Persistent Behavior

Posted on January 28, 2013 by circleofpractice

Persistence comes of our belief that we will accomplish what we’ve set out to do. How do we build that belief if we don’t already have it? Where does that belief come from in those that do have it?

I remember reading in Duhigg’s The Power of Habit about Michael Phelps. His coach, Bob Bowman, believed the key to winning was building the right routines. Routines built of small wins; small wins that built preparedness, confidence, and a sense of calm; which in turn led to a series of record setting victories on one of the world’s biggest stages: the Olympics.

My secret dream since college has been “to be a writer.” But as soon as I turn my thoughts from “practicing writing” to “being a writer” I’m a deer in the headlights. It was the same way with “practicing mathematics” versus “being a mathematician.” One perspective keeps my pencil moving, the other keeps me from even getting started.

I thought writing a 250 word essay every day would be easy. It isn’t.

“Being a writer” isn’t a small win. In fact it isn’t even well defined. Does writing this essay make me a writer? Or writing a book that never gets published? Or writing an article for a newspaper or magazine? It’s too vague; and “Being a writer” focuses on identity rather than practice.

Obviously I’m no expert on this matter. But I suspect the key is to have a well defined and very specific routine that leads to the behavior required to produce the desired outcome. For example if you, like me, are interested in writing essays here is “How to Write an Essay – 10 Easy Steps.”

How about you? Do you struggle with persistence? Or are you one of those who seem able to beat down any obstacle that stands in your way? Do you understand where your persistence comes from? Please share your thoughts with me.

What Practice Isn’t

Posted on January 19, 2013 by circleofpractice

My practice is writing a 250 word essay every day; not a research paper, not a novel, and not a book review. While that might not seem like much of a distinction, it’s important for me to keep in mind, because if I don’t remember what my practice is I will quickly get lost in what it isn’t.

I want my reading to inform my writing, but not dictate it. I want my interests to guide my research, but take care that my research doesn’t kill my interest.

One of the pitfalls of deliberate practice is that we can be so concerned about practicing the right way that we lose sight of the practice itself. That is, I’d rather listen to Dory (Finding Nemo) and keep on swimming than stop swimming because I might not be swimming the “right” way.

The last few days I’ve been trying boil down an enormous tomb of research into a 250 word essay. It totally put the brakes on my writing. I want to continue chewing on that tomb, and hopefully it will inform my future posts, but I can’t stop writing just because I haven’t digested it yet.

I have to continually remind myself what the heart of my practice is and make sure I do that core every single day. One of my favorite books is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He elegantly and hilariously describes this inner struggle with resistance, the greatest obstacle to practice. And nothing is more important or difficult than sitting down to practice that thing we’ve been called to do every single working day…one of the strangest ironies of life.

Virtue: the Practice of Well-being

Posted on January 15, 2013 by circleofpractice

Well-being is that state of wholeness, meaningfulness, and connectedness we associate with happiness, the good life, or a life well lived; a life that aims to fulfill its potential. Virtue is the practice that leads to well-being.

These ideas of well-being and virtue have been discussed and debated by philosophers and theologians down through the ages. But it is only recently that science has begun to investigate them.

In 2004 Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman published Character Strengths and Virtues, an attempt at a scientifically derived catalogue of the healthy human character. They made “a comprehensive literature search of lists of virtues critical to human thriving” that was both interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, and made a determination as to whether those lists converged.

Their research strongly indicated an historical and cross-cultural convergence identified by what they describe as six core virtues:

Courage: the capacity to overcome fear; the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition.
Justice: that which makes life fair; broadly interpersonal, relevant to the optimal interaction between the individual and the group or the community.
Humanity: relating to others, interpersonal strengths; positive traits manifested in caring relationships with others; dispositions to tend and befriend.
Temperance: moderation; positive traits that protect us from excess.
Transcendence: meaning or purpose larger than ourselves; that which allows individuals to form connections to the large universe, and thereby provide meaning to their lives.
Wisdom: hard fought knowledge used for good; exceptional breadth and depth of knowledge; creativity, curiosity, judgment, and perspective; positive traits related to the acquisition and use of information in the service of the good life; cognitive strengths.

If well-being or happiness is our aim in life, then it behooves us to find one or more practices to inculcate each of these virtues into our lives. I will be inquiring into what the nature of these practices might be over the next few days.

Life in the Slow Lane

Posted on January 14, 2013 by circleofpractice

When I was a young man I was always in a hurry. I drove in the left lane, rode the tail of anyone driving “too slow,” and was impatient in traffic. I got lots of tickets, and paid high insurance premiums.

