What if Every Practice is a Performance? Trick to Learning Fast!

I had the wonderful opportunity of sharing some challenges on accelerated learning with Judith Delozier and as we were discussing she came with this bold statement

“What if every practice was actually a Performance?”

She is a trained ballet dancer and confessed how every time she danced and was practicing alone she actually did it as though it was a performance

Corporates are familiar of the term “On The Job” learning. And somehow employees learn fast when they are just thrust into the job and the learning happens on the job. How many times have we surprised ourselves with what extraordinary competencies we develop when there is an actual job or need.

What about exams? Those last minute preparations in comparison to those planned study hours.
It’s like my mother telling me – “If I have to then I will”.

If an external event or job or necessity can magically trigger those neurons that help us focus and learn in an accelerated way then what stops us from deliberately creating those situations? If not really, atleast in our imagination.

Every performance – writing an exam, dancing on stage, a hack challenge, running a race requires a profoundly different state of mind. If you don’t think so, consider the question – why was the world record for 100 m dash only broken during the Olympics and not during any trial runs. If you read the description it was considered impossible to run within that time frame, which means during practice those limits were not broken. Somehow people do their best in a context that matters and this is true for all of us.

A trained NLP practitioner has many methods to do this and if so desires can actually make it very real and hallucinate audience. But that’s not necessary. And methods to specifically do this deserves another post by itself but all of us have moments in childhood when we have had an imaginary friend and have hallucinated a competition or a performance that doesn’t exist. A clue to actually make this happen is remember such an instance and use that as a guide to build your Imaginary context or situation for Performance.

I am certainly excited in the number of ways I can use this explicit awareness to expand my own opportunities to learn fast and to design accelerated learning courses. Sincere thanks to Judith…

Antano Solar John

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