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Domain
Sport
Elite athletes and coaches on practice, psyching up and performing under pressure.
Examples drawn from sport and athletic performance -- deliberate practice, pre-performance psychology, and performing under real-time pressure.
Where it runs — 3 chapters, 19 sections
II. Practice Makes Perfect
- Practice Makes PerfectThe performance mindset begins, rather prosaically, with practice.
- 5:45AM
- HOMEWORKIn 1993, when he was 11, Lang won the Xing Hai Cup Piano Competition in Beijing.
- Practise a lotPractice makes perfect. Practice won’t guarantee that you will become a virtuoso, and people with talent can deliver great performances with less practice than a less-gifted performer would need. But the very best performers are those with great talent who practise very hard.
- Sweat the difficult bitsWhen artists practise, every detail – a note in a musical scale, a step in a dance routine – is worked on until it is perfect in itself.
- Have heroesAll artists have heroes: other artists whose work they admire and emulate.
- Practise until it’s second naturePerforming artists practise until the technical aspects of the craft have become second nature – until they can perform things ‘in their sleep’.
- Practise a lotPractice in the world of business tends to be confined to education: MBAs, skills training, leadership development courses. Once we have finished our ‘formal’ education, ongoing training tends to be sporadic and ad hoc.
- Sweat the difficult bitsModern leaders don’t have to be Renaissance men and women, skilled in every art and every branch of knowledge. But there is a lot of stuff that we have to master and that we dare not bluff.
- Have heroesYou don’t have to do this on your own; study the masters.
- Practise until it’s second natureThe point of practice is to be able to forget about it.
III. Turning Technique into Art
XIV. How to Perform
- How to PerformIn rehearsal, there are no mistakes and nothing can be seen as ‘failure’ – we try things out, and some don’t work as well as others.
- Get Psyched UpDon’t sleepwalk into a performance. You should be nervous, so you can turn the adrenaline of stress into the energy of performance. It can be easy to forget that some aspects of our work are, indeed, performances. We go into the situation with little preparation…
- Calm DownControl that energy: before you step onto the stage (or into the meeting), take a minute to control your breathing and focus on the things you are experiencing. Be aware of the tension in your shoulders and throat, the tremor in your hands, and maybe…
- Stay AwareWhen you hit the stage, try to be aware of your body posture at all times. Top performers control their every gesture; nothing happens without thought and control. A lot of the time, nothing happens, which is a big part of having ‘presence’.
- Stay FocusedFocus on one thing only: your performance. If you watch athletes or racing drivers just before a race begins, you will see a kind of inward gaze – they have ‘turned off’ all distractions and are focusing all of their attention on their coming performance.…
- Stay ConnectedKeep connected to what is happening around your performance. What are your fellow performers doing? What is the audience doing? React to that. Be there for your fellow performers and for the audience.
- Tell the StoryWe have looked at the importance of ‘telling the story’ in everything we do. Make sure that your narrative is clear – that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Every aspect of our performance must reflect the shape and detail of our…