"Elite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.
A determined effort to introduce coaching could change this. Making sure that the benefits exceed the cost will take work, to be sure. So will finding coaches—though, with the growing pool of retirees, we may already have a ready reserve of accumulated experience and know-how. The greatest difficulty, though, may simply be a profession’s willingness to accept the idea. The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure.
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Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.
A determined effort to introduce coaching could change this. Making sure that the benefits exceed the cost will take work, to be sure. So will finding coaches—though, with the growing pool of retirees, we may already have a ready reserve of accumulated experience and know-how. The greatest difficulty, though, may simply be a profession’s willingness to accept the idea. The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure.
- More Here
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