“It’s not what we don't know that gives us trouble; it’s what we know that just ain't so".   Recent discoveries show that Will Roger’s famous dictum applies to the process of learning -- much of what we think we know about how to learn and build skills is wrong.  The good news is -- if you know how -- you can learn faster, achieve higher, and have more fun doing it.  Thank goodness!  With the accelerating pace of change and innovation, if there is one thing we need to be good at, it is learning.

What We Know That Just Ain't So

There are long-held assumptions about how people grow their skills that don’t hold up under the scrutiny of science.  And these finding apply to all types of learning -- even workplace learning and leadership development.

The Importance of Ability

One of the most surprising findings is that natural ability is not as important as we think.  We believe that people are gifted in art, music, sport, leadership, etc.; but, hard evidence shows that it is an illusion.  We assume that performance is capped by innate talent; but, in reality, it is limited by the way we learn. This does not mean that ability is irrelevant - it means that the factor that distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘great’ is not natural ability.

The Value of Experience

Now, you’re thinking -- if it isn’t natural ability, it must be experience.  Well, not exactly.  Expertise does not automatically come from many years of experience.  When the performance of people that were considered experts by their colleagues was measured objectively, many ‘experts’ demonstrated remarkably unremarkable performance. In the workplace, job performance only increases within the first two years (or less) of experience.  Don’t believe me? Ask yourself -- how much better am I at driving than I was five years ago? If you are typical, your driving skills will not change much between the ages of 25 and 65. We do something for 40 years and don’t get any better at it!  Is your golf game getting better?  Is your cooking getting better?  How long has it been since you made a significant improvement in your job performance?  In all endeavors, we generally learn a great deal at the beginning and then our performance plateaus.  When we get ‘good enough’ for our purposes, we stop learning and more time spent doing the activity does not improve our skills.  Experience is necessary for learning; but, it is not nearly as efficient or effective as we believe it to be.

The Truth about Learning

If it is not ability or experience, what does make us great at something?  In the last 10 years, research on the neuroscience of learning, the acquisition of high-level expertise, and motivation to learn has produced an explosion of understanding about how people build skills and become world-class performers and high-level experts -- and, why most of us never come close to achieving the potential that is easily within our grasp.

It’s Your Brain

The truth is that all expertise -- from baseball to brain surgery – comes from physical changes in the structure and functions of the brain.   Every action we take, idea we have, or memory we make, creates a new neural pathway or reinforces a current path or connection.  The more times we repeat an action or thought, the faster and easier it becomes to process that information. In addition, as we progress from novice to expert, we move from processing information with our working memory to processing in our long-term memory.  Working memory, like computer RAM memory, is limited and easily overwhelmed. Long-term memory is more like a computer’s hard drive and is virtually limitless.  

These changes in the brain allow an expert to process information so quickly and easily that performance is effortless and automatic.   At this level, the expert is no longer really aware of how they know what they know.  Can you quickly describe how to tie your shoes?  No, you cannot (unless you have a five year old at home). This action is so well practiced that you don't really “know” how to do it anymore - it is done on auto-pilot.   Automatic processing makes performance effortless – but, skills on auto-pilot never improve. That is why you aren’t any better at driving than you were 5 years ago. And there is a 50/50 chance that you have been tying your shoes wrong since you first learned how.  Don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault.  The natural process of learning causes these limitations.

Four Requirements for Achieving the Highest Levels of Performance

The research on how people reach the highest levels of performance shows us that it is not some magical alchemy of innate talent and pathological drive that creates a champion – it’s the way they learn and train.  There is a remarkable consistency in the path to excellence for high-level experts and performers.  In all areas studied, people who became world class had four things in common:

1. Deliberate practice
2. Support
3. Hard work
4. Ability

At first glance, the list looks obvious -- practice, get support, work hard and have some ability.   But, if you dig into the truth, these four things are quite different from how we typically think of them.

