Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:28: What is deliberate practice?

00:06:34: 10,000-hour rule

00:08:24: Steps towards deliberate practice…

00:08:44: … 1: be specific about what and why

00:15:26: … 2: productive practice - attention and retention

00:20:27: … 3: self and supported feedback loop

00:25:01: … 4: build in rewards along the way

00:31:11: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Every week, we take a topic to do with work and we come up with some ideas, we share some frameworks that we hope will help you, and it does always help us to navigate those Squiggly Careers with just that bit more confidence and control.

Helen Tupper: I like how you said, "We just come up with some ideas, we just sort of talk to each other and throw some ideas"!

Sarah Ellis: Let's face it, that is what we do!

Helen Tupper: There's research that has gone into this.  Today's topic --

Sarah Ellis: Actually, we've done a lot of research for today.

Helen Tupper: Yes!  Today's topic is deliberate practice and we've both read an awful lot around deliberate practice.  I'm not sure we just come up with ideas.  It's a bit of a mix, everybody.  If this is the first time you have listened, as well as coming up with some ideas, we also create some resources for you, things like our PodSheet, so what you're going to hear Sarah and I talk about today. 

You'll be able to download a one-page summary.  Lots of people tell us they use that in their teams at work so that they can talk about this topic together, so that could be useful.  We also have little swipeable summaries that we put on the Amazing If pages on Instagram and on LinkedIn, so if you like this topic and you want to share it with other people because you think it might help them, please make sure you follow there and share, that would be cool.  And if you want to talk about it a little bit more, we've got PodPlus which happens on a Thursday morning at 9.00am.  It's a free 30-minute session and we just dive in a bit deeper into the topic and hear what the community think about it. So, all of that is freely available for you.  You can find out about it on our website, which is amazingif.com.  And if you ever can't find stuff, just email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.

Sarah Ellis: So today's topic is deliberate practice, and what that means is practice that focuses on tasks beyond your current level of competence and comfort.  And I had a real aha moment when I was reading about deliberate practice, practising, learning by doing, in terms of just understanding the difference between the three.  And I think you can relate it usually quite quickly to something in your life where you think, "Oh, that's why I'm not getting any better at that thing", because there is a really clear difference between learning by doing and learning by deliberate practising, because essentially not all practice makes perfect.  

And if you just learn by doing, essentially what that means is you're turning up and doing a lot of the same thing, probably in the same way, and hoping that you will get better.  And I do think, to an extent, you probably do get a bit better, but if you're really ambitious for getting much better at something, really extending your skills, you need to move beyond just doing something a lot into this idea of deliberate practice.  It's just a more efficient way of learning ,because you'll get a higher level of competence with whatever the thing you want to focus on sooner.  But I would say it does require more effort than just doing the same thing.

Helen Tupper: I'm just putting that out there, when Sarah and I talk a bit more about this and the ideas that we've got for you, it is definitely make a choice about what you want to improve in and then commit the effort to doing it, because deliberate practice is something that you have to sort of design your development around.  This doesn't just happen, you kind of have to put the effort into it.  But the payoff is pretty big. So, the person who's done quite a lot of work on this is someone called Anders Ericsson. 

You can have a look into his work.  We'll link to some of his stuff actually in the PodSheet if you want to dive in a bit deeper.  But at a very high level, when you look at, "Well, what does it mean to have this process of deliberate practice that you design your development around?" it starts super-simply with a goal, so you need to be really clear about what you want to improve in; you need to be able to improve on that thing without distraction, so there's a high level of focus around that learning activity; you've got to build in a feedback mechanism so you can see how you're doing, what you could improve upon, so you've got that data coming back for your development; and then you've got to use that data to adapt what you're doing and then basically do it all again on repeat. 

And that's the point about taking effort, because you really have to design your learning around that and you really have to commit to doing something different so you continually get that little bit better. Whilst this is a very self-directed way of learning, you don't have to do all this alone.  That feedback bit in particular is really useful to get somebody else who might be maybe better at this thing than you are, or maybe somebody else who can be really like a critical friend who can see what you're doing and give you a bit more perspective on how you could do it differently.  So, very self-directed, but you don't have to do all of it on your own really when you're thinking about deliberate practice.

