“It’s not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it’s what you put into the practice.â€
Eric Lindos
I wrote earlier about how practice seems pretty essential for lasting behavior change.
There is, in fact, a big difference between “experts” and those “who are expert” in what they do.
In a 2006Â book co-edited by Anders Ericcson called “The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance“, the authors conclude that great performance comes mostly from two things:
- Regularly obtaining concrete and constructive feedback
- Deliberate practice
Two authors in the Cambridge Handbook (Janice Deaking and Stephen Cobley) analyzed diaries of 24 elite figure skaters to determine what might explain some of their performance success. They found that the best skaters spent 68% of their practice doing really hard jumps and routines compared to those who were less successful (they spent about 48% of their time doing the same difficult things).
Having raw talent is wonderful but it’s what you do with it that really seems to matter. “Only dead fish go with the flow” is an old saying–if you don’t work to get better it just doesn’t happen naturally. Ericsson and others use the words “deliberate practice” to mean focused, structured, serious and detailed attempts to get better. That means it has to be challenging and difficult (i.e., practicing the most difficult tasks).
As it turns out, expert performance requires about ten years, or ten to twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice. Little evidence exists for expert performance before ten years of deliberate practice in any field ((K. Anders Ericsson , ed., The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996, pp.10-11)).
How Long Does it Take for New Habits to Form?
Research by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from the UK suggest that new behaviors can become automatic, on average, between 18 to 254 days but it depends on the complexity of what new behavior you are trying to put into place and your personality ((Lally, P. et al. (2009). How are habits formed: Modeling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, DOI: 10.10002/ejsp.674)).
They studied volunteers who chose to change an eating, drinking or exercise behavior and tracked them for success. They completed a self-report diary which they entered on a website log and were asked to try the new behavior each day for 84 days. For the habits, 27 chose an eating behavior, 31 a drinking behavior (e.g., drinking water), 34 an exercise behavior and 4 did something else (e.g., meditation).
Analysis of all of these behaviors indicated that it took 66 days, on average, for this new behavior to become automatic and a new “habit” that seemed pretty natural. The range was anywhere from 18 to 254 days. The mean number of days varied by the complexity of the habit:
- Drinking / 59 days
- Eating / 65 days
- Exercise / 91 days
Although there are a lot of limitations in this study, it does suggest that it can take a large number of repetitions for a person for their new behaviors to become a habit. Therefore, creating new habits requires tremendous self-control to be maintained for a significant period of time before they become more “automatic” and performed without any real self-control. For most people, it takes about 3 months of constant practice before a more complicated new behavior gets “set” in our neural pathways as something we are comfortable with and seemingly automatic. So, adopting a new physical workout routine or learning to become more participative as a leader might take quite a while with or without coaching to truly become more natural.
Idiot Savants Excel Without Deliberate Practice
Some new research suggests that deliberate practice is necessary but not sufficient to explain individual differences in skills ((Meinz & Hambrick (2010). Deliberate Practice Is Necessary but Not Sufficient to Explain Individual Differences in Piano Sight-Reading Skill: The role of Working Memory Capacity. Psychological Science, 21)). Across a wide range of piano-playing skill, deliberate practice accounted for nearly half the variance (45.1%) in sight-reading performance in the authors study. However, working memory capacity (which is highly stable and heritable) accounted for a significant proportion of the variance (7.4%), above and beyond deliberate practice. Working memory is our short term memory which is an ability to remember information over a short period of time.
Their results challenge the view, advocated by Ericsson as well as other researchers that basic capabilities and skills such as working memory capacity are unimportant for expert performance. Although it seems reasonable to predict that anyone who engages in thousands of hours of deliberate practice will develop a high level of skills in any field, it appears that our basic skills and abilities may actually limit the ultimate level of performance that can be attained.
Together, their research does indeed suggest that practice doesn’t always make “perfect” if you don’t have the minimal capabilities to begin with….Be well….
[tags]deliberate practice, expertise, experts, leadership, executive coaching, performance, layoff, social support, mastery, expertise, kenneth nowack, ken nowack, nowack, Envisia Learning, deliberate practice[/tags]
Ken Nowack
Kenneth Nowack, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist (PSY13758) and President & Chief Research Officer/Co-Founder of Envisia Learning, is a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Ken also serves as the Associate Editor of Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. His recent book Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It is available for free for a limited time by signing up for free blog updates (Learn more at our website)
