What is the secret to getting really good at something? As in, how does one shabby Russian tennis club turn out more top 20 women tennis players in a year than the whole USA? What are the secrets of top performers (and their instructors)? Listen to this excerpt from the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. (Great performers are made not born) Rewire your brain with deep practice!

• Deep Practice–Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.

• Ignition–We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.

• Master Coaching–What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.

Have you ever had a professional that excelled at everything in their life but was a painfully slow learner in the cockpit? Want a clue why this is a predictable (and solvable) problem? Read “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” by Chris Argyris. A shorter review is here. Spoiler alert;  these are people who never struggled with anything (everything they tried came easy) and they have never learned *how* to learn properly. And “double-loop learning” is valuable for accelerating everyone’s learning curve.

Double-loop learning is part of action science — the study of how we act in difficult situations. Individuals and organizations need to learn if they want to succeed (or even survive). But few of us pay much attention to exactly how we learn and how we can optimize the process.

If your time allows spend some time reading How People Learn. This is an amazing book for educators is the FREE  from the National Academy Press. You can download as a pdf or read online html (available chapter by chapter in either format) There are some amazing insights in this book for every educator!

Have a great holiday weekend. More tools for educators from SAFE here and next time; stay busy and keep learning!