Page 130 - The Power to Change Anything

Surpass Your Limits 119

on skills they have yet to master. Club skaters, in contrast, work
on skills they’ve already mastered. Amateurs tend to spend half
of their time at the rink chatting with friends and not practic-
ing at all. Put simply, skaters who spend the same number of
hours on the ice achieve very different results because they
practice in very different ways. In Ericsson’s research, this find-
ing has held true for every skill imaginable, including memo-
rizing complex lists, playing chess, excelling at the violin, and
conquering every extant sporting skill. It also applies to more
complex interactions such as giving speeches, getting along
with others, and holding emotional, sensitive, or high-stakes
conversations.
Before we move on, let’s take care to avoid a very large and
dangerous trap. The fact that improvements in performance
come through deliberate practice makes all the sense in the
world when it comes to activities such as figure skating, play-
ing chess, and mastering the violin. However, few people, if
any, would think of practicing with a coach to learn how to get
along with coworkers, motivate team members to improve
their quality measures, emotionally connect with a troubled
teen, or talk to a physician about a medical error. Most of us
don’t even think that soft and gushy interpersonal skills are
something you need to study at all, let alone something you’d
study and practice with a coach.
But that’s precisely what should be going on. Consider a
common problem at hospitals. A surgeon has just committed
a medical error. While performing a mastectomy, she’s acci-
dentally ripped a tiny muscle guarding the patient’s chest cav-
ity. The anesthesiologist sees a gauge jump, so it appears as if
one lung is no longer taking in air. Two of the nurses assisting
the operation see similar signs of distress. If the medical team
doesn’t start corrective action soon, the patient could die. But
before this happens, either the surgeon needs to take respon-
sibility or one of the other professionals needs to raise an
alarm.