Sarah Ellis: And I think this can be useful for a few different things in a Squiggly Career, almost depending on what's most important to you.  I think you can make a choice about where you apply deliberate practice.  So, you might think, "I'm going to apply the structure of deliberate practice to learning a new skill, where I do want to get a lot better at it, so I'm not just playing tennis for the fun of it", which you could completely choose to do, "Actually, I do want to get a lot better".  So then, you might choose this deliberate practice method to get much, much better at it.  Or, you could apply deliberate practice to something you are already good at, so stretching a strength that you've got and thinking, "Right, I want to be even more expert in this area", and you'll set yourself up so that, as Helen said, you don't waste energy, that you're efficient in terms of how you do that.  And you can also, and we'll talk about some examples of this, you might also do this as a team. So, I think within a Squiggly Career, when we're thinking about deliberate practice, it's very easy to apply this individually.  It feels like quite an individual thing, "How can I get much better, or how can I learn this new skill?" 

But I think you could also ask a we question, "Well, what is it that we want to deliberately practise as a team or as an organisation?"  And I think that helps to translate some of this research into something that feels very practical for all of us. It is useful to be aware that the research on deliberate practice came from this idea of, who makes it as an expert?  And as I was reading this I was thinking, "Oh, but for a long time in my career, I didn't want to be an expert.  I was a very, very happy generalist".  And so that's, also worth a question you asking yourself, "Are you trying to be an expert in a certain field, are you trying to be a specialist?" in which case, great, this will definitely work.  Probably for most of us, we're not trying to be experts, but we can apply this learning to something we just want to get better at.  I probably want to be more of an expert now than I ever have in terms of in career development, so this feels like I would apply this differently now versus, say, when I was working in a big organisation.  And the one other thing which often comes up, which lots of you I'm sure will know or have heard of because it's been really popularised, probably by Malcolm Gladwell more than anyone, is the 10,000-hours rule, which feels really daunting, doesn't it?  It's over a year continuously, I think, if you look at it.

Helen Tupper: But without sleep?

Sarah Ellis: No, I think you do get sleep, when I was reading how long would it take; but you'd be doing nothing else.  So, 10,000 hours often looks realistically, I think, more than 10 years.  And so for most of us you're like, "Wow, that's a big old commitment, the next ten years of my life, sometime deliberately practising".  I wouldn't get too hung up in the 10,000-hours rule because it came from research into almost, "Who is the number-one chess player in the world?  Who's the best at this instrument?" and for most of us, that's not our goal, that's not our ambition.  The really important point is when you deliberately practise something, to really see the progress, it is likely to take time.  So, this is not a quick win, this is not a fast payoff.  And almost, if that's what we were expecting, we are setting ourselves up to fail; but the likelihood of it needing 10,000 hours, that really depends on what you're trying to do.  If you want to be a professional footballer then, hey, maybe it will take 10,000 hours, and you probably need to start from when you're about 6!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, this might not be the episode for you!  But if you just want to get a bit better at something that you think is important for your development, this will be a really good episode for you.  It's not really about becoming the world best at... it's just about, "How can I kind of move significantly forward in my skill from where I'm starting from", that's what this is all about.  And to get away from the idea of being the world's best footballer or tennis player, all those kinds of sporting examples, we're going to give you some really practical ideas for things that you might want to improve upon at work that you can use deliberate practice for. So, the way the rest of this episode is going to go is, Sarah and I are going to work through the process for deliberate practice, and we're going to take an example of something that we both want to improve in to bring all this to life.  And as I said before, we'll document this process for you in the PodSheet so you can follow it step-by-step when you might be doing this for yourself.  So, step one, you need to be specific about what you want to deliberately practise and why.  And as Sarah said, this could be as an individual or as a team. 

