A Little Book of Self-Coaching Tips

The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

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Hardcover , pages. Published August 21st by Bantam first published January 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Little Book of Talent , please sign up. Would you recommend getting the book as a hardcover or kindle? I am always torn with self-help books! Todd Doubleu This is one to have in hardcover. It will be a frequent reference. See 1 question about The Little Book of Talent….

Lists with This Book. Stare at who you want to become Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. Spend fifteen minutes a day engraving the skill on your brain watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until you build a high-definition mental blueprint. The key to effective engraving is to create an intense connection: Become aware of the movement, the rhythm; try to feel the interior shape of the moves.

Chess players achieve this by replaying classic games, move by move; public speakers do it by regiving great speeches complete with original inflections; musicians cover their favorite songs. Steal without apology All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. When you steal, focus on specifics, not general impressions. Buy a notebook A high percentage of top performers keeps some form of daily performance journal. What matters is not the precise form.

What matters is that you write stuff down and reflect on it. Goals for next week. A notebook works like a map: Be willing to be stupid being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections. When it comes to developing talent, remember, mistakes are not really mistakes—they are the guideposts you use to get better. Choose spartan over luxurious Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: When given the choice between luxurious and spartan, choose spartan.

Your unconscious mind will thank you. Before you start,figure out if it's a hard skill or a soft skill Begin by asking yourself which of these skills need to be absolutely percent consistent every single time. Which need to be executed with machinelike precision? These are the hard skills. Then ask yourself, which skills need to be flexible, and variable, and depend on the situation? Which depend on instantly recognizing patterns and selecting one optimal choice?

These are the soft skills. To build hard skills, work like a careful carpenter When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start. To build soft skills,play like a skateboarder When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. After each session ask yourself, What worked? Don't fall for the prodigy myth If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens.

Instead, treat your early efforts as experiments, not as verdicts. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to grow. Great teachers are first and foremost learners, who improve their skills with each passing year. But other things being equal, go with someone older. Find the sweet spot There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest.

If you tried your absolute hardest, what could you almost do? Mark the boundary of your current ability, and aim a little beyond it. Take off your watch Deep practice is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the number of high-quality reaches and repetitions you make—basically, how many new connections you form in your brain. Instead of planning to hit golf balls for an hour, plan to make twenty-five quality swings with each club. Then combine those chunks into still bigger chunks. No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing.

Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. We complete the appointed hour and sigh victoriously mission accomplished! One useful method is to set a daily SAP: The point is to take the time to aim at a small, defined target, and then put all your effort toward hitting it. It feels like failure.

Choose five minutes a day over an hour a week If it can be counted, it can be turned into a game. For example, playing a series of guitar chords as a drill is boring. But if you count the number of times you do it perfectly and give yourself a point for each perfect chord, it can become a game.

Track your progress, and see how many points you score over a week. The following week, try to score more. Think in images The images are far easier to grasp, recall, and perform. This is because your brain spent millions of years evolving to register images more vividly and memorably than abstract ideas. Whenever possible, create a vivid image for each chunk you want to learn.

Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake Develop the habit of attending to your errors right away. Take mistakes seriously, but never personally. Visualizing this process as it happens helps you reinterpret mistakes as what they actually are: Visualize the wires of your brain getting faster Every time you practice deeply—the wires of your brain get faster. Shrink the space Smaller practice spaces can deepen practice when they are used to increase the number and intensity of the reps and clarify the goal. Where is extra space hindering fast and easy communication? Slow it down even slower than you think When we learn how to do something new, our immediate urge is to do it again, faster.

This is known as the Hey, Look at Me! This urge for speed makes perfect sense, but it can also create sloppiness, particularly when it comes to hard skills. We trade precision—and longterm performance—for a temporary thrill. So, slow it down. Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them. Close your eyes Closing your eyes is a swift way to nudge you to the edges of your ability, to get you into your sweet spot. It sweeps away distraction and engages your other senses to provide new feedback. It helps you engrave the blueprint of a task on your brain by making even a familiar skill seem strange and fresh.

