Coaching practices for Practice and Excellence

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Practice and Excellence, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I practice I’m just kind of doing it again and hoping it’s better, because I don’t actually have a clear picture in my head of what great is supposed to look like
• I work on my character all in my own head, by my own standards, and it stays abstract and unproven
• I can’t actually tell good from great while I’m doing it
• I keep grinding away at this without ever having really looked, in close detail, at what truly great looks like
• When I run the whole thing end to end, my strong parts quietly cover for my weak one, so the actual bottleneck never gets touched

Practices that may help

1. Build sharper mental representations
   Develop a detailed internal model of what excellent performance looks like.
   Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
2. Embed your virtues in a practice community
   The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
3. Build and refine mental representations of expert performance
   Develop an internal image of what excellent execution looks, feels, and sounds like.
   Growth-Edge Training: Practicing at the Edge of Your Ability
4. Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
   Deliberate practice, studied by Anders Ericsson, is focused, effortful practice aimed just beyond your current ability, with immediate feedback and constant correction. It is what separates people who keep improving from people who simply log hours — and it is why the popular "10,000 hours" rule is an oversimplification of his work.
5. Study models of excellent performance to build a representation of the target
   Absorb what elite performance looks like in concrete detail before trying to produce it.
   Mental Representations: The Expert’s Internal Map
6. Use constraint-based drills to isolate one component
   Remove degrees of freedom so attention concentrates on a single weak sub-skill.
   Growth-Edge Training: Practicing at the Edge of Your Ability
7. Train at the edge of your ability
   Work on tasks just beyond what you can reliably do, not what you already do well.
   Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
8. Stop judging learning by today’s performance
   How well you do during practice is a bad predictor of how much you will keep.
   Desirable Difficulties: When Harder Means Better Learning
9. Practicing past criterion
   Continue practicing beyond first mastery to deepen automaticity and stress-proof the skill.
   Automaticity: When Skills Run Themselves
10. Finding the virtuous mean in a specific situation
    Identify the excess and deficiency extremes in a situation and practise hitting the mean — the appropriate response — deliberately.
    Aristotelian Eudaimonia: Flourishing Through Virtue

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.