The properties of deliberate practice have been studied as key components of self-regulation. Effective self-regulation is something you do before, during, and after the work activity itself.
Before the work.
Self-regulation begins with setting goals. These are not big, life-directing goals, but instead are more immediate goals for what you're going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don't set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome - win the order; close out my positions at a profit; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome. For example, instead of just winning the order, their goal might be to focus especially hard on discerning the customer's unstated needs.You can see how this is strongly analogous to the first step of deliberate practice. It isn't precisely the same; you are not designing a practice activity, but rather doing whatever the requirements of work may demand of you that day. But within that activity, the best performers are focused on how they can get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage.
With a goal set, the next prework step is planning how to reach the goal. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They're thinking of exactly, not vaguely, how to get to where they're going. So if their goal is discerning the customer's unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer's crucial issues.
An important part of prework self-regulation centers on attitudes and beliefs. You may be thinking that figuring out specific goals and plans for what you'll be doing every day sounds hard. It is, and doing it consistently requires high motivation. Where does it come from? The best performers go into their work with a powerful belief in what researchers call their self-efficacy - their ability to perform. They also believe strongly that all their work will pay off for them.
During the work.
The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers use during their work is self-observation. For example, ordinary endurance runners in a race tend to think about anything other than what they're doing; it's painful, and they want to take their minds off it. Elite runners, by contrast, focus intensely on themselves; among other things, they count their breaths and simultaneously count their strides in order to maintain certain ratios.Most of us don't do work with a significant physical element, but the same principle applies in purely mental work. The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it's going. Researchers call this metacognition - knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it's an established part of their routine.
Metacognition is important because situations change as they play out. Apart from its role in finding opportunities for practice, it plays a valuable part in helping top performers adapt to changing conditions. When a customer raises a completely unexpected problem in a deal negotiation, an excellent businessperson can pause mentally and observe his or her own mental processes as if from outside: Have I fully understood what's really behind this objection? Am I angry? Am I being hijacked by my emotions? Do I need a different strategy here? What should it be?
In addition, metacognition helps top performers find practice opportunities in evolving situations. Such people can observe their own thinking and ask: What abilities are being taxed in this situation? Can I try out another skill here? Could I be pushing myself a little further? How is it working? Through their ability to observe themselves, they can simultaneously do what they're doing and practice what they're doing.
After the work.
Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. Similarly, the practice opportunities that we find in work won't do any good if we don't evaluate them afterward. These must be self-evaluations; because the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out.Excellent performers judge themselves differently from the way other people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay. The best performers judge themselves against a standard that's relevant for what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare with the performance of competitors they're facing or expect to face; sometimes the compare with the best known performance by anyone in the field. Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practices, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.
If you were pushing yourself appropriately and have evaluated yourself rigorously, then you will have identified errors that you made. A critical part of self-evaluation is deciding what caused the errors. Average performers believe their errors were caused by factors outside their control: My opponent got lucky; the task was too hard; I just don't have any natural ability for this. Top performers, by contrast, believe they are responsible for their errors. Note that this is not just a difference of personality or attitude. Recall that the best performers have set highly specific, technique-based goals and strategies for themselves; they have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want. So when something doesn't work, they can relate the failure to specific elements of their performance that may have misfired. Research on champion golfers, for example, has uncovered precisely this pattern. They're much less likely than average golfers to blame their problems on the weather, the course, or chance factors. Instead they focus relentlessly on their own performance.
The final element of the postwork phase is affected by all the others and affects them in turn. You've been through some kind of work experience - a meeting with your team, a trading session, a quarterly budget review, a customer visit. You had thought about what you wanted to achieve and to improve, ant it went however it went. Now: How do you respond? Odds are strong that the experience wasn't perfect, that parts of it were unpleasant. In those cases, excellent performers respond by adapting the way they act; average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future. That stands to reason. Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their gols. So when things don't turn out perfectly, they attribute the problems to vague forces outside their control. As a result, they are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time. Little wonder that they'd rather just avoid going through anything like it again, which of course means they have zero chance of getting any better.
Since excellent performers go through a sharply different process from the beginning, they can make good guesses about how to adapt. That is, their ideas for how to perform better next time are likely to work. So it's hardly surprising that they are more likely than average performers to repeat the experience rather than avoid it. And when they do repeat it, we can now understand why they go into it with some of the prework traits and attitudes we observed: They approach the job with more specific goals and strategies, since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies; and they're more likely to believe in their own efficacy because their detailed analysis of their own performance is more effective than the vague, unfocused analysis of average performers. Thus their well-founded belief in their own effectiveness helps give them the crucial motivation to press on, powering a self-reinforcing cycle.
Notes
Yellow: key pointsGreen: summary statement
Blue: summary story - it explains why deliberate practice matters
