Many of you will have heard of the ‘10,000 hour rule’ as a magical marker required to become an expert. This rule coined by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers, claimed that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields.

The original study conducted by K. Anders Ericsson in 1993 was based on research with violin students in a music academy in Berlin and is a major part of scientific literature on expert performers. It is this research, more so than Gladwell’s catchy phrase, that is valuable to the coaching community.

Ericsson and colleagues suggest that mastery or expert performance does need the significant accumulation of many hundreds, possibly thousands of hours.

However, simply accumulating several thousand hours does not make you an expert. Think about how many hours you have accumulated behind the wheel of a car; are you an expert driver? No. Why? Because the hours invested have just been about driving time, with little thought behind it.

These hours could be regarded as naive practice hours. By not investing any thinking toward how to do the task, not integrating challenges to stretch the quality of performance and not undertaking reflection to consider how effective you were, all those hours behind the wheel are almost automated

Achieving mastery requires the accumulation of several thousand hours or deliberate or purposeful practice, not just automated practice.

Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise Purposeful Practice (2016) state that purposeful practice has several characteristics which set it apart from repeat or naive practice. Purposeful practice:

1. Has well defined specific goals. Any goal set will determine what is going to be achieved. Whether these are long term or short term, achieving success needs a plan that clearly describes how those goals will be achieved. A step-by-step plan for each season, each game, each session and each element of each session needs to be considered and clearly identified. This plan will also act as a tool for monitoring and evaluating progress and success.
2. Is focused. Performance improvement requires full and undivided attention throughout the planning, delivery and evaluation phases.
3. Involves feedback. Players and coaches need to know whether they are doing something right or not. Others can generate feedback but perhaps the most critical feedback comes from within. The ability to self-detect and correct errors is an incredibly important skill.  Without this insight, either from yourself or others, it is almost impossible to tell how close you are to achieving your goals.
4. Requires getting out of ones comfort zone. This is potentially the most important element of purposeful practice. Setting goals that challenge you to stretch just beyond your reach and step outside of your comfort zone are key. This means trying to do something that you couldn't do before. Inevitably this may mean running into roadblocks. The ability to navigate these roadblocks is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice. Working harder is not always the answers, thinking and acting differently is often part of the solution to improved performance.

SEE ALSO: How to set M.A.G.I.C. goals to achieve excellence 

Think about how you create your coaching environment. Think about every element of every coaching practice of every week within and across the season. How effectively are your players engaged in purposeful practice?

Sarah McQuade is an independent coach education consultant, owner and director of e.t.c coaching consultants and co-director with The Coach Learning Group. To find out more about either company follow www.etccoachingconsultants.com or www.thecoachlearninggroup.com