Regular Practice is Not Deliberate Practice

For most of us, practice equals doing. We practice for a piano recital by repeatedly playing the musical piece, we practice golf by hitting a bucket of balls, or we practice leadership by taking on a stretch assignment or by using a new approach with our direct reports.  We focus our attention on improving our results – playing the song perfectly, driving the golf ball farther, improving our team’s performance. This is not what champions are doing when they practice -- world-class performers practice with a unique approach called deliberate practice.  Deliberate practice is an intentionally designed drill that includes three things 1.) a small, concrete, segment of performance 2.) deep concentration; and 3.) correction of mistakes.  During deliberate practice performers pay close attention to what they are doing, make small adjustments, and repeat the practice drill until they can execute flawlessly and effortlessly.  

Practice methods are so important that when we look at historical records of performance, the improvements are startling. Olympic swimmers from the early 1900s would not qualify for today's competitive high school swim teams.  When the Soviets opened their book of practice techniques to the rest of the world, the Russians' chess domination was lost.  Learners who use well-designed deliberate practice techniques improve their performance five to ten times faster than learners who spend the same amount of time practicing, but do not use deliberate practice.

One of the biggest differences between regular practice and deliberate practice is that deliberate practice focuses on the techniques that produce good performance, not the good performance itself. Great golfers don’t practice golf or even practice their swing; they practice not bringing their hips forward on the downswing. The best pianists practice new music very slowly, working on small passages at a time until the mechanical execution is perfect and then practice the subtleties of the piece. Leaders practice observing and scripting feedback in behavioral terms, without actually giving the feedback to anyone. Practicing by doing doesn’t work very well because we cannot slow the process down and pay attention to whether we are doing it correctly or not.   If we don’t practice perfectly, then we are wiring our brains wrong.

Expert Support is Essential

If you have ever tried to teach yourself something with no help from anyone or anything else, then you know how important support is for learning.  Generally, when we want to learn something new in the workplace, we find someone who is already good at it and have them guide us through the basics.  Then we continue learning on our own through experience and experimentation. The problem with this is that, because of auto-pilot, experts are frequently not very good at describing what they know. They go too fast, skip key details, and have trouble telling us exactly what we are doing wrong in a way that helps us correct our mistakes.  

Those who reach the highest levels of performance have a great variety of support, but the most important is coaching by an expert teacher -- not an expert doer.  People who are experts at teaching can break performance into the small segments that can be practiced deliberately. They can identify and tell a learner precisely what they are doing wrong and show them exactly how to fix the problem. Expert teachers provide the deliberate practice techniques that are needed to learn quickly. 

The expert teacher is the most critical for accelerating learning, but to reach the highest levels of performance you also need support in the form of resources for training, motivation and encouragement, as well as feedback on how you are doing.  This is where traditional workplace support like mentors, role models and supervisors play an essential role.

Learning Can Be Self-Motivating (Addictive Even)

No one doubts that learning is hard work - the thorny question is "how do you motivate yourself to work that hard"?  Have you ever had the experience of trying to learn a new hobby or skill and, after failing miserably on the first few attempts, giving up?  The reason we lose interest and quit is that we tried to master too much at one time and failed.  We like to do things we are good at and we don't like to do things we are bad at.

When properly structured, learning is self-motivating and feeds the desire to continue to learn.  Consider, for example, the birthdays of professional soccer players -- they are born in January, February and March much more often than would be expected by chance. What would cause such an anomaly? It is very simple.  The cutoff date for participation in youth soccer leagues in Europe is December 31. This means that children born in the first of the year are slightly bigger, faster, and stronger than the others and therefore are better at playing the game. It is this early success that causes them to enjoy playing the game and receive extra attention from coaches and parents.  This tiny success starts a snowball of advantages in motivation and coaching which accumulates throughout their careers.    

