To be great at something takes conscious practice.
Just blindly repeating an action over and over is not enough. Practice at its best being a better personal leader – means practicing the right things, at the right time and in not always in the right way.
Breakthrough learning happens as a result of experience. Experiences of failure, success, and of non-momentum can jump-start a personal growth path like no other – as long as you have the mindset that failure is learning.
Being a great personal leader is like other journeys to being an expert in something. It’s about gaining understanding of the context, the general rules, and then passionately embarking on a road of perpetual learning and experimentation as you actively create the best way forward to your desired outcome.
Adaptive practice brings peace because it provides a system that can be repeated to the point where challenge becomes ease.
To practice the right things, you know the key skill-sets related to your desired outcome. Once you have clarity about what you need to do, the next thing to get clear on is how you will do them and in what order. Though, at some point that will certainly involve breaking the particular skill down into micro- transformations, those little repeatable observable behaviors that you will use as your practice.
A quick method I often recommend is to break the skill down into four sections and then break those four sections down into an additional three parts. This count of 16 items will usually give you four strategies and 12 specific behaviors. This can go a long way to designing a practice schedule which is a way to measure the results.
Here is where adaptive practice comes in.
Once you have your skill to practice, you need to find a way to measure your results. I always recommend for women to capture whether they did their desired practice but also catch things like, what variants they tried and why, how they felt, and anything that prevented a successful practice. This information provides fantastic opportunities to learn, shift, grow, and adapt.
If you do the same thing over and over again, and never learn anything new – why do it? You’ve just given yourself a job, and that’s not self-leadership, that’s just you going along for the ride. To lead, you must try on different perspectives, and approaches, and engage your curiosity.
Self-leadership is about pursuing ongoing learning with a commitment and dedication that is both open-minded and steeped in a willingness to do whatever it takes. It understands that trying things out may mean making mistakes and making mistakes means new wisdom.
If you think about this, embracing adaptive practice is just a desire for continual improvement. And anyone willing to do what it takes to get better will do better. It just mostly takes a revolutionary stance to leave victimhood. Self-leadership is a commitment to a higher level of awareness and consciousness.
The truth is no one is going to tell you to undertake a daily habit of doing adaptive practice. It’s something that comes from within. It comes from within, like almost all self-leadership traits. To be an expert in your own life – takes a commitment to some key values – and adaptive practice is one of those shared values among successful personal leaders.
