Good Life Project - Why You Need a Teacher (even if you're sure you don't).

Episode Date: January 18, 2018

If you don't have a teacher, you're cheating yourself.Wow, I do NOT like those words!In fact, I resisted the whole notion of a teacher for decades. Friends and colleagues, from artists to athletes, execs to educators would all tell me about their amazing mentors, teachers, coaches and gurus. My eyes would roll. I'm an autodidact, I'd tell myself, I learn best when I'm in control. I don't need a teacher or a coach, I just need access to information.Turns out, that is a complete and utter lie.To go from being a newbie to being really good at anything takes a ton of work. Still, most people, with enough motivation, can get there. To go from really good to excellent takes a whole different level of effort known as "deliberate practice." But, to go from excellent to stunningly-good, to step into that final, brutally-hard to access top 5% of your potential, that takes something entirely different. Something called "directed practice." And, here's the thing, you cannot DO directed practice without a teacher. End of story. No exceptions.What deliberate and directed practice are, and how a teacher becomes a critical player, no matter how smart you are, is what we're talking about in today's GLP Riff.Good Life Science Update.And, on the science side of things, today, we're diving into a cool new study from a team out of University of Illinois about how being in nature affects your ability to focus your attention, stay engaged longer and go better work. We've known about the effects of nature on your body and mind, it's an amazing Vitality Bucket filler. But, now, we've got research to show how it can effect your ability to do your best work. To fill your Contribution Bucket, too. And, as always, for those who want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So let's say you're trying to get really good at something. Best you can possibly be. Is practice enough? Is this thing called deliberate practice enough? Or is there something else that's really important? Turns out there is. It's this thing called directed practice. And we're going to talk about that and the role of somebody else in that in today's Good Life Project riff. And along with that, some really cool new research on how nature affects our attention and engagement. And it just keeps piling on the argument for us getting out of our indoor areas. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is a good life project. The Apple watch series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple watch ever making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between me So how do you get really good at something? That's been a question that's been sort of persistently on my mind

for many, many years, probably decades, actually. As somebody way, way, way back in the ancient days when I was in college, I actually came really close to studying performance psychology because I've just been fascinated by it. I was a gymnast as a kid, and I had this sort of predisposition for discipline and progress, which is one of the things that for that particular sport is critically important because even though you compete as a team, there's a really big solo aspect to it. I became really fascinated with what makes people do the work to become extraordinary at anything. Chunky years down the road, reading Malcolm Gladwell's famous book, Outliers, introduced the world to the research of K. Anders Ericsson, who is one of the leading researchers in the field of excellence, expertise, and greatness. What allows somebody to tap their fullest potential,

become extraordinary, become world-class, great. The 10,000-hour rule was popularized as this thing that you had to, quote, put in that amount of time in order to become extraordinary in any given field. We now know that, in fact, the 10,000 hours is a fairly gross misrepresentation of the original research by Erickson. I had a chance to actually sit down with Erickson a while back and explore in a lot more detail what does it actually take to become extraordinary, potentially the best in

the world, or at least the best that you are capable of becoming in any given pursuit that matters to you. And we talked about this idea of the 10,000 hour rule also, and he shared how it was really completely misrepresented and that in his original research, there was a wide range of amount of time. And the bigger concept was that it took thousands and thousands of hours, sometimes less than 10,000, sometimes substantially more than 10,000 in any given field to become truly extraordinary. But that wasn't the end of the conversation. The type of practice that most people focused on was this thing called

deliberate practice. So 10,000 hours, which we now know is a misnomer, and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. And deliberate practice is not just repetition. So a lot of people think practice makes perfect. And in fact, that's not true at all. You can write and write and write and write and write for 10,000 hours and never hit your potential as a writer. You can play a violin or a guitar. You can play soccer or baseball. You can paint for thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours

and get incrementally better at what you're doing, but never come close to what your true potential is and never become truly extraordinary. Develop a high level of excellence and expertise. So what people latched on was that practice enough, this thing called deliberate practice is where it's really at. And we'll talk about what that is, but I also, in conversation with Erickson, really learned that even that was not entirely accurate. There's something bigger than that that is even more important. So deliberate practice is practice that is hyper-focused on progress. So rather than saying, I'm going to play these scales 100 times today, on whatever instrument it is, you play the scale once.

