We Get Good At What We Practice. Choose Wisely!

I'm getting pretty good at playing the piano. It's taken a while. Still a long ways to go, but it's coming. The crazy thing is the more I practice, the better I get. We get good at what we practice. Long ago when I was just a kid, I took piano lessons. My grandmother was an accomplished pianist and organist, and as such gave lessons.

But I didn't stick with it. Baseball was more fun than learning repetitive scales and songs from "old people." A curious thing happened. I got to be pretty good as a shortstop. Hours of ground balls, lots of ballgames improved my skills. Practice made me better at baseball, but on the flip side, my ability on the keyboard all but vanished. Practice makes perfect or at least much improved, but there is a flip side. There's always "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey used to say.

In this page, we'll look at the proverbial flip side of what we focus on and the ramifications of such focus. We get good at what we practice. As we write this page, we're coming off weekly themes of regret followed by clear thinking. You'll see a phrase throughout. "Someone might..." So you know, when you read those two words, you'll know that one of the three editors did what "someone might." The results are predictable because the results of practice are predictable.

We Give Up Something With What We Think About

Getting back to those first two paragraphs, I wish I had stuck with the keyboard in my youth. With a little better thinking, I could have found some time to practice and still play baseball. Don't get me wrong, I loved those years of summer fun. But there are no more baseball games for me. I regret the lost time getting better at the piano. I didn't realize it then, but now I'm covering ground that could have been second nature to me. With some better practice.

Not all practice is productive. Someone might not even realize what they are practicing is hurting them. Someone might be reactive to every negative situation in life. Someone might become agitated in advance. They might lash out at any perceived criticism. They might insist that they are always right and anyone who disagrees is just nuts. Someone might spend so much time languishing in despair and anger that their life actually becomes a reflection of what they inadvertently practiced. We get good at what we practice.

As we wrote in our pages about habits, we can allow them to run us for profit or run us for ruin. We also wrote that breaking bad habits is a misnomer. We don't break them, we create better habits. And they become habitual by practicing them.

Someone might decide to do their best to live by a few core values. Someone might choose to be compassionately courageous. It wouldn't be easy. They would need to become a better listener. They would need to develop patience, especially when dealing with confrontation. They would need to practice all these things. We get good at what we practice.

As the title of this section suggests, they would also need to give something up. They would need to get past becoming agitated, with lashing out at anyone who disagrees, with always needing to be right and making sure everyone knows they are right.

They would need to release the anger that causes them to tear down someone else to move themselves up. They had to practice those negative things to get good at them. Those negative things became habits. Someone might need to give up practicing those bad habits and replace their valuable time with learning how to be compassionately courageous. That will take practice.

Someone might have a dream to simplify leadership development. They can see the end result and they like what they see. But there is this nagging fear of failure. It stays with them and saps the energy and will out of them. Someone might fall into the trap of procrastination and set aside this worthwhile vision.

Fear might cause them to slip back into the shadows. This trepidation might cause them to lose sight of the goal and replace it with mind-numbing hours parked in front of a television, not really watching, but definitely not moving courageously toward their goal. Someone might practice fear and procrastination so often that they become very good at both. Someone might regret the predictable results.

Someone might slowly, oh so glacially slowly, step out of the shadows and meet a couple people who also had good and not so good things occur in life experiences. They might have skills sets developed through years of practice that could compliment the talents of the other ones.

Together they might latch on to those core values and practice providing content to simplify leadership development. Someone might become compassionately courageous. They might practice always being accountable. We get good at what we practice.

We Get Good At What We Practice. Choose Wisely

We have a finite time on this earth. We don't know how much time, but we know there will be an end date. That isn't a morbid thought, just a factual statement. Someone might actually exist for many decades, but what they chose to practice caused them to stop living long ago.

But on that flip side, someone might make a positive difference in a short time. They might try to live by a set of core values which will define their goals. They might practice what they need to learn to share a vision of what could be as a nation of accountable citizens.

We get good at what we practice, so choosing wisely seems like the most effective use of our time. Perfect practice becomes habit-forming. The results are predictable.

Choose wisely and never forget that someone might need to course-correct and practice better habits.

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