So, some examples here: writing.  So obviously, Sarah and I, if you're regular listeners, you'll know that we are writing a book and we want it to be our best book yet, so that's something we might want to deliberately practise.  But this could be, you know, you might not be writing a book, it could be emails.  You're probably writing a lot of emails and you might think, "Do you know what?  I want my emails to be the best things that land in people's inbox", so that could be something. It could be presenting, and maybe specifically it's in-person presenting or maybe it's virtual presenting, or maybe it's the presentations you do to your department.  Again, the more specific you can be, the easier it is to design deliberate practice around it.  It could be listening, a really core skill for work, one that is often overrated by ourselves.  

So, maybe you want to improve your listening, or maybe a career skill like curiosity, which is hugely helpful for your learning.  Maybe it's building relationships.  So, beyond the ones that you have today, how could you get more confident in building or working your weak ties, those relationships that are outside of your immediate world of work? 

Or maybe it's improving your brand, improving your profile, and maybe your presence on social media. They're just some ideas of things that you could apply deliberate practice to that might feel more relevant to your day-to-day than where some of this research has started from.  And as I said, it's important to know what you want to deliberately practise, but also why, so creating a bit of that emotional connection, like why does this matter to you?  Because that just means we're more likely to stick at this stuff.  And as we've mentioned, these steps that we're going to go through require effort.  So, having a bit of stickiness behind the skill you want to develop is really, really important. 

So, Sarah, what do you want to deliberately practise and why?

Sarah Ellis: So, the more I read about this, I changed my mind on the answer to this one.  So, I would like to deliberately practise how we experiment as an organisation.  So, this goes beyond me into everybody in Amazing If.  And the reason for that is, I read a really interesting article about how deliberate practice partners really well with the idea of experimenting.  Those two things are kind of very happy, they work together really well.  And also, I reflected on how we experiment at the moment, and I think we learn by doing rather than learn by practising. 

So, we do have experiments in Amazing If, so we do the experiment, but I don't think we are deliberately practising getting better at experiments.  We do them and we'll label something, we'll say, "We're doing this new project [or] we're trying out a different process", and we'll label it, we'll say, "Oh, yeah, that's a good experiment".  But then we just do it and I'm not sure we are getting better at experimenting. So, back to the point on deliberate practice, you're practising to make progress.  And if I think about how we experiment now versus how we experimented nine months ago, it doesn't feel that different or it doesn't feel like it's progressed as much as it could.  And then that's where that point really struck home with me. 

I was like, "Well, doing is not enough when it comes to deliberate practice".  Now, it's probably better than not doing it at all, which is good, so we should give ourselves credit we've got to this point, but I feel like we've sort of got the building blocks now in Amazing If to really start experimenting in a different way that would accelerate our learning.  So, I wanted to think about, what might that look like?

Helen Tupper: Mine's quite small and specific, which I think is helpful with this.  My thing I would like to deliberately practise is how I introduce myself and us as a company.  And the reason why this matters to me is I don't really like how it feels when the first moment I meet someone, I feel a bit awkward.  I want that to feel like a really empowering moment and I want to feel like I've really positioned us in a really confident, positive way.  And at the moment, because we do quite a few things, I'm like, "Oh, there's a podcast and some books and we train about 5,000 people a week", I feel like I just reel off all these things, and I just want to have a really clear, compelling, confident introduction.  And I do it quite a lot, back to the point of doing rather than deliberate practice, I do it quite a lot and I don't feel like it's getting better.  So, I feel quite emotively attached to improving my introductions.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think your point there was a good one.  When you said emotionally, why is this something you want to deliberately practise, I think I'd not really thought about that.  But now when I think about -- or the fact that I've chosen experiments, one of my values is ideas and another one of my values is learning.  So you're like, "Oh, what are experiments?" 

You're testing ideas, you're hoping that you're going to learn a lot from them.  So, I think we've probably both picked something that appeals to us personally, even though mine is much broader, yours is sort of smaller and more specific and much more individual, I can see why they're both important to us.  I can see you always tell me, "Oh, I didn't like how I introduced myself". 

