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I recently read an article by Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large, of Fortune Magazine.  The article states that "the conventional wisdom about natural talent is a myth. The real path to great performance is a matter of choice" or "deliberate practice."

This idea resonated deeply for me. As a trainer, I am constantly interacting with people in an environment where their performance and awareness is stretched in developing their presentation skills.  Believing that you can attain the higher levels of performance can lend the stamina and investment necessary to reach this goal.

The elements of deliberate practice are each worth examining:

1) Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is "designed." The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities.  That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range, at the piano, or delivering a presentation, most of us are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.

2) Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.

For example, when Tiger Woods works on chipping out of a sand trap, he drops his ball in the sand, steps on it, then tries to wedge it up onto the green.  He'll practice this shot over and over for about 90 minutes.  Yes, that is hard but the fact that it is hard increases the liklihood that your competitors won't do it, giving you an edge.

More on Deliberate Practice or Why Talent is Overrated

Well, Kevin, you've done it again.

Kevin Ferguson of Kevin Ferguson Consulting, has posted a story about Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana and his Creation Myth.  Of Indian descent, his birth name was Piyush but he enjoyed watching The Brady  Bunch on TV so much that he was tagged with the name of the youngest brother Bobby Brady.

This is the second post that Kevin has done on Creation Myths.  His first was a nice piece about my presentation on Creation Myths at the Presentation Camp at Stanford back on February 28 struck a cord.

Check out the post here.

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How customers view you or your products is garnered by a framework of assumptions, stories and images in their minds.

If you really want to influence someone, your first task is to understand how they think. An individual’s perspective on the world can be identified and “mapped.”

Skills for Understanding our Mental Maps

1. Suspending Assumptions/Judgments:  Holding our own views in abeyance; refraining from imposing them on others but not suppressing or holding them back: as if our assumptions are suspended in the air before us, hanging on a string a few feet before our noses.
2. Seeing Each Other As Colleagues: Seeing the other as a colleague in a mutual quest for clarity. The greatest benefits are achieved by viewing “adversaries” as “colleagues with different views.”
3. Pay Attention to Your Intentions: Understanding what you hope to accomplish: “What is my intention?” “Am I willing to be influenced?”
4. Reflection: Slowing down the thinking process in order to become more aware of how you form your mental models. Most people believe that, when faced with difficult problems, the thing to do is act. In dialogue, the motto could be “Don’t do something, just stand there.” “What is it I am thinking?” “What do I want at this moment?”
5. Advocacy: Making your thinking process visible by stating your assumptions and providing the data as to how you arrived there. “Here’s what I think, and here’s how I got there.” “I assumed that…”
6. Inquiry: Holding conversations where we openly inquire into each other’s assumptions, thinking and reasoning. “What leads you to conclude that?” “Can you help me understand your thinking here?”

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