This phenomenon of slight advantages is seen in the histories of nearly all world-class performers.  With champions, or anyone, the motivation to work hard at building skills comes from a series of small successes.  One of the best ways to ensure success is to attempt something new that is just slightly above your current level of ability – an optimal zone of learning called critical stretch.  You can see the principle of critical stretch in video games.   The game proceeds by levels that are just a little above a player’s current abilities and rewards their mastery with points, privileges, or other (relatively meaningless) rewards.  It is not surprising that people become addicted – the games were designed just for that purpose. Critical stretch is important because it motivates us to keep at the hard work of learning, but also because the continuous pursuit of critical stretch activities is what keeps us from stagnating on auto-pilot.

So What...

All of this is interesting, but how does it help you to develop your skills in leadership or anything else?  The conditions required to accelerate learning and reach the highest levels of performance – deliberate practice, hard work, support and ability – can be summed up in ten practical and simple principles. Using any single principle by itself will help; but the more principles you use the greater the improvement you will see in the speed and effectiveness of your learning and skill building. These principles, called the Prodigy Method®, are:

The Ability Principles – What do you need to learn?

Break it down -- Break the skill or activity down into small parts and only attempt to master one part at a time.   Expert teachers (including expert sources like books, classes, or the web) can help you identify the key parts of an activity.

Start where you are right now - Assess your current skill on each of the small parts.  What can you already do and what do you still need to learn? Learning must be highly individualized to be most effective.

The Hard Work Principles – How do you stay motivated?

Start early - Expertise is a result of changes in the brain and that takes time. Plan ahead to give yourself plenty of time to practice without having to worry about performance.  During deliberate practice, your performance is slow, awkward, and does not produce good results.

Make learning rewarding – Set yourself up to succeed. Practice just slightly above your current ability in the optimal zone of critical stretch. If you don't stretch yourself, you don't learn; if you stretch too much, you fail and lose the motivation to keep trying.

The Support Principles – How do you get the help you need?

Ask for support - Ask for coaching advice from the best teachers, not necessarily the best doers.  Ask expert coaches for ways to practice, for feedback on your performance, and to point out what is causing your mistakes.  Ask mentors, supervisors, and peers for advice and resources for your development.    

Transfer wisdom with questions – Share the learning principles with experts so they understand better how they can help.   Watch them perform and ask questions about what they are doing and why -- wisdom is in the answers to the "why" questions.

The Deliberate Practice Principles – How do you practice and learn by doing?

Use deliberate practice drills – Practice small parts of performance where you can slow down, pay close attention to how you are doing and make corrections in your execution.  Repeat a drill until you get that part right, and then move on to another drill. 

Set the right kind of goals for practice – Focus practice on proper execution or correct technique, not the result you want to produce. For example, you should practice making eye contact when you talk with people, not improving interpersonal relationships; or practice using the correct grip on the golf club, not distance or accuracy.  

Build practice into regular activities – Find creative ways to fit practice drills into your regular work.  For example, during meetings you can practice listening, problem solving, creativity, empathy, and more, without detracting from the meeting at all.  

Learn from success – Review and analyze your good performances and experiences. We learn from mistakes because mistakes make us think about what we did and motivate us to make changes, but we can learn more from our successes if we take the time to reflect.

We tend to think of people like Mozart, Michelangelo, Serena Williams, or Jack Welch as somehow inherently gifted, but when you dig in to the truth -- "it just ain't so".  They were simply training in a way that is consistent with what it takes to change your brain. We have isolated the ‘active ingredients’ in learning and now the secret is out - anyone can use the training methods of prodigies to accelerate their learning and reach their highest potential.

The Prodigy Method was developed by Sandra J. Miller, PhD and is based on research from several disciplines including the neuroscience of learning, the acquisition of expertise and high-level performance, motivation in learning, and leadership development.  Dr. Miller has over 30 years’ experience translating the empirical evidence on leadership and leadership development into practical advice for practicing managers and organizational leaders. You can contact Dr. Miller at (423) 265-8700 or sjmiller@prodigymethod.com.