Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (24 page)

We’ve all heard this advice a million times: “Take it one step at a time.” There’s a reason why we keep hearing it: it’s spot-on accurate.

The best performers realize that the key to success is breaking down an overall goal into components and focusing on perfecting the components rather than the end result. Focus on the process, not the goal. To take an easy example, musicians will practice a fragment of a piece again and again until they have mastered it, then move on to the next fragment, and the next, and so on. Only after they’ve mastered all the sections do they string them together and play the whole piece. Fluency happens after each component is mastered individually. Only then are we able to process them all simultaneously and perform them with excellence.
That’s
what gives rise to greatness.

Now let’s take a less conventional example, like working on a relationship. Your overall goal is for the relationship to be happy and healthy. But there are a lot of components to a happy, healthy relationship: you need to know how to listen, how to communicate, how to compromise, how to forgive, and so on. Let’s say you’re a good listener but a lousy communicator—this is where you start practicing.

Evaluate the weakness. Do you keep everything bottled up and expect telepathy when it comes to others understanding your needs? Do you get defensive and start yelling when you should remain calm and talk things through? Do you put others on the defensive without meaning to by expressing yourself in “you” statements rather than “I” statements? (As in “You are an inconsiderate jerk for not calling to tell me you would be late,” rather than “When you don’t let me know you are running late, it makes me feel worried about your safety and insignificant to you as well.”)

Breaking down your goal lets you focus your energy on the weaker areas that are holding you back. Once you have mastered
one weak spot, you’re ready to move on to the next. Tiger Woods smartly uses target practice to enhance his golf game. He doesn’t just play one round of golf after another. He picks a shot he’s struggling with—say, hitting the ball out of a sand trap from an incredibly difficult line—and works on that specific shot until it improves. This strategy of breaking down the things we need to practice into individual components makes the overall goal of improvement less daunting and more digestible and helps us make the best use of our time. By just doing one small thing at a time, we systematically eliminate the obstacles that hold us back, rather than getting overwhelmed by everything we need to get better at.

Okay, so now you’re thinking,
Great, Jillian. Break down our weaknesses and work on the stuff we suck at, but how?
Read on—the answer lies in using immediate feedback and repetition.

GET LOOPED IN

I covered this subject earlier in this chapter when I talked about the benefits of having a mentor. But I’m hitting it again because a key principle of practice is that we must learn from what we do, and the quickest way to do that is to seek out immediate feedback from someone with proven expertise. That way you know right away when you are off course, you learn from your mistakes, and you bring improved strategy to your methods.

You may be thinking,
I don’t need outside feedback. I know when I’m on the right track and when I’m not
. If I had a dollar for every person whose life was a mess who said to me, “I don’t need therapy, I know what my problems are,” I’d be kickin’ it with my neighbor Bill Gates.

But the truth is, often we are too close to a situation to see it for what it really is. How many times have you thought you nailed a job interview only to find out someone else got the gig? Or been dumped by a boyfriend when you thought things were
going really well? Sometimes it really helps to get the advice of a friend, coach, or mentor to help us figure out where we are falling short and how we can fix it.

Let’s take a few hypothetical examples. If Tiger Woods is struggling to hit a ball out of a sand trap, a coach might recognize that he is using the wrong golf club for the shot or possibly that he needs to angle his body differently. If you’re not advancing at work, a colleague or supervisor might be able to tell you about a mistake you’re making that’s holding you back. A loved one might point out something that is straining your relationship. This type of feedback saves us hours of frustration and the pain of failure.

Think about it—people don’t try to learn sports on their own. Most CEOs, when they are facing a challenge, call in advisers. Doctors spend years interning under seasoned professionals. And so on. Seeking real-time feedback from an expert can save you much time and struggle and increases your chances of success exponentially. I have been able to help so many people break through years of diet mistakes in just a few short minutes, simply by analyzing what they’ve been doing, pointing out the mistakes, and giving them the proper information to apply so they can lose weight.

Again, whom you seek advice from will depend on what area you’re looking to improve in, but common sense will usually dictate whom to get feedback from. Sometimes it’s obvious. If you want to learn how to get in shape, get a trainer. If you’re looking to climb the ladder at work with an eye to getting a better job and salary, then ask your boss what you could be doing better. If you want to improve your relationship with a loved one, ask what you could be doing differently, or discuss the problem with a therapist or a trusted friend.

In almost everything you could want to do, there’s a way to get feedback from somebody who knows more than you do—all you have to do is toughen up and have the courage to listen. No one really likes to hear criticism, even if it’s constructive. But at the end of the day, you’re talking about a momentary sting versus
the anguish and confusion of repeating the same mistakes again and again. Man up. Be
grateful
for the knowledge. Take it to heart and soar.

Now, you don’t have to, nor should you, rely on other people as your sole source of feedback. Self-assessment is going to play a big part in your progress as well. This brings us to our next step, which even has a fancy name: metacognition.

LET ME THINK ON IT:
UNDERSTANDING METACOGNITION

Metacognition
is one of the current buzzwords in the field of educational psychology and is often defined as thinking about thinking. I know right now you are thinking,
Huh?
But all it means for our purposes is being brave enough to step outside yourself and evaluate your behaviors and actions honestly, so that you can make improvements. In Step Two, I hammered into you that you must learn from your failures in order to improve. Metacognition is paramount in helping you do that.

Metacognitive skills include planning and selecting strategies, analyzing their effectiveness, correcting errors, and changing methods when necessary. Those with greater metacognitive skills are more successful in their endeavors. Period. The good news is that we can all cultivate these skills, and here I’ll tell you how.

