Mastering New Skills with Intentional Practice & Managed Focus
Here’s another article I hope you find value in. This one invites you to surrender to the “curse of courses” but the right way.
For me, life after law school felt a bit empty. After 3 years of having almost every waking minute of my day accounted for, I suddenly “only” had to go to work. That was it; no homework or reading assignments. I would have to find ways to occupy my time. I’ve always loved learning new things, so I decided that this newly-found free time was the perfect opportunity to pick up new skills.
If you’ve read some of my previous articles, you may know that I suffered from CCPS (Chronic Course Purchasing Syndrome — a totally made up disease) where I had a tendency to buy each and every course I stumbled upon that remotely interested me. Until I realized I had purchased more courses than I had time for, so I stopped.
When I narrowed my focus to a couple of skills and devoted my time and attention to them, I then got to experience the euphoria that comes with learning new skills and really getting to appreciate your progress. I am still in the process of developing these skills (I’m learning Brazilian Portuguese and delving into music production), but I can already tell you that seeing progress is one of the best motivators out there to keep you pushing through.
After some introspection, I realized that my skill-learning journey came down to two core concepts: intentional practice and managed focus. I’ll explain both concepts in the context of my efforts to learn Brazilian Portuguese (BP)
Intentional Practice
When I started learning BP, I made it a point to spend time practicing the skill on a regular basis and not just sporadically. For the past 3 months, I have been spending 1 hour practicing BP. I did this by tackling 3 different tasks:
First, I spend 30 minutes on an audio lesson. Then, I do a couple of levels of the Duolingo app. And lastly, I wrap the hour up by reading 1 chapter of a book in BP.
I did this even when I did not feel like doing it. Even if I did not “have time”, I MADE time.
By day 10, I found myself laughing at some of the passages I was reading from the book — a clear sign that I was starting to understand what I was reading in a more natural way. Oh, what a jolt of motivation that was.
Slowly but surely, practice with a purpose started to show progress and, once that happened, I just had to keep the wheels turning.
Managed Focus
Like I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I found myself with a lot of free time, so it could have been easy for me to try an go all in on my new skills. But, I’ve had enough experience with having to learn new concepts under pressure (i.e., law school subjects) that I knew that approach would probably not be the best for me.
I could have pushed myself to carve out 2, 3, or even 4 hours a day to devote specifically to learning BP, but I knew this would, sooner rather than later, lead me to fail, because nothing will sabotage your progress faster than trying to create sudden, drastic change.
You may feel like you are making progress, but neither will power nor motivation are infinite.
When you try to make drastic changes, you quickly deplete your “reserves” of will power and motivation, and once you do that, odds are you will burn out and call it quits.
What was the solution? Managed focus. This meant that I would devote only 1 hour per day, but I would make sure I made it count. After all, it is not how much time you devote to something, but how much quality work you are able to pack within the time you devote.
By deciding to manage my focus during that 1 hour per day, I only needed to find will power and/or motivation to get me started that day — starting was really the hard part; after the first few minutes things flow smoothly — and my energy reserves remained solid.
If you think your life could benefit from either of these two concepts, give them a try. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get familiar with them, they can become great tools in your journey towards learning bigger and better skills.
Let’s do this.
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