When we acquiring a new skill, we essentially pass through three different stages:
1.The cognitive phase. We are intellectualizing the task. We are discovering new strategies.
2.The associative phase. We make fewer errors. We get better at it.
3.The autonomous stage. I am okay and we essentially turn into autopilot and stop paying any attention.
There’s an entire field of psychology that studies how people get to be good at what they do. That studies what differentiates experts who are the best from the rest of us. (…) What they found is there are a set of principles that actually sort of generalizable tend to be used by experts in field after field after field that help to explain why their practice resolts in them achieving this degree of expertise that others don’t necessarily achieve.
If you want to get better at something, you cannot do it (or is hard to do it) when you are in that autonomous stage. One of the things that experts tend to do, field after field after field, is use strategies to stay out of the autonomous stage.
4 Principles:
1.-One of the principles that experts tend to operate is outside of their comfort zone and study themselves failing.
2.-Another technique that experts often use is they will try to walk in the shoes of somebody who’s more competent than them.
3.-Experts crave and thrive in immediate and constant feedback.
4.-Experts treat what they do like a science. They collect data. They analyze data. They create theories about what works and what don’t, and they test them.
Watch this video to learn strategies for developing expertise in any field: