Train to Ingrain
Why is so much reinforcement needed to ingrain a skill?
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Why is so