The 4 Principles of Skill Mastery
Posted by: bflorez in StarterSeries, entelechy on
Dec 28, 2008
Executive Summary: Learning a skill is very different from simply learning academic knowledge. Four principles you need to know to rapidly master skill acquisition, including social skills.
Last issue, we discussed at length the important distinction between knowledge and skill, and divulged the two most important formulas you will ever learn. As as a recap:
Knowledge + Practice = Skill
Skill + Action = Power
Skill + Action = Power
The problem with most educational programs and training classes (especially our formal education system) is that they are very good at communicating knowledge, but pretty miserable when it comes to building skill. As mentioned in the Prologue:
Educational systems around the word (to varying degrees) are very good at teaching us how to
acquire new knowledge. By the time most people graduate from secondary school, we are experts
in reading a book or magazine, sitting in a classroom or lecture hall, or staring at a computer
screen. We can analyze, synthesize, dissect, critique, and explain. But as soon as it comes to
getting off our butts and actually doing something...Well, we don't need to tell you what happens.
Because we're so focused here at Social Charm on helping you get actual results (not just filling your brain with facts), we knew this was an issue we'd have to address. In fact, members of our team have spent nearly three years just trying to figure out how to best crack this nut. The results of their hard work are what we call the Entelechy Training System, or ETS (Entelechy rhymes with 'the melody').
Entelechy means "a conception completely actualized". We thought this was the perfect name, because it means taking knowledge (which is potential power) and converting it through action into skill (which is actual power when used).
As part of this training system, we have espoused an incredibly insightful list of rules from Neil Rackham's Spin Selling called the Four Princples of Skill Mastery:
The Four Principles of Skill Mastery
1. Practice one behavior at a time.
2. Repetition is key.
3. Quantity before Quality.
4. Match Challenge to Skill
We go into a lot of detail on each of these in the Prologue (if you somehow missed it, you can download it here - it's highly recommended (and free)). However, for those of you who are pressed for time (i.e. lazy), or are for some reason having trouble downloading or opening the Prologue, here's a quick recap:
Practice one behavior at a time.
Despite many people's claims to the contrary, the human brain is actually quite bad at multitasking. Consider the evidence put forth in a fantastic New Atlantis article by senior editor Christine Rosen (you can read the full article here):
"...But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, "Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers." The psychologist who led the study called this new "infomania" a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas" for 2007 was Linda Stone's notion of "continuous partial attention," which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are "constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing."Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy , has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously." In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, "Attention Deficit Trait," which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is "purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. "Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points," Hallowell argues, and this challenge "can be controlled only by creatively engineering one's environment and one's emotional and physical health." Limiting multitasking is essential."
For this reason, when you take our programs, the thing you will notice is how little information we actually will give you at one time. This is because we want you focus on getting one skill down before moving on to the next. There's a old saying that goes like this:
Q: "How do you get seven elephants through a narrow doorway?
A: "One at a time."
Focus on one thing, get it down, and then move on. In short order, you will have made more progress than you're probably used to.
Repetition is Key.
If you haven't noticed already, a lot of information in this Starter Series is a repeat on information we already covered in the Prologue. This isn't an accident. Even with plain-old "knowledge" learning, repetition (especially after a short break) is one of the best ways to ensure that information is retained.
Its importance is even more pronounced in learning a skill. Without going into a lot of detail here (you can find that in the Prologue), the reason this is so is that skills (like riding a bike) are actually stored in a different part of the brain than declarative knowledge (like knowing that the capital of France is Paris), and that this part of the brain is just a little bit slower to pick things up than your 'fact' brain.
However, although it definitely takes longer for this part of your brain to 'get' something, once it does there are substantial benefits. For one, you won't ever forget it (ride a bike lately?). Second, it has very fast recall and basically becomes automatic. If you had to consciously think through every step of hitting a baseball or forming a sentence every time you did it, life would be a lot of work. By focusing on mass repetition, you can make your skills rapid and automatic, freeing you to focus on more important matters.
Focus on Quantity, not Quality.
Many times when people want to learn a new skill, they want to do it perfectly right off the bat. While commendable in theory, it works horribly in practice. The problem is that while perfect practice would make perfect, oftentimes what really happens is that people get so worried about making a mistake that they don't every actually DO it.
This gets us nowhere. No matter what the skill - especially something as complex as improving your social ability - you are going to make mistakes. More than that, you HAVE TO. If you don't, there's no way you're going to learn.
For that reason, our goal is simple: to accelerate your rate of failure. That's right, we're going to make you fail faster and more often than ever before. Why? Because the faster you fail, the faster you will learn, and the faster you learn, the faster you can stop failing.
Think about it this way: when Thomas Edison was trying to invent the lightbulb, he could have sat around and said to himself "Ok Tom, we've got to get this right, and get it right the first time - if we fail at all, everyone's going to think we're an idiot." How far do you think he would have gotten? He could have thought and thought and thought, but at the end of the day until he tried something, there's no way he could know whether it worked or not. Accept the fact that in order to improve your social abilities, you are going to have to fail 10,000 times. No avoiding it. Once you fail that many times, you will attain unbelievable success, guarenteed. How fast you want to do it is up to you. You can either never fail and thus never succeed, or you can man up, fail as fast as you can, get the skill, and get on with your life.
Match Challenge to Skill
Remember our scenario in the last issue with Coach Belichick giving you the chance to step in and play quarterback again Dallas? Do you think that would be a good way to learn the skills necessary to play? Certainly you'd get repetition. We can certainly agree you'd be out there doing it and failing rapdily. So does that mean that if you want to be an NFL quarterback the best way is just to jump into the NLF?
Of course not. If you did that, you'd be lucky to end up in the hospital. The problem is that the challenge of playing at that level so far exceeds your skill at managing that challenge that you wouldn't learn a thing except an appreciation for how hard those guys hit. Conversely, if you were playing ball against a bunch of six-year-olds, you wouldn't get much better either.
The point here is that unlike knowledge (which either you have or you don't), skills develop over time. At any point, the only way to improve your skills is by challenging yourself to get better. But it's a fine line: challenge yourself too much and you get frustrated (or worse), too little and you get bored.
As part of the skill development process, then, it's important to always keep the challenge matched to your skill level. At Social Charm, the way we do this is by taking measurements of your performance at regular intervals (or telling you how to measure yourself), and then calibrating the types of things we ask you to do according to how well you're doing. In this way, we can ensure that you're always improving while avoiding extreme frustration or bordom.
The Entelechy Training System
The way we apply these four principles to help you acheive social mastery is a simple four-step process called RSDM - Read, See, Do, Measure:
1. Read. Understand the general concepts - this engages the analytical mind.
2. See. Actually see and hear the concepts being implemented - this engages the gestalt mind.
3. DO. The most important step where you practice the concepts - this engages your body and is where theoretical knowledge gets turned into practical skill.
4. Measure. Have an objective way to know if you're doing things correctly - adjust as necessary.
By reading the Prologue and this Starter Series, you've actually already started on Step 1. You've gained a cursory knowledge of the basic fundamental concepts, and understand the high-level principles we use throughout our materials.
When you purchase our Core Program (or any of our other products or services), in addition to more of Step 1, you'll really start getting into steps 2 through 4. In these programs, we really spend a lot of time showing you how things are done, giving you exercises to practice, and helping you evaluate your performance so you know how well you're doing.
We've got one more issue of this Starter Series, and then you're introduction to the science of social dyamics is complete. By coming this far, you've already shown a great deal of interest in and dedication to improving yourself and the quality of the relationships in your life. Don't stop now:
Until Next Time,
The Social Charm Team
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