There are two parts to it. The first is taking responsibility. I’ve touched on responsibility in other parts of the book, but it applies here, too. One of the traits of highly successful people is their belief that they take responsibility for their mistakes. They don’t blame their setbacks on the other guy getting lucky, or on genetic inferiority, or on a freak of circumstance; instead they shine a light on those setbacks to see what they can learn from them and how they can adapt their performance to avoid similar setbacks in the future. Now, for this you have to learn to become aware of your actions in a way you probably haven’t been up until now.
As you practice, you must be conscious and honest with yourself about where you are struggling and what you need to do better. You can monitor yourself by asking a few simple questions after every practice:

What did I do well?

What could I have done better?

Was there a turning point in my performance for better or worse? And if so, what were the direct causes or surrounding circumstances?

How did my thoughts, emotions, and reactions contribute to my success or failure?

Look at your answers impersonally and judiciously. Take out your journal, or go online to my website, but write the facts down. Make note of the problems, as well as the ambiguities and inconsistencies, that are holding you back. Then jot down how you can start to deal with them. Once you start thinking impartially about your work, you’ll be amazed how your mind will jump to the challenge of figuring out where and how to improve a weakness. This type of self-monitoring allows you to zero in on the areas that need strengthening when you don’t have a coach or a mentor.

The second key to metacognition is to stay present and maintain concentration. Since life doesn’t always play out the way we expect it to, it’s important to be aware and to monitor our thoughts and actions so we can easily adapt to changing circumstances. If something that is out of your control goes wrong, how are you going to change your game plan to avoid being torpedoed? In adverse circumstances, the last thing you want to do is act on impulse or emotion or, even worse, not react at all. By slowing down, taking in the situation, and thinking through the choices you are about to make, you help ensure that the outcome will be in your favor.

On
The Biggest Loser
, you can see this at work. The most successful contestants are those who are always thinking, processing, and applying the information that Bob and I give
them. While others are unraveling, zoning out, or complaining about the pain, these contestants stay present and think about their breathing, focus on their form, visualize their goals, and remind themselves why they are there and what their greater purpose is. It’s this kind of thinking that separates the good from the great.

As you become more skilled at using metacognitive strategies, you will gain confidence and become more independent as a learner, and more successful in your practice.

As if taking criticism from others and giving it to ourselves weren’t hard enough, once you have figured out the areas where you need work and the activities you need to do, you must do them over and over again. Remember, I never said this would be easy. Possible, yes; easy, no. This is probably why so few people achieve greatness. It’s tough! When I meet couples who have been together for years and years, one of the first questions I always ask is, “How do you guys do it?” Without fail, every single one of them has the same answer: “It’s hard! We work at it!”

Success is always within your reach. How badly do you want it? If your answer is “A LOT,” then get ready for the next step, which is about repetition, repetition, repetition.

REPEAT AFTER ME

Repetition is the fourth critical part of target practice. You can know what changes you need to make and where your weaknesses lie, but unless you practice over and over, you’re simply not going to see more than incremental improvement. It takes a lot of time and enormous effort to become a master. Some theorists have even posited the “ten-year rule,” which states (as its name implies) that it takes a decade of work in anything before one can truly be a master. Even child prodigies, such as Carl Friedrich Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music, and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier
and working harder and smarter than others. Studies show that world-class experts, whether chess prodigies or musical virtuosi, practice at least three to five hours a day. WOW.
*

A big part of practicing successfully has to do with that substance that’s produced in the brain, myelin. Every time you practice something, you are literally carving neurological pathways in your brain, and as you repeat it, it becomes more automatic.

This process can work for you when you are practicing things the right way, but it can work against you if you are practicing them the wrong way. That’s why target practice is so important. It allows you to work on perfecting mistakes as opposed to ingraining them. In addition, target practice requires that you constantly push yourself just out of your comfort zone (i.e., working on the stuff you suck at) to continue improving your abilities. In other words, once you have mastered something, it’s time to get out of your comfort zone and practice a new aspect of your skill that has been challenging you.

Think of it like this. If a child’s goal is mobility, first he would master crawling, then walking, jogging, running, and sprinting, and eventually even hill sprints. No one is meant to repeat crawling over and over again. We all need to continue practicing and repeating, but only when we are in our “learning zone”—working on things that are just outside our reach.

Now, a final word: be patient with yourself, and don’t be afraid. You don’t have to lose yourself in pursuit of your goal—whether it’s to find a life partner, make some money doing something you love, or anything else you might want. I’m just pointing out the importance of putting in the amount and type of work that comes with achieving something you want. Sure, it’s daunting, but it’s also empowering. It literally changes you from the inside out. Let’s look a little deeper at these physiological effects by briefly exploring the concept of cognitive mapping.

MAP IT OUT

Research has shown that behavior is deeply ingrained in actual physical pathways in the brain. All of your beliefs and habits, everything making up your mental reality, is contained in these neural connections. Each time you take an action or think a thought, it is communicated to your neurons via tiny electrochemical messages.

The first time you have an experience or learn something new, a new pathway is created. Then the next time you have that experience, your brain will search to see if you have experienced it before. If you have, the experience will follow the same pathway. This is where the myelination effect I discussed earlier comes into play. The more often you engage in a behavior or think a thought, the stronger the neural pathway holding that thought or behavior will become. This is how a thought or action becomes habit—a habit is more a cemented highway than a pathway. That’s why the repetition aspect of specific practice is so important. It helps create strong highways that your brain can map to make the skill set associated with your goal habitual and automatic.