Practice makes performance

Becoming a natural

I took a couple of slow, conscious breaths before opening the Zoom call.

Yes, I was nervous, right before my first ever coaching call with a real client, but it was an excited type of nervousness.

I knew I had done the work. I didn’t need any cheat sheets. I had more than a year of real practice under my belt. I could focus on the person in front of me and simply have a conversation.

Okay maybe one extra breath won't hurt.

Becoming a beginner

In many sports and games, there’s this concept of playing a ‘lucky first game’ or having beginner’s luck. Card games, golf, and even fishing have these stories, where a total novice enters a new arena and does surprisingly well at their first try.

Why does this happen?

One way to interpret this phenomenon is that these lucky first-timers are not yet encumbered by the pressure of the ‘technique’. They are untrained, free, and loose. They play by feel rather than being distracted by their thinking.

It’s an enviable state for many trained professionals, to reach this sense of effortlessness.

It’s similar to the idea of Beginner’s Mind found in Zen Buddhism and martial arts. It is an intention to, after instruction, return to openness, looseness, and the absence of preconceptions and premeditation.

So how do we ‘find back’ our beginner’s luck? How do we recover that blissful state of effortlessness?

Through practice.

Practice

It’s very difficult to be natural at something. Although some performers make it look easy, be sure they have put in the hours.

I come from a musical family. Both my parents are professional musicians and many uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces have careers in some musical capacity. When growing up, the sound of live instruments was around me all of the time and I feel lucky to have been infused with an appreciation for music from such a young age.

What I’m even more grateful for though is to have seen up close what true practice is.

Professional musicians are intimately familiar with practice. It’s the foundation to their performance. My parents practiced every day for several hours, even more when a concert was on the horizon. 

Through seeing them work at their craft, I’ve seen what practice (and dedication to a craft) really means. 

Playing a concert for a crowd of people may be very cool and impressive, but practice isn’t pretty. It isn’t glamorous at all. 

Behind the climax of a live concert, there’s a whole world of clumsiness, mistakes, and hours and hours of trying it again… ‘slowly this time.’

Practice is the way to get back that naturalness of the beginner, without being a beginner.

Second nature

Musicians practice their scales so that later on, when they’re making actual music, the scales feel second nature. No performing musician is still working on their scales live on stage. When it’s time to perform, the work is already done.

It works the same with coaching skills.

When I was training to become a coach, I remember first learning about the nuts and bolts of asking powerful questions.

I remember quite clearly my earliest, clunky attempts to put the theory I had learned into practice. It felt far from natural. I was uneasy, nervous, even stuttering at times. I often had to resort to memorized questions and made mistakes left and right.

After practicing for a while, I started to see a difference.

Instead of getting stuck in how questions work theoretically (worrying about the specific articulation of them), I started to become present with the other person. I could listen, be a real human, and let the questions bubble up out of my natural curiosity.

Practice helps to turn theory, techniques and skills into an attitude. Something that is second nature. We don’t have to think about it anymore, we just act, speak, or be silent in the moment.

When we’ve practiced, we can have a real conversation. We know the scales, now we can focus on making the music.