The 3 Features of Good Practice
If you want to get better at something, the practice needs 3 key features.
The first is repetition. This is what you are used to doing in practice. It's the repeated soccer drills, the rereading of your notes, or the memorizing your speech. This is a step you can't skip, because it helps you nail the fundamentals.
The second is variation.
You leverage it once the fundamentals are down, because you want to see how the fundamentals work in different situations.
The best way to introduce variation is to introduce constraints. It's forcing yourself to only pass with one foot, playing small-sided games, flash cards, or practicing your talk when you're finished working out to mimic the physiological arousal of being on stage in a novel situation.
Variation builds a richer mental model of the ways to execute.
Neuroscience is converging around the theory of predictive processing. The basic idea is that the world we perceive is based on our mental model of a given situation — not the stimuli exactly as they are. Building a richer mental model allows you to perceive dynamic situations more accurately and select correct actions more often, based on what you've done before (called "priors").
If repetition builds the base model for the movement, variation expands the model under different conditions.
The final feature is representativeness. That means that the practice looks like the performance. It's scrimmages, practice tests, and dress rehearsals. Representative practice helps all that repetition and variation transfer to the performance itself.
Most people stop at the first step, and then hope the fundamentals work out in the performance itself. If you want an edge, take the time to leverage all 3 types of practice.
You'll be more confident in the performance, be better prepared, and execute with greater flow.
You'll perform better.
If you want to try this today, here's how:
1. Pick a skill you want to build.
2. Design a task to practice repeatedly.
3. Then, think about a constraint you could use, and set aside time to practice in those constraints.
4. Finally, design a simulation for yourself. Again, think dress rehearsal or scrimmage. As close to performance as possible.
5,. Each day, track your progress. Ask yourself what you want to keep doing, do differently, and what you've learned.
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