Correct practice makes perfect

Practice makes perfect. That is if you are practicing the correct thing and most importantly adapt the correct thing to your personal style with your personal stamp. My wife being an avid baker will get lots of request from people for her recipes. Even if she shares them, a comment that frequently comes back is, why doesn’t it turn out like hers? That is where practising the right thing and internalising it to your style makes a difference. Often, I would ask her for her “secret sauce” where actually there is none. More often than not, estimation seem to play a big role in her baking and cooking. So besides her recipes, it is her experience and a deep understanding of the art that makes a difference.

What does this have to do with the business world? Everything. With all the business disruptions coming with new tech, new ideas and new capabilities. Businesses are pressured to adopt these changes to future proof their business. In the baking world, there’s option of retries. But in the business world, we do not have the luxury of time. Some of these changes involves regulatory requirements like data privacy, better customer engagement with collaboration, timely and accurate decision making with data analysis etc. are key changes that business need to adopt. The key is than how to transit and adopt all these key changes effectively with minimum disruptions. Not negating the importance of process and tools, this is where we enable the people to embrace all these changes effectively and in a timely manner.

This is where a coach, trainer or facilitator comes into the picture. With all these changes, we are learning and building new muscles daily. If we do not put it into practice, those muscles will go away. It will be back to business as usual and the people will go back to doing things as it were. Going down the path of least resistance is the norm. Which is to do things within our comfort zone. As we all know, if we keep taking the same action, we will always get the same results, just that it may not be the result we want.

My latest engagement with a NZ company embraces all these 3 elements, training where it gives them the knowledge they need. Facilitated learning where we incorporate the experience of the staff and give them the space to internalise. Lastly, coaching, where I will enable them to practice the correct things to deliver the key results. From the feedback and recommendations I am receiving it definitely had been a good start to that journey. Next, would be the showcase of results as proof point to the effectiveness of the engagement. As my social selling mentor Tim Hughes and Adam Gray says, if you do exactly what I tell you, you will definitely see results. That is the guide of putting the correct practice in place.

Ending off, it is not just practice makes perfect, it is the correct practice that will make perfect.