You pause. You think about what went really well, where the notes were really clean, where you struggled, where your technique from moving from one note to the next wasn't quite right, where you had hitches in your movement. And then you repeat trying to do something a little bit different. And then you analyze that. And then you repeat it and you try to do something a little bit different. So it's a series of not just repetition, but repetition. And with each thing you were working towards a very specific growth goal. You pick a single thing that you want to change or improve on and then you analyze each repetition to figure out how did that work? What could I do better? What could I do differently?

And it's all towards very sort of analytical, hyper-focused, growth-oriented on a single growth metric. This is not fun practice for the vast majority of people. And Erickson was sort of crystal clear on that fact. But this is what is needed to sort of stand as fully in what you're capable of as possible to develop the highest possible level of expertise and proficiency in any field or any pursuit as possible. But it turns out, even deliberate practice is not the full story. So when I sat down with Erickson, it became clear that there was another part of the research that he had really been doubling down on, and that was even emerging or revealing itself in his earlier work that nobody had really focused on. It was all about first the 10,000-hour rule or how much time you had to put in to become extraordinary at anything you cared about. And then it was about distinguishing between practice, just repetition, versus deliberate practice, which is repetition plus hyper-focus on growth plus choosing a very narrow set of metrics and then analyzing and repeating with change.

And then there's this other thing. It's the bridge between deliberate practice and directed practice. And this is really eye-opening for me, and it has led me on my own journey of discovery with my own growth. The difference is the role of a mentor or a teacher, which is interesting to me because I am somebody who has always considered myself an autodidact, which is just a fancy pants language for I self-study really, really well. I don't do great in classroom settings. I don't do well when somebody else is in control of learning objectives, the learning pace, the learning structure,

and the instructional design. I tend to do much better when I'm in control of all those things myself. I can pace myself. I can go where I want to go and deepen into what I want to deepen into, and I tend to learn very rapidly when I can do that. And I tend to struggle when I can't do that. So I have sort of over the course of my life, I've gone about learning things and developing mastery and expertise, largely solo. And whenever I hear people, I would hear people talk to me about the role of their teacher or their mentor or somebody who's taken a deep interest in them and made a huge difference in their lives.

I would think to myself, oh, that's nice. You know, that's good for them. I'm glad that, you know, they felt it was necessary in their life and they found that person and it made a real difference for them. But I never felt a real lack because I was always progressing. But also in the back of my mind, I've always known I've never quite been progressing to the level of either capability, proficiency, expertise, or depth of knowledge that I was capable of. And I've always kind of wondered what might I be able to do that would

unlock that sort of next level of potential in me. And I've made a lot of changes and a lot of discoveries. If you listen to the earlier podcast a few weeks ago, where I shared my scaffolding, success scaffolding, a lot of those are environmental and circumstance changes that allow you to become much more successful at putting in the necessary practice to become exceptional. But in that 7P success scaffolding, you also probably recall that people played a role, people on different levels. And what I have become much more aware of in part through Erickson's later research is that the role of a teacher is actually critically important for everybody, even grumbly, somewhat introverted autodidacts,

people who think, well, I learn best when I get to control the whole process on my own. The truth is directed practice is different than deliberate practice because you are doing the practice under the direction of somebody else. That doesn't mean that you're with them the entire time or a hundred percent of the time. You may only see them once a week. You may talk to them once a month. They may be with you every single hour. Whatever it is, you are in some way giving up some level of control and autonomy to be 100% self-directed and inviting somebody else who is a master in their craft and also an exceptional teacher, into your learning process and opening yourself to their input as a way for them to help you improve.