You've said that to me quite a few times.  And I think I've read a lot about experiments, and you know when something keeps going around in your mind, but you feel like you've not moved it any further forward? So, I think just that point about, why does this matter to you, will just help you to just make sure you've got the motivation behind this because otherwise, I think you do just keep doing.  I think that is okay.  It's often easier to think of personal examples I think when you think of deliberate practice.  There are definitely things I do where I'm not trying to be loads better at that thing, I'm just doing it to keep fit or I'm just doing it because I know it's a good thing for me.  Like, when I go for walks in the day to take a quick break, I'm not trying to walk faster, I'm not trying to walk better, I'm just going for a walk.  There's no deliberate practice there.  I think probably when I was reflecting on this I was like, "Oh, how many things should you be deliberately practising at once?"  I was thinking probably only one.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I think one.

Sarah Ellis: If you're going to do this, it's not an easy thing to have all of the different component parts we're going to talk about.  I was like, "Oh, I don't know how you would have the space for more than one".  You could perhaps have one professional and one personal.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, maybe.  And I think also --

Sarah Ellis: It would be ambitious though, wouldn't it?

Helen Tupper: It would be ambitious.  It's also, you've got to stay quite open because, you know, being aware of every time you do this; and then you've got to also be open to critical feedback, you know, "Oh, that wasn't as good as the time before" and why, and making sure that you're able to hear that or hear it from somebody else.  I'm not sure; you know if you're trying to do five at once, I think you could be like, "I'm basically just rubbish.  I can't introduce myself or do my job or help other people.  I'll just go back to bed". 

So, yeah, I think maybe one thing at once with a very open, positive perspective on it. So, step number two is all about productive practice, so how you practise matters, and how you kind of set yourself up for this and plan your practice makes a really big difference.  So, the first thing that matters is the level of attention you have.  So, if I take mine as an example here, so my introduction, I need to be really aware that this is a moment that I am introducing myself and I need to be aware of who I'm doing it with. 

I can't be chatting to five people at once and looking around a room and being like, "Oh, hi, I'm Helen.  Oh, hi, I'm Helen".  I have to have a high level of attention and identify this as a moment to improve my introductions.  So, I think whatever the thing is that you want to focus on, be really aware of when and where am I going to practice that thing, and how do I make sure that in that moment I have a really high level of attention. Take me writing an email, for example.  If you're like, "I'm going to practice that at 9.00am every morning, I'm going to write three really high-quality emails", but you've got somebody who keeps, I don't know, messaging on Microsoft Teams, or if you're in the office they keep chatting to you, that is not going to help you to really focus on improving in that particular area at that particular point in time.  So, the what and the when, in order to increase your attention to that improvement, is a really, really important thing to design into your practice.

Sarah Ellis: And in the research that both Helen and I have read, they are very clear that you're better off practising for short amounts of time with very high attention than long amounts of time and low attention.  So, if you're like, "Oh, it's fine because I'm just going to keep coming back to emails during the day", that won't work.  Now obviously, dream scenario, you have a good amount of time and high attention, but you've also got to be realistic about it.  So, these are really moments where you want to minimise any distraction downfalls, really kind of be in it, so really think about what that looks like for you.  So, that's attention. Then you've got retention, which is just as important, which is thinking about how you make sure that then each time, your deliberate practice builds on the time before.  And there are a few things just to think about.  Firstly, a bit of spacing. 

So, spacing is essentially just leaving a bit of time between your practising so that you can consolidate, you can keep coming back to it, you can see what you remember.  And actually they talk a lot about things like the importance of sleep and rest.  And I suppose if you think about, say, professional athletes, it's why they really commonly talk about rest days.  That's why they have rest days because the body needs time to recover.  So, I think for us normal people, if I think about it, my brain needs time to recover, you know, less so my body, I probably need to do more exercise to be honest!  So, spacing and rest do matter. Let's say you were, I don't know, you were thinking about writing better PowerPoint presentations.  If you have no gap from that, if you just feel like you're doing one every day, that's probably not a good thing for deliberate practice.  You probably need a day away from them, or you probably need a couple of hours away from them.  So, just think about that. 

