A couple of days ago, I was giving a lesson to one of my junior students and I was explaining to him how we, as humans learn more from our mistakes and errors than we do from making shots. This reminded me of a great book I read regarding how we develop skills, the book is called “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle. It focuses on what makes the great performers, GREAT, and how we can use it to improve our own performance or help others around us maximize their performance. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has children, coaches or any business person who is in a role of leadership. This article is a brief summary of the lessons I learned from the book.
According to Coyle, any idea that our individual capacities and limitations are fixed at birth are irrational. We all have the remarkable potential to learn and perform at the highest levels as long as we followed the following criteria:
The 3 key elements that will allow you to develop your skills and optimize performance:
- Deep Practice-Specific kinds of practice can increase skills up to ten times faster than conventional practice. Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways-operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes-makes you smarter. Experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them. When you’re practicing deeply, the world’s usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it in to skill. The trick is to choose goals just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle.
- Ignition-We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment-call it passion-born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. When they see someone they know accomplish a high goal, that success shows them that its possible for them to achieve such high goals as well. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite and catalyze skill development.
- Master Coaching-4 virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students: 1. The matrix – having deep interconnected knowledge of the discipline being taught and also how to teach it. 2. Perceptiveness – observing and taking in how the student learns and customizing teaching to the student. 3. The GPS reflex – teaching comes out as short bursts of pure information such as “get to #3 (the follow through)”, “early #1 (preparation)”, “swing from the ground up”. 4. Theatrical honesty – “I LOVE IT” when giving praise
When these three elements occur, learning velocity goes way up.
To your tennis success,