Because it turns out that we all hit a point in our practice and even in our deliberate practice where we are no longer capable from the inside out of seeing what needs to be changed in order to bridge the gap to the next level of knowledge, expertise, and capability. We are not actually capable in a vacuum, entirely on our own, of seeing what we need to see in ourselves, of identifying our stumbling points, of seeing what has become habitual and we no longer even cognitively think about it, and then creating changes in the way that we learn, sort of shaking things up, doing things differently in a way that would be effective at breaking us through to a new

threshold of learning and growth and development and allowing us to step more fully into our potential. We need another human being to see that in ourselves, another human being who sees from the outside in what's really happening, who sees what we don't see, and also who has the wisdom and the expertise and the experience to be able to adapt a new learning protocol, a new approach to our practice so that we can break through. This is a little bit hard to swallow for some folks who consider themselves extraordinarily self-directed, self-reliant, I'm raising my hand there because that's always been me. But I have really become open because

the research makes it crystal clear, even the best of the best in every field in the world get there at some point by bringing somebody into their orbit who can participate in helping them grow. So they bridge the gap from not just practice to deliberate practice, but from deliberate practice to directed practice. And that has actually led me on a bit of a search to learn from people in different fields of my life and to drop my armor of autodidacticism, whatever that means, and say, I need help. And it's okay.

And for me to tap more fully my potential, whatever thing it is, whether it's my emotional relationships, whether it is my skill and craft working with my hands, whether it's my ability to write or create audio, whatever it may be, I will benefit from a well-chosen teacher or mentor. And so I'm on a bit of a quest, and I've been open to and starting to explore relationships with different people. And it's been extraordinary because it has moved the needle in a lot of ways in my life. So that's another seed I want to plant with you as we move into a month where we tend to be exploring what we would love to make happen in our lives. Explore the possibility of no matter how self-reliant, how self-reficient, no matter how good you feel, you learn and grow and improve, the invitation is, what if I open myself to the direction and

instruction and help and assistance of somebody who is an extraordinary teacher in a particular area that I really want to grow in? Something to think about. And also really excited because as we sort of dive into our second half here, our Good Life Science update, we are going to be exploring the role of nature in this very same growth and learning process. Some really fascinating new research. We'll be right back. Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. And we're back with today's Good Life Science update. For those new to the podcast, these are weekly science updates where I share my complete and utter geekery around research and science that in some way affects the human condition. As always, we will include a link to the actual study report for fellow geeks who want to go deeper into the learning around this. Today, we're talking about something really cool. And it also in an interesting way builds on the riff that I was talking about. How do we grow? How do we learn? How do we sort of improve with what we're doing? So in my last book, How to Live a Good Life,

I had an entire chapter on this thing called forest bathing. I am fascinated by how nature affects us. And there has been a pretty significant body of research now on the many different ways that being in nature changes us. Everything from calming us to actually changing both our psychology and our physiology to reducing inflammation, to reducing anxiety and depression, to improving health and recovery outcomes after medical procedures. Things like even being in a hospital

room with a window in it dramatically changes recovery outcomes for people. Having a plant inside in an office setting dramatically reduces agitation and anger and all sorts of other stuff like that. And we also know that being out in nature in woods, actually something called shinrin-yoku, which is Japanese for forest bathing, walking in a forest, has a dramatic effect. There are a whole bunch of theories about why, but what we do know,

and it's everything from just being exposed to natural environment, to ions, to different phytochemicals which are released from plants, what we know is it affects us in a pretty major way. This week in our science update, I'm talking about a really fascinating new study that links exposure to nature for a relatively short amount of time with helping to increase attention and calm people in a classroom setting. It's kind of cool. This was done actually on kids, 9- and 10-year-old kids, but it's completely and utterly relevant to us in the way that we actually work and want to grow and learn. So in this research, a scientist named Ming Kuo

at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was researching how being in nature would affect young kids, 9- to 10-year-olds, so that would be third graders in the U.S. where I am, and whether that would actually help their learning. What they did was they did a 10-week trial where a bunch of kids would go outside for sort of like a classroom session. They would just be out on a lawn, and they would learn a lesson where they were sort of on grass and with a foresty area, a woodsy area in view of them.

