Practice

If our goal is to build a life, and life is a muscle that requires training and practice — well, what does that actually mean?

The “Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition” (see chart right) describes what it’s actually like to build a new skill. When we begin learning a new skill, we need structure and routine to guide our actions. As we become more competent and expert in a skill, the basic structures are internalized: these basic routines start to “just happen” easily and subconsciously, without needing to run through a checklist. At that point we free ourselves to expand to a more advanced skill set, and ultimately to improvise and innovate based on specific situations.

A few non-psychological examples:

• When you first learn to drive a car, you have to go through a long mental checklist — ignition, lights, GPS, blinker, mirrors — that is very mentally taxing. You’re almost so distracted with the steps of driving that it’s hard to notice what other cars are doing. With a few months of practice, suddenly you find yourself getting in the car, zoning out in your thoughts, and suddenly at the grocery store without ever consciously needing to think about what you’re doing.

• When you learn a new language, you start with very basic words and sentence structures. No one fluent in the language actually talks like that, but you must learn the basic grammatical structures to be able to get to a place where you can intuitively throw in some slang, and still make sense to native speakers.

• When you learn to dance, you start out by counting the steps to the rhythm: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…after somewhere between a few lessons and a few years of dancing (depending on your natural endowments), the rhythm becomes part of your body — you no longer have to count, or even think about your feet — you just move intuitively with the beat.

We share this to simultaneously provide hope and to set expectations. Developing identity and esteem, empathy and intimacy are also skills. You can improve your relationship with yourself and with others, you can master any or all of the domains in the prior chart.

First, you need to want to do so.

Next, you need to commit to practicing, work out what practicing actually means in this particular case (Personily training can help with that!) and set aside adequate time in your schedule.

Then you need to expect that it’s going to be really hard work and probably quite painful (if it weren’t, you would have done it already). You’re probably going to be clumsy and bad at it at first, and you’ll need to keep coming back to practice over and over again despite the pain.

Once you’ve gotten to that place mentally, the rest is action — just doing it — and compassion for yourself when it’s hard, you don’t want to, and you chose to quit.

When standing at the novice point, the most important thing I’ve learned is that everything gets easier — if, and only if, I put in the time, tolerate the pain, and continue to show up.