famed zone press. He
also developed and taught to his players what became known as the pyramid of success. This represented a model for achievement
that ultimately produced competitive greatness. Basketball technique, tactics,
and physical conditioning were embedded within a framework of developing
character attributes such as industriousness, enthusiasm, self-control,
alertness, and team spirit. He deeply believed in this framework, and created
an environment in which the pyramid was operationalized every day. The year
prior to Wooden’s arrival at UCLA the team was a mediocre 12-13, but by the
time Wooden retired, UCLA had won 10 NCAA Championships over a twelve-year
period!
Conclusions
While my juggling exercise may seem
somewhat simplistic, it does open the door to asking the important question
about why some people succeed at challenging tasks and why others do not. What
is evident to me is that developing expertise is a complicated process. It entails
a combination of factors working in concert. Some of these exist within
individuals, some are contained in the relationship between an athlete and her
coach, and others exist in the environment in which an athlete lives, works,
and plays.
While deliberate practice describes the pedagogy for developing
expertise, such a pedagogy is only an abstraction, that must be embedded in a
context for it to be meaningfully operationalized with fidelity. Simply
explaining and urging my PCers to follow a deliberate
practice process was, perhaps, one part of the puzzle, but as I have
pointed out above, not sufficient. Emerging expertise also requires inspiration
and guidance from coaches and teachers who are deeply committed to the success of
their students. As well, being embedded in an environment in which others are
committed to and working toward similar goals, using similar processes, also
appears to be validated by examples in sports and business[1].
Consequently,
if I wished all of the PCers in my group to acquire expertise in juggling, I
realize that simply explaining the concept of deliberate practice is not enough. For a start, I would attempt to
pair each person with a coach who could provide them with daily inspiration, feedback,
and guidance, to practice. As well, I would have weekly sessions when PCers
came together to report on and reflect on their progress and set-backs, and to
promote a culture in which achieving the goal became more than simply learning
to juggle, but a noble quest for self-development and mastery over all of the
internal and external obstacles aligned to prohibit them from attaining what
they had set-out to do.
[1] Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to
great: Why some companies make the leap--and others don't. New York, NY:
HarperBusiness.
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