Mime it Removing everything except the essential action lets you focus on what matters most: When you get it right,mark the spot One of the most fulfilling moments of a practice session is when you have your first perfect rep. When this happens, freeze. Rewind the mental tape and play the move again in your mind. Memorize the feeling, the rhythm, the physical and mental sensations. The point is to mark this moment—this is the spot where you want to go again and again. Take a nap Napping is good for the learning brain, because it helps strengthen the connections formed during practice and prepare the brain for the next session.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that napping for ninety minutes improved memory scores by 10 percent, while skipping a nap made them decline by 10 percent. To learn a new move,exaggerate it If the move calls for you to lift your knees, lift them to the ceiling. If it calls for you to press hard on the guitar strings, press with all your might.

If it calls for you to emphasize a point while speaking in public, emphasize with theatricality. You can always dial back later. Go too far so you can feel the outer edges of the move, and then work on building the skill with precision. Make positive reaches You can either focus your attention on the target what you want to do or you can focus on the possible mistake what you want to avoid. This tip is simple: Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one. To learn from a book,close the book closing the book and writing a summary forces you to figure out the key points one set of reaches , process and organize those ideas so they make sense more reaches , and write them on the page still more reaches, along with repetition.

The equation is always the same: More reaching equals more learning. Make the correct move. Make the incorrect move. Make the correct move again. The goal is to reinforce the correct move and to put a spotlight on the mistake, preventing it from slipping past undetected and becoming wired into your circuitry. Invent daily tests To invent a good test, ask yourself: How can I isolate my accuracy or reliability, and measure it?

How can I make it fun, quick, and repeatable, so I can track my progress? To choose the best practice method,use the R. Reaching and Repeating E: The idea of this gauge is simple: The larger lesson here is to pay attention to the design of your practice. Small changes in method can create large increases in learning velocity.

Stop before you're exhausted Then, the mistakes are fresh in my mind and I can go to the practice tee and work specifically on those mistakes. Just before sleep,watch a mental movie Just before falling asleep, they play a movie of their idealized performance in their heads. End on a positive note A practice session should end like a good meal—with a small, sweet reward. Six ways to be a better teacher or Coach 1 Use the first few seconds to connect on an emotional level Before you can teach, you have to show that you care.

Try this concrete thing. Now try this concrete thing. Now try combining them into this concrete thing. The problem with those scorecards is that they can distort priorities, bending us toward short-term outcomes and away from the learning process. The solution is to create your own scorecard.

See a Problem?

Pick a metric that measures the skill you want to develop, and start keeping track of it. Use that measure to motivate and orient your learners. What kind of space will create the most reachful environment? How can you replace moments of passivity with moments of active learning? To do this, avoid becoming the center of attention. Aim instead to create an environment where people can keep reaching on their own. Whenever possible, step away and create moments of independence.

Think of your job as building a little master-coach chip in their brains—a tiny version of you, guiding them as they go forward. Have a blue-collar mindset Top performers get up in the morning and go to work every day, whether they feel like it or not. For every hour of competition,spend five hours practicing Games are fun.

They also slow skill development, for four reasons: The presence of other people diminishes an appetite for risks, nudging you away from the sweet spot. Games reduce the number of quality reps. The pressure of games distorts priorities, encouraging shortcuts in technique.

Games encourage players, coaches, and parents to judge success by the scoreboard rather than by how much was learned. One solution to the problem is to make public performance a special occasion, not a routine. A five-to-one ratio of practice time to performance time is a good starting point; ten to one is even better. Don't waste time trying to break bad habits-instead,build new ones The blame lies with our brains.

While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them. Try as you might to break it, the bad habit is still up there, wired into your brain, waiting patiently for a chance to be used. The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

To build new habits, start slowly. Build the new habit by gradually increasing the difficulty, little by little. To learn it more deeply,teach it Rather, it underlines two more basic points: Give your talent that is, your brain the time it needs to grow.

Words, Ideas, and Images to Make You Think

When you get stuck,make a shift A plateau happens when your brain achieves a level of automaticity; in other words, when you can perform a skill on autopilot, without conscious thought. One way to do this is to speed things up—to force yourself to do the task faster than you normally would. Or you can slow things down—going so slowly that you highlight previously undetected mistakes. Or you can do the task in reverse order, turn it inside out or upside down.

View all 3 comments. Jul 10, Eric Wallace rated it really liked it Shelves: First you should know before continuing to read my review is that I am totally addicted to books about increasing productivity, developing talent and creativity, probing how the mind works and how to get the most out of it, and building good habits and influencing positive decisions.