Now middle-aged, I find myself in the slow lane most of the time. I give myself plenty of time to get where I’m going, and listen to a book along the way. When the traffic is slow, I wait. When it moves swiftly, I go with it.

I like living in the slow lane. I take time to reflect. I do work that is deeply satisfying to me. I focus on the work itself, rather than the status of my particular vocation or job title.

In the slow lane, less is more: less stuff, more relationships; less status, more significance; less travel, more walks in the parks. It means having enough to share, and enough time for family and friends; it means having enough time to figure out what’s important to you, and making the time to do it. You learn to find what’s real good for free.

When I lived in the fast lane I was in a constant state of stress. I felt anxious without knowing what I was anxious about. I continually measured my own life against the lives of others.

It’s easy to confuse status with doing good work, or living well. It’s human nature to want the respect of our fellow human beings, particularly our peer group. So much so that marketers have become expert at turning that need for respect into a desire to buy their product; we’ve come to associate those products with the thing itself. That is, if we have the right job title, drive the right car, wear the right clothes, and travel to the right places then we must be successful. If we don’t, then we’re not.

Living in the slow lane is very simple and very difficult. It’s as simple as being aware of what’s driving your need for status, and as difficult as letting go of it.

The Dilettante’s Tapestry

Posted on January 12, 2013 by circleofpractice

How does the dilettante compete with the expert? How do we turn our depth of experience into something that might provide a viable alternative to a highly specialized and focused expertise?

I suspect that in order to compete with the experts we need to find a way to turn our multifarious interests into a unified whole.

Suppose we consider our dilettante from yesterday, who had 1,000 hours of deliberate practice in each of math, dance, drawing, history, and meditation. If she tries to compete with say mathematicians on the same single axis who have maybe 5,000 to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, then she is going to have a tough time keeping up.

But if instead of competing with them directly, she combines her interest in math with her interest in drawing to help those other more specialized mathematicians in her department visualize their work, or turn their abstract concepts into a visual that lay people can understand, now she has a real value-added skill that bridges people who work in one domain with those who work in another.

She can use her interest in history to use examples from the past to deal with problems in the present, or use them as allegories that both technical and nontechnical people can relate to.

She could use her interest in dance to build the social capital of the groups with whom she works. I mean let’s face it geeks don’t often dance. But once they overcome their fear of dancing by someone teaching them how to dance in a safe place, not only will they find themselves having fun but will discover another avenue for relating with people. It builds teamwork.

If she shares her interest in meditation with her group, she could both increase their collective ability to concentrate and to deal with stress, making her team much more happy and productive.

Just look at all the value our dilettante has added to her place of work! And just by venturing out along each axis of her interests and finding ways to bring them into her work, she has taken leading roles in her company. By looking for ways to weave the threads of our interests into a desirable and useful whole, we can satisfy the needs of others as well as our own.

The Dilettante’s Practice

Posted on January 11, 2013 by circleofpractice

How does a dilettante turn the 10,000 hour rule into a viable practice for herself? The dilettante’s dilemma is that she is too interested in too many things to devote herself to only one of them. She is a liberally educated vocational ignoramus.

Take heart, those of you insulted by my last remark; I walk among you, am one of you.

In one of Ericsson’s papers on deliberate practice and expertise, he gives a graph of expertise which looks logarithmic to me. That is, the levels of skill that result from the accumulated hours of deliberate practice appear to me to be logarithmically related to the number of those accumulated hours of practice. Intuitively this makes sense to me; our skill level tends to increase rapidly in the beginning, but then begins to plateau. Even so, the logarithm is a monotonically increasing function.

Suppose that this function is in fact logarithmic. The base ten log of 10,000 hours is four, while that of 1,000 hours is 3. In other words, if this relation were in fact to hold true, then 1,000 hours of deliberate practice would yield 75% of the skill level of an expert. Might this level of skill be competent?

Now consider our dilettante again. Suppose she were to practice in domains orthogonal to one another; that is, one domain casts little, if any shadow upon another. For example, math casts quite a long shadow on physics, but hardly any at all on dance apart from rhythm.

Suppose she had four or five of these orthogonal domains of practice in which she was “competent,” that is, had one thousand hours of deliberate practice in each; say math, dance, drawing, history, and meditation. Consider what her experience of the world is like, its richness and depth, versus the world of the violinist who has given 10,000 hours of her life to the deliberate practice of the violin. Could it be like the difference between Flatland and the world we live in?