And at the same time, which might feel like a bit of attention, but I think not if we're sensible about it, you do also need to think about repetition.  So, I think it's very hard to deliberately practise something that you're not doing particularly frequently.  So, for Helen, you might be like, "Well, that's fine".  She knows that she's going to meet enough people in a week and it happens commonly enough. For me, actually, this is one that would give me pause for thought because, yes, we have experiments in Amazing If, but I can't look at a meeting or a moment and go, "Oh, well, that's the time we talk about experiments [or] that's the time we design experiments". 

We have our good growth guides, which is where we talk about what's to work on and our experiments, so that could be a good place for them.  But that's one where I need to think about, "When does that happen?" because at the moment it happens in a very ad hoc way.  So, that's a good flag of, if something is ad hoc, you'll need to change something if you want to achieve deliberate practice.  So, the way that we're set up to do experiments at the moment, that's not going to happen for me.  I'll need to think about, "Okay, so does that look like a conversation with Helen every couple of weeks on how we're experimenting with Amazing If?  Does that look like something in our team meetings on the agenda every quarter about how we're experimenting?  What do I need to do differently?"  So, that's a good prompt for me.

Helen Tupper: I think the spacing one for me, I probably introduce myself to about either three people or three groups of people a day, just because of the way that our work is.  Sarah and I, we do lots of career development sessions, so there's often lots of new communities.  So I think for me, the way I would do it is, rather than all day thinking about my introductions, I'd probably think about that first introduction of the day and then I'd give myself some space for the rest of them, just to kind of relax and be normal, but I'd really put that height and level of attention and the spacing in by doing it just that very first one, and then I'd kind of move on to the next steps that follow.

Sarah Ellis: So, step three is self and supported feedback loop.  So, the first thing here is this idea of coaching yourself; see excellent book, You Coach You, which we created!  I did read this and think, "I don't think I knew as much about this when we wrote You Coach You" and I was like, "That's a miss, that should probably have been in there, but never mind".  But there's definitely a link between coaching yourself and deliberate practice.  And what's interesting is when you read the examples of this, this is quite confronting because it is the skill of self-critiquing. 

So, it's giving yourself a bit of space, revisiting what you did, and then asking yourself, how would you make it better now? For Helen, for example, that would look like introducing herself, and then an hour later or as soon as she's sort of got a bit of space to reflect on it, probably going back and watching the video. 

Certainly if it's online, she would be able to do that.  She would have to go back and watch that video and then almost rewrite what she said to be even better.  It couldn't just be, "I'm just going to think about it again", she'd have to go back and watch it.  Easier to do virtually, obviously, than it would be in person because she doesn't have that luxury.  In person, she'd probably just need to maybe on her way home, or when she was next transitioning from one thing to another think, "Okay what did I say; how did that make me feel; what would I rewrite for next time?"

So, it's almost quite a forensic way of giving yourself feedback, and what I think will probably feel quite hard about it is, yes, you look at the good stuff; but what you're really interested in is the better stuff, like how would you be even better for next time?  And then the bit about getting coaching and mentoring here, this again is very specific.  So, this is not just having a supportive manager or someone who's helping you along the way.  This is really having someone who will challenge you to higher levels of performance. 

So, this is someone who you are going to be better at that skill because not only you spend time with them, but they are giving you feedback that often, or is likely at some points along the way, to feel quite painful.  So, often in the examples, these are people who are already better at that thing, and again they are picking out the things that you don't do well and they are talking about the gaps that you've got to really get to making even more progress on something. I think this is unlikely to be lots of people, from what I've read, much more likely to be an individual.  And also, it's quite a specific brief for them, in terms of what you need from them, what you're looking for from them. 

