As I sit here listening to my son practise his guitar playing, practising the same piece over and over again. I ask him why he keeps practising the same piece, even though he mastered it.
And he says “because I want it to be perfect”. Good isn’t good enough for him, he wants to be a professional musician, and he knows he needs to be perfect.
We are all born with some natural talents, but unless we nurture them, practise, practise and then practise again, we will never achieve our full potential.
There is a view that anything that at which we practise for 10,000 hours, we will become World Class. That means practising 4hrs a day, 5 days a week, for 10 years.
Many of us dream of being World Class, but how many of us are prepared to put that kind of effort into our practise?
Bruce Lee didn’t become a Kung Fu Legend by training 2-3hrs per week, it took years of dedicated training, in groups or on his own, day after day, week after week, year after year.
The same is as true of Leadership Skills, as playing the Guitar or doing Kung Fu, the more we practise the better we will get, and we cannot just practise by doing, we also need to work on our skills, trying different approaches for different scenarios.
For many of the skills, such as Active Listening which is a great Leadership Skill to develop, we can practise at home, we can even practise this on our partners, and with our children, not only will it help improve our skills but it will possibly also increase our private lives too 🙂
We can also learn and improve by reading, picking up new techniques, new thoughts, which we can then try and add to our repertoire.
We can all do more to improve ourselves, the day we stop learning and improving is the day that our skills begin to fade.
I know that writing this blog helps me improve, as it makes me think about things, how I apply them, what works and what doesn’t, and it also makes me read up on things that I can comment on or share, but I know I could do much more, and will look to do so, especially working on Active Listening in the home 🙂
So what are you going to do to improve?
Gordon Tredgold
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