What price glory?

The Measure of a Man

Posted on January 10, 2013 by circleofpractice

How do we take our own measure? Can we build a model of our own well-being? Is it possible to determine whether our practice makes us healthy, wealthy, and wise?

Time is our most precious and limited resource, so any such measure ought to include how we spend it. Time on task is the inertia of a habit. If you’ve been doing something for an hour every day, every year for the last ten years, then that habit has a tremendous amount of inertia and is going to be hard to move, one way or the other.

But time by itself doesn’t tell us what we’ve accomplished during our time on task. To address this issue I’ve been working on something I call a cycle. A cycle represents a completed task, or a completed step in a sequence of steps required to accomplish a goal.

A cycle will vary from domain to domain, and perhaps even within a domain. So for example, Ganpati Kriya calls for eleven minutes of chanting, so one cycle of Ganpati Kriya is eleven minutes. But Sat Kriya calls for 30 minutes of chanting, which I only do for five. Five minutes of Sat Kriya translates into about 0.17 cycles. My goal for a blog post is to write 250 words. So if instead I write 300 words, those translate into 1.2 cycles.

While this method isn’t perfect, the two measures of time on task and number of cycles completed give me a better idea of how my practice is going than time by itself.

I want to know what kind of impact my practice is having on my physical and emotional health. So I periodically measure my vital signs, and positivity ratio.

To measure our financial health I periodically calculate a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.

These measurements are an attempt to gather feedback from my practice, to make my practice more deliberate, and to insure my practice is taking me in the direction intended.

The Game of Life

Posted on January 9, 2013 by circleofpractice

When I was a kid I enjoyed playing the game “Life.” Looking back from beyond midlife, the game doesn’t seem to teach much about what matters to me now.

How do we play this game we all find ourselves in? Most games have some sort of set up. You get a piece, an avatar, which represents you on the board. You may start the game with a certain amount of money, or maybe you roll the dice for certain talents or abilities.

Real life is like that. We get dealt a hand we have no control over: our family, certain genetic talents and predispositions, where we grow up, etc. Apparently much of our personality and character come from these genetic set points.

These set points, combined with the people who enter our life, like parents, teachers, and friends to a large extent determine the domains we choose to play in: athletics, music, science, religion, etc.

Fortunately for us science is learning that many of these set points are plastic. We can change them through practice. The game begins; we roll the dice, and begin our journey around the board.

Chance brings challenges of various sorts into our lives. How we respond to them is determined at first by these set points: our character, our personality, our parents, etc. But at the same time there is feedback, we learn from these interactions, and we can choose to respond differently as we age. We can choose to practice, and learn to practice deliberately.

It’s up to us to keep score. We determine the points on the scoreboard. We can measure the things that matter to us, or let others measure us by their own standard. But we are all measured. Will we find ourselves wanting? Will we spend the resources we started the game with in a way that leaves a legacy to our children, to our friends and family, to our community, or to the very earth itself?

It’s up to us to envision, to plan, and to play the game. Play well, all of you. We’re all depending on us.

Therapy as Practice

Posted on January 8, 2013 by circleofpractice

Yes I have a therapist; and fortunately so, because therapy has made my life a whole lot better, and made me a whole lot easier to live with.

But therapy is a practice?

What is practice anyway? It’s a means to mastering some skill. The skill I work on in therapy is self-awareness, and relating to others.

Therapy is my practice dojo for learning trust, vulnerability, and honesty. Part of what makes therapy work is that you’re paying this person to keep your secrets, and if they don’t they can lose their license. This enables you to look into the dark places of your soul, admit to yourself and your therapist they’re there, and begin to understand why.

Everything that walks in the light casts a shadow. The only way to avoid casting a shadow is to walk in darkness. Our shadow selves come from trying to find ways to cope with the world. They are the part of ourselves we’d like to hide from the world, the part we are ashamed of, and the part we want to deny exists.

Embracing the shadow is embracing ourselves; it means accepting who we are. Deny our shadow and deny our own self-acceptance. Grace comes from that acceptance, and can lead not only to our own acceptance, but accepting our spouse, our children, our parents, and so on. It’s a profoundly healing experience.

That’s a hard path to walk alone. A good therapist can help us find that path to trust, vulnerability, and to honesty; a path that leads into our own darkness; but there is light and wholeness on the other side.

circleofpractice

Turning life into practice; practice into transformation

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