This post is by Lukas Kyska of The Aspiring Guitarist.
Deliberate practice is your highway to becoming an expert. It is the fastest way to become really good at things. If you want to become great, you need to learn how to practice deliberately. But there is a problem…
Deliberate practice is not easy. It is not something you were born with. Deliberate practice is effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day and exhaustion must be avoided.
The goal of deliberate practice is not to be enjoyed, the only goal is to improve your performance.
Maximization of deliberate practice is also not simple – it takes time, energy and money.
Maybe you think that your practice regimen is good, but it’s probably not. I had to find for myself that my practice sessions are far from perfect. I was missing many key concepts that make practice sessions really effective.
I realized that I need to revise my notion of how to practice in order to become the best that I can be. You are only as good as is the quality of your practice.
I have created a list of useful techniques, tips and tricks that helped me to improve my practice sessions. I’ve used them all and they all work.
Important thing is to choose one strategy at a time and stick with it. Don’t take three or four, one is enough. The goal is to improve your practice sessions gradually.
Every time I feel like I need to improve my sessions, I go through the list and find one tip that resonates with me. Then I try to apply it as much as I can. Instead of reading them, I started to live them. I realized that there is no benefit if I know them but won’t apply.
So pick one and live one (if you are not sure which one you should start with – start with the first one 
).
1. Slow Down
I know this is one of the most obvious tips, but for some reasons it is really hard for people to do it. From my experience I can say, that my guitar students are usually going the opposite direction. After every mistake they usually speed up the tempo. The reason is probably that they want to learn it faster but in fact they are doing the exact opposite.
Slowing down is really the key to get any skill under your belt. The goal is to get to the point where you can do something smoothly, not fast. By slowing down you get better control and higher precision.
2. Start with a Goal in Your Mind
You need to know what you are trying to accomplish. You need to have a destination. Before you start practicing anything, try to see, hear or feel what it’s gonna be like when it’s done. Watch somebody doing it perfectly and you are much closer to your goal than you might think. Create a vision and work towards it.
3. Chunking
Don’t try to learn complex skill all at once. Chunk it up. Create shorter sequences, little movements and practice them in isolation. When you are ready, connect them.
4. Practice at the Edge of Your Abilities
Finding the sweet spot at the edge of your current competence is the key to learning skills fast. You don’t aim too high or too low. You need to find that place where you don’t feel comfortable but it is not so bad that you want to quit. Design every task to fit your current level.
5. Get Feedback
It is almost impossible to get valuable feedback from yourself while you are fully immersed in action. A good teacher can help you immensely. This is not the only option though. You can record your practice session to watch and evaluate it later. Or you can let somebody read your next bestseller and ask for feedback.
6. Repeat
In order to master any move or action you need to make a lot of repetitions. First you have to learn it perfectly and then you need to repeat it until you feel absolutely comfortable with it.
7. Vary Your Approach
Nothing is more destructive to learning than being bored with the task. Although I said that repetition is an important part of deliberate practice, it cannot be mindless repetition. You need to stay fresh and be really focused. By varying your approach it is possible to repeat the same move while still keeping it interesting to you.
8. Count Good Repetitions
Quite often we get trapped by thinking that putting more hours will produce better results. By now you probably know that it is not about time, but about quality of that time. Instead of focusing your attention on minutes, try to count good repetitions. Count anything that will tell you if you are moving forward or not.
9. Record the Data and Review
Keeping a daily journal can be very helpful when you are trying to become expert in any field. By tracking your progress you can see if you are moving ahead or not. You can also investigate how effective are your learning methods and strategies.
10. Make it Harder
Practicing and training under pressure might help you to gain skill faster. In your practice room everything is quite safe, but when you are on stage it is very different situation. Try to find opportunities that put some pressure on you and see how well you can adapt.
11. Find Someone Who is Better
Feeling like you are good enough? Find someone who is better and see what happens. Constantly try to surround yourself with people that are better in what you are doing. Your learning will accelerate many times.
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Do you have any other tips or strategies that help you practice better? I would love to hear about them in the comments.
Photo by Colton Witt Photography
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I like the last point. It helps one deal with his ego and this keeps the person pushing harder (for more knowledge or achievement) each day.
It is also a faster way to learn from the mistakes others made and come up with better ways to execute a plan.
It is always good to stay hungry for more information or skill. Once you stop learning, you can’t progress.
Thanks for the comment.
Good article Lukas. I like the tips provided. May I add that it’s also important to not practice too many skills within the same timeframe.
What helps me, and what you’ve pointed out, is to focus on one skill at a time.
Nathan
Thank you Nathan. Glad you found this article useful!
Being patient and finishing things before you start new one makes a big difference.
Very useful post. I would like to add that one may practice two or more skills at a time but his first priority should be focused around his one main goal, while he can work on the other goals treating them as goals for which he would even dare to fail. Embracing success always comes with a man’s ability embrace failure.
Good point. Thanks for comment.
Lukas, I also believe that those 11 tips are meant to be interleaved rather working with one at a time , What’s your opinion regarding this?
For sure they are interleaved. I think that deliberate practice is a skill that you need to develop. These 11 steps are guidelines that can help you get there. For me it is kind of a checklist that helps me to evaluate my practice session. You need to focus on one at a time, but in order to become an expert you need to use them all.
I think ‘Progression’ should be included in this list or substituted for ‘make it harder,’ and ‘practice at the end of your ability.’ The mere act of making practice harder or merely practicing at the edge of ability does not necessarily yield the desired improvement. Progression involves knowing optimal sequences of learning. For instance in growth and development one must know how pull their head back and roll before they can crawl, crawl before they can walk and walk before they can run, these types of progressions can be found in nearly every field and the feedback component is absolutely essential, ideally an objective coach/mentor.
I also agree with whomever indicated that focus should be assigned to singular actions of improvement. Though you may single task via chunking your time (i.e. spend 30 minutes improvement one component of a larger skill before taking a break and moving to another chunk or piece of another skill or the same skill), we know that the conscious brain can only truly focus on one thing at a time effectively.
Also I think ‘Goals’ should be narrowed (as goals narrow focus) and/or combined with the notion of chunking a skill. Goals that focus on outcomes divert our attention from making the necessary improvements on pieces of the skill, and limit our ability to focus on the singular chunked task at hand. Instead I encourage people to focus on what I term ‘process-oriented goals,’ that is create goals that encourage improvements in the pieces of the puzzle as opposed to the desired outcome within the practice session itself. Setting outcome oriented goals enables us to visualize and set limitations of our skills in advance or make us bounce from goal to goal with little purpose.
Good article though, glad to see that deliberate practice is getting written about.
Great post! I have had the pleasure of being taught by Joe Filisko on blues harmonica on a number of occasions and he often talks about playing vs practicing. Playing is when you go through the mostions and is valuable to keep things you know alive but to learn something new you really have to practice and what he has taught me is really close to the steps you describe. What has worked best for me is to go slow, divide the piece of music you are working on into a chunk that you really can concentrate on, pratice often and record yourself praticing. Doing these things have really accelerated my learning.
One way I like to make things harder is working with a metronome and pratcice the piece I am working on 10% faster than “normal”. When I go back to “normal” it seems very slow and I can get everything right faster.