Deliberate, Purposeful, Ironic.

 I had a little aha moment the other day. I've been researching what could actually make me a better therapist. Seems like again the idea of "deliberate practice," Anders Erikson's famous research that has been often touted as the "10,000 hour rule" for mastery, came up. Deliberate practice is about much more than putting in the time. It's about how you practice, and there is a good amount of nuance to it. And unfortunately, it doesn't translate directly into more complex things like teaching and therapy. It works better for things like chess and music and sports, where there are very clearly defined outcomes being measured, and very clear skill paths that coaches can lead people along. For most jobs, it's more complex, or perhaps just has less energy and time being put into seeking seeking excellence. There is a general rule of hard work though. Those who are willing to work harder and longer, tend to do better. And even in professions without deliberate practice wisdom, there are always those that perform way better than others, so there is still a pathway to mastery. However, that falls into the realm of "purposeful practice" which is basically as good as you can get when you don't have a well defined field and pathway to mastery that coaches have been refining for a while.

In any case, there's some promising work on that, in counseling, which is cool, though it's still in its infancy. And it is anything but an 'easy way to get great' since effortful, often unpleasant practice is a key ingredient. I kind of want to try to learn something in a more standardized field, so I can get a sense of what deliberate practice feels like, in an unambiguous way. But I already feel strapped for time, so I don't know if that will happen.

Anyways, that's a far too long preamble. The "aha" was simply that, if I wanted to get better at using my time well, the principles of deliberate/purposeful practice should be applied. Which include getting a baseline read of performance and tracking outcomes, so you can get a sense if what you are doing is actually leading to improvements. It's also important to delineate what specific elements are holding you back or need improvement. What I will be doing is a far cry from deliberate practice, but I can at least hope for some purposeful practice. Seems like a better approach than blindly flailing around, though even that has surfaced some nuggets of wisdom.

OK, that's all I have time for, since I didn't use my time super well today. Hah! Irony.