The Power of Practicing - Think Deep

The Power of Practicing

We’ve all heard it before. Practice makes perfect, or if you want a better catch phrase, perfect practice makes perfect.

It’s a very obvious fact. The more you practice, the better you get.

Let’s explore why in more detail.

Many people will feel content just to practice in their “head”, in other words, mentally visualizing what they want to do. Don’t get me wrong, that’s certainly useful, but practicing in “real life” is a totally different experience.

In your head, everything is perfect. Nothing goes wrong. However, when you practice in real life, a dozen variables will come into play that you never would’ve seen coming.

These variables obviously shatter the perfect vision you had in your head.

A perfect example is giving a speech. Some people are perfectly content with running “tape” in their head, imagining themselves giving the best speech that’s ever been given. Then, some will practice by whispering their speech while standing up. Then, there are those who will go all out and practice exactly as if they were giving the speech live and when you actually practice that in real life, you’ll find yourself stumbling through words, mumbling, becoming tongue tied, not enunciating very well, awkward gestures, etc.

Practicing introduces you to all the variables that you never would’ve considered to be factors before in doing what you’re doing. That’s why it’s so important to practice because by doing so, you can identify what those factors are and improve upon them.

The thing is though, you will never be able to discover what those variables are if you don’t simulate your practice as realistically as you can. That’s such an important point. You have to make the practice as “real” as possible. If that means going to the location of your speech and actually standing behind the podium, looking at the point of view from there, so be it. Do it. Make it as realistic as possible because only then will those variables begin to introduce themselves to you.

Practicing that way obviously gives you less stress as well because if you practice realistically, then when the time comes for the real deal, you won’t be as nervous because it will feel as if you’ve already been in that position.

When you master those variables, you’ll find other variables will come up, but the good thing is that there probably won’t be as many as before. To picture how the entire practicing process looks like, it will probably be like a triangle pointing downwards – wide at the top, but narrowing in width as you go down. Practicing is a seemingly never ending refining process.

Practicing keeps you focused on what you want to do and more importantly, it also forces you to seek help on how to solve the variables that come into play. It makes you research for tips and tricks on how to help with those variables and it also might make you ask some people for help who’ve been in those situations before.

All that knowledge will come into play and raise your practice to another level. Practicing makes all those tangent actions natural byproducts.

If you think about it, mastering a certain skill or activity takes years. You get introduced to so many variables to fix in the beginning and as soon as you fix them, other variables will arise, not as much as before, and you fix those as well while remembering to master the previous variables too. When the process repeats itself as you practice the same activity for years, THEN you start getting good.

Respect the process of practice by making it as real as possible and commit yourself to doing it and the practice will respect you by showing you all the things you need to do to perfect it.

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