Learning New Skills

MUSINGS FROM A COACH - 15 OCTOBER '24

I don't hang out on social media at all, but I watch a lot of YouTube - both for learning and entertainment as I follow quite a few people. One channel I follow is Blacktail Studio. The owner, Cam, is a fantastic woodworker and hilarious. Honestly, his monthly videos are incredibly entertaining and relaxing, so check him out: https://www.youtube.com/@BlacktailStudio/videos

During the latest episode, Cam talks about how he's constantly learning new skills and how this can be frustrating. He put up this hand-drawn chart shown above at the beginning of this article. On the "Y" axis (going up and down), he has TIME with "For Freaking Ever" at the top and "Reasonable Time" at the bottom. For the "X" axis, he has "Number of Attempts" increasing from left to right.

His point is that when trying new things, especially skilled things, it can take forever to complete the skill on the first couple of tries. But over time, your skill improves and you become quite proficient. In other words, with practice comes efficiency.

This is a great way to look at any new sport we may be starting. Let's take swimming, for example. It seems to take forever to just learn how to "not drown" and swim forward. But the more attempts we make (with proper instruction), our progress increases and the time to learn new concepts becomes more reasonable.  

This requires a couple of things from the athlete: commitment to frequency and patience with progress.

I often tell athletes that when we're learning a new skill, it's helpful to know that we must go through three steps to become competent in that skill:1 - We must learn the skill. That means understand it and do it.

2 - We must memorize the skill. Now that we know it, we must remember it to repeat it.

3 - We must get fit to repeat it. We know it, we memorized it, and now we have to get stronger to be able to repeat it over and over.

Ultimately it's up to us to commit and be patient with ourselves. Oh, and make sure you learn the right way the first time!

Gratefully, Mark CEO Team MPI