So how could I not like this book? And yet because of said affliction, there were few ideas or concepts that were new for me, simply because I've read so much on these similar topics. Still, I enjoyed the book for it First you should know before continuing to read my review is that I am totally addicted to books about increasing productivity, developing talent and creativity, probing how the mind works and how to get the most out of it, and building good habits and influencing positive decisions. Still, I enjoyed the book for its straight-forward delivery of so many practical suggestions.

The pithiness of each tip's title make them memorable, if you need a mantra to help you apply these steps. And the stories from the various "hotbeds of learning" that Coyle visited and observed in preparation for his earlier book "The Talent Code" and this one as well help make the goal more vivid and inspirational to boot. Who could forget his description of the younger students' rapt attention as they unabashedly stare in observation of the elder masters of their craft?

A Little Book of Self-Coaching Tips (Paperback)

Despite the glut of my related reading, I have not read "The Talent Code" before--but now the pragmatist in me says that I don't need to, as this book seems to contain and summarize what I imagine to be the bulk of the "actionable" data. In other words, if I am reading with a goal of improving myself, then this is all I need. Nevertheless I'm sure the other book is an enlightening and engaging read.

Similarly if you have not spent as much time as I have devouring books on secrets to performance and skill development, then this book may be a shortcut to learning and applying the key points. My foremost take-away right now is the impression that I should spend my practice time for whatever skill I am seeking to master in the zone at the leading edge of my abilities, where it requires the most mental effort--and thus achieves the greater reward.

I suppose it's much like weight-lifting, where they say, "the only rep that counts is the last," the one in which it is almost too much for your muscles to bear--that's what makes the muscle grow. But I fully expect to revisit the book in he future so I can be reminded of more ways to stretch and grow. View all 5 comments. Jan 08, Flexnib rated it really liked it. Some great tips here, including: Keeping our big goals to ourselves is one of the smartest goals we can set.

Apr 21, Saeed rated it liked it. Nov 28, Amir Tesla rated it liked it Shelves: Nuggets of applied techniques for effective learning and training many of which if employed enables you to achieve the results of 1 year training in just couple of months. This book would be a great companion to his other amazing one "The talent code" It's supposed to be a pocket book, so, the material are quite concise.

I'd prefer more in-depth material, hence the two withheld stars. Jul 03, Marissa Morrison rated it it was amazing. Stare at what you want to become e.

Musicians should have "listening practice" as well as playing practice. Play super-slowly to find mistakes. Work in a simple, spartan space. Learning hard skills requires precision and repetition. Soft skills require variation and improv. My books are pragmatic, simple to follow and educational, designed to make life and learning easy. The self-help topics include time management, self-coaching, self-publishing, unlimited thinking, abundance and sales - complete courses in handy pocket guides.

My cartoon art is a more accessible and often humorous way of expressing some of those ideas. I am currently writing a graphic book called Wise El's Big Thoughts. I firmly subscribe to the view that every individual can make a difference; that we should stand up and be counted, and my posts frequently reflect strong opinions, as well as being an account of my spiritual journey. Are you an author? Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central.

Sorry could be my middle name. I say sorry when I get justifiably angry.

Yet many people do not appear to have the word in their mental vocab at all. Plus airport parking totting up the bill I certainly needed those two alarm clocks to get me out of bed at 4am but thereafter it was a pretty smooth ride. Finding APH was easy, despite leaving behind the address, and their coach service deposited me at the North Terminal with plenty of time. Plenty of time to spend money! What is it about airports that makes me spend so much money? The journey is three and a half hours!

Books by Euphrosene Labon (Author of A Little Book of Abundance Tips)

Love is a much abused word. Ancient memes opine that we always hurt the ones we love. With love comes empathy and, if we truly loved, we would put ourselves out as an act of empathy. Love involves sacrifice to a degree. She has, say the Lefts, created a generation or three of selfish individuals at the expense of the kindly caring community.

People seem to need to hate and no end of rational argument is going to change that. I made a conscious decision to stop being a Roman Catholic when I was Not so, said a friend the other week. According to him, I have never stopped being one. While I can still recite most of the Tridentine Mass and have — and will always have — a massive loyalty to the true spirit of Roman Catholicism, he is wrong.

Mysticism is a bit of a coverall term. To me, it is a form of communicating with the divine and, as mentioned in Profit From Unlimited Thinking, it can often mean years of one-sided talks, begging for an answer. The customer is always right. Popularity Popularity Featured Price:

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