So they weren't actually out walking in the woods. They were just out on the grass where they could see all the trees. Now, what's kind of funny is that one of the theories in education, especially for kids this age, is that if you take them outside and then you try and bring them back inside, they're all going to be hyped up from being outside. They'll be bouncing off the walls a little bit. They'll be agitated.

And it will actually have a negative effect. And in fact, some of the teachers that were part of this study were skeptics. They were like, this is going to be a disaster. This is not going to work. And this will do the exact opposite of allowing the students to become focused and have strong attention and become focused and have strong attention and become calm and engaged. But here's what happened. And I'm quoting Quo now. She said, our teachers were able to teach uninterrupted for almost twice as long at a time after the outdoor lesson. And we

saw the nature effect even with our skeptical teacher as well. So what's really interesting is what they found was that over a 10-week period, the different groups of kids having a single, like one lesson a week, so it's not a lot right now, one lesson a week outdoors, and then a similar lesson in a classroom that after being outside, when you bring kids back in, that their level of attention and focus and calm and engagement went up dramatically, so much so that they could actually stay twice as long in a classroom with a really high level of hyper-attentiveness and engagement. So you think to yourself, well, that's pretty interesting and pretty cool. And it also speaks to the fact that

we are so deeply attuned to natural environments that being in nature in some way, shape or form, it's like we are wired to be constantly interacting with nature. And when we do, it has really dramatic effects. And we're seeing this now in a classroom, but also if you broaden this out, right? If... The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-nest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Being in nature for a relatively short period of time and being in a relatively low level of nature literally doubles the attentiveness and the amount of time that you can stay hyper-focused and do good work in a classroom setting. What about you as a grown-up on a day-to-day basis? What if you have something really important that you need to get done, right? What if instead of flipping on a screen and killing time for 15 or 20 minutes, you actually took a break and you went out into nature. And then when you came back, if this same effect was repeated in you, it would then give you the ability to dial in your focus, become hyperattentive, and increase your engagement for twice as long as you normally would have been able to do that. Imagine how that would

affect the quality of your work. Imagine how it would affect your state of mind. Imagine how it would affect the way that you move through your career and make a difference in the world. So this isn't just about kids. This is about the way that we contribute to the world, the way that we are able to fill our contribution buckets and do meaningful work and make impact in the world. So we've known, as I shared, that there is dramatic effect on our health and state of mind. What this new study is showing is that it also really facilitates a high level of learning and productivity and engagement and attention. And that is really cool. So my invitation to you based on this particular new bit of research is if you're a parent,

maybe get your kid out into nature as much as you can possibly do it. And if you are a grown-up, which you probably are if you're listening to this, get yourself into nature. Take nature breaks as regularly as you can. And what you may find is that that becomes an unlock key for a higher level of work, engagement, creativity, attention, and productivity. And that actually taking time off and taking time off to be exposed to natural environments may be a bit of a game changer for you.

I know for me, it is a huge difference maker. Even in New York City, I am regularly walking along the Hudson River and walking in the trees and plants in Central Park. These are my salvation. They're what let me stay human in a massive, fast-paced city. And they are also where some of my best work comes both while I am out in nature and immediately after returning from nature. And this study helps validate that that is not just me. That is the way that human beings respond to being in the woods.

So hope you found that interesting. As always, we will include a link to the actual scientific study so you can dive into it and learn more yourself. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode and then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action that's when real change takes hold see you next time

mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun january 24th tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.