Because again, when I was thinking about experiments and experimenting as a deliberate practice, I was then thinking about, "Okay, who do I know who runs a company where almost experimenting is part of their DNA, or has been part of their DNA?  Could I ask them very specifically to say, 'Okay, well that's something that I am trying to get better at'?"  And then, you've got to be really clear about your brief in terms of what that looks like around the support that you need, and giving them a lot of permission to say -- you need someone to be quite a fierce feedback friend, I think, here.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I agree.  It's someone who's got a very specific skill.  They can be clear and quite direct.  It's that sort of radical candour approach, and there needs to be quite a lot of trust in that relationship, that you can hear what they're saying without getting too defensive about it.  So, I think part of your brief is that's what you're opening yourself up to when you create that peer coaching relationship.

Sarah Ellis: You do read that people who are very, very good at deliberate practice are also good at, let's say you give me some feedback on experimenting, you do get to the point where you also realise what's useful for you and maybe what isn't.  And I was like, "Oh, wow, that's like another skill on top of it".  So, people don't just go, "Oh, well I'm just going to do everything you say all at the same time".  You might go, "Well, the thing that feels like it's going to help me the most", back to self-coaching, "is A.  So, that's the first thing I'm going to integrate, but maybe I'll leave some of those things".  So, you also have this kind of filtering of the feedback whilst at the same time being incredibly open to it.  And I was thinking, wow, it is quite a sophisticated skill just in terms of just how open you have to be, and then you have to think, "Well, what does this mean for me?" and then you have to do something differently as a result.  I was like, "No wonder deliberate practice is so hard"!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, but don't worry because step four is going to help you feel really positive, because step four is about building in rewards along the way.  So, we don't want you to think about, "Okay, what's this skill that I want to improve, and then I'm going to deliberately practise and in one year's time, I'm going to get to where I want to be", because all that effort that Sarah has been talking about, it's going to take time, it's probably not going to always feel comfortable to hear some of those messages about your improvement areas.  And so, what we want to do is design in a way that you can see the progress that you're making, that you can reward yourself along the way. 

And I think how you do this is quite individual. I was thinking about, "Well, what would this look like for me?  How would I be able to see my progress and design in some rewards?"  I think I could give myself a score.  I could potentially get a score as well in my feedback, but a score of how effective I felt that introduction was out of a score of 1 to 10. 

So, for example, I did one yesterday, and if I just reflect on it yesterday, I don't think my presentation was that bad, but if I was thinking about my introduction, I'd probably give myself a 6 out of 10 for my introduction.  I mean, I'd give myself a 2 out of 10 for my clothes; I haven't even mentioned my clothes!  My clothes were really bad!  I was like, "So, thanks everyone", honestly, exactly like, "Thanks everyone, I'm Helen".  I was just like, "Thanks everyone.  Questions?"  Definitely, the ending is even worse, I need to work on!  So, I think keeping like a self-score would probably be a useful way to be able to see my progress, and my aim is to get an average 9 out of 10.  I'd love to get to that, and the occasional 10, I'll bank one of those. Then I think again, rewards are very personal, but mine are mostly things that I would consume, generally wine or chocolate!  But you do what works for you.  But every time I hit a 10, I might be like, "Right, I really want to share that success with somebody else".  So, that could be a way you can design an award, because that can feel like a bit of a boost that someone else is like, "Well done!"  And I'd probably approve the purchasing of an expensive chocolate truffle, is normally what I would do when I when I hit a target that I'm working towards.  What about you?

Sarah Ellis: I think my rewards often come from maybe more intrinsic than extrinsic things!  We're slightly different in that way.

Helen Tupper: No chocolate truffles?

Sarah Ellis: No.  I do like chocolate, but still.  I think I'm always quite motivated by a sort of before and an after, a from and a to, probably more so than you are, though you do like a score definitely, or you love some sort of benchmarking scorecard or something.  But I think if I have clearly defined, "This is where I am today and this is where I want to be quite far in the future", because I'm motivated by future states and things that are quite far away, and I quite like working towards those things. 

If I can say, "Okay, well to get from, if experiments today we learn by doing, and in a year's time I would like to feel our experiments are learning by practising, by deliberate practising", I think I would need to map out, "Well, here are six things that are going to need to happen along the way to make that happen", and then keep coming back to those six things and being like, "Right, well where am I versus that one; where am I versus that one?" and it would be like a red, amber, green.  I always quite like a red, amber, green.  And seeing those things go green actually is enough for me. Funnily enough, that's all I need from life!  It's having that clarity of direction, because I think like you, we've both got a value as achievement, so I like to achieve stuff.  And I think once I've made a decision to do something, then I'm pretty focused and quite single-minded on then making that thing happen. 

So, that's what it would need to look like for me.  So, I think if I genuinely wanted to do what we've talked about today, which for me feels like I'm quite far away from this at the moment, and it was only through researching for this podcast, I've got to this conclusion about experiments, and the learning by doing versus learning by practising has really struck a chord with me, to just identify that thing where you really want to accelerate your learning.  Because I think learning by doing, incrementally you will improve; but learning by practising is just so much more deliberate. I think, yeah, you don't need to be perfect with every single one of these steps.  But I think even if you had a few of them, you would make much more progress, and I like making progress.  So, I think that's what I would need.  I would need like a Miro map of what was going to happen, and then I'd need to keep coming back to that map every month and be like, "Oh, yeah, get to turn that green.  Oh, that's a bit more amber".  And that's it, that's all I need in my life!

Helen Tupper: Sarah does like a traffic light system.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I do.

Helen Tupper: I was just thinking when you were talking that the other thing for me that always feels like a reward is when I can use what works for me to help someone else.

Sarah Ellis: Actually, that's true, yes.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, so if at the end of this process, I could unlock how to do better introductions in a way that I could share with people and be like, "Oh, this is how I've deconstructed doing introductions and it really works and it feels really authentic and it really like sticks with people, and this is how you can do it too", that kind of having mastered something and then being able to share it so other people could do it, I love that.  I mean that's what our company's been built on, right?  Like, "We did this stuff, it worked for us, let's try and help everyone to do it too". 

So, I think, yeah, but I guess the main point is rewards are very personal, so you've got to work out what that looks like for you, but we all need to be able to see progress along the way to whatever this thing we're trying to do through practice, the outcome that we're trying to work towards, that ability to see how far you've come; and the journey that you're on and to see that you're making progress is a really important part of being able to stick to this deliberate practice effort.

Sarah Ellis: And if it's something you just love to dive a bit deeper into, I would really recommend the Farnam Street blog on Deliberate Practice.  It's a good guide and a really good overview, so we'll link to that.  And there are a couple of really good HBR articles on things like the 10,000-hour rule, which is also where I saw some of the stuff around experimenting, and actually just again the research on making an expert.  Again, you don't have to be an expert, but there's some good things that you can read that give you a useful sense of what does this mean for me.

Helen Tupper: And now, Sarah, we're going to have to cut this podcast short because straight after this, I'm going to go do a session and I'm going to introduce myself.  How's that going to go?

Sarah Ellis: No pressure!  Should I come and watch you and make notes?

Helen Tupper: No, I'm just going to do that one.  The next one, I'll deliberately practice.

Sarah Ellis: Okay! Helen Tupper: It's the next one, it's always the next one.

Sarah Ellis: Is that like an avoidance tactic?

Helen Tupper: Oh, my gosh, maybe I should introduce myself on PodPlus and get some feedback from everybody.  Oh, my gosh, I've said it now.  Come to PodPlus everybody on Thursday, give me some feedback on my introduction!  That'll be painful. 

For less painful ways to practice deliberate practise, download our PodSheet.  But yeah, download the PodSheet.  The four steps just in summary: work out what you want to deliberately practice and why; number two, make sure that you're designing for productive practice, that's for the attention and retention; step three, have self and supported feedback loops; and step four, design in rewards along the way.

Sarah Ellis: So, we hope you found this episode useful.  If there's any topics you'd like us to cover or career questions that you need some support with, you can email us anytime.  We're helenandSarah@squigglycareers.com.  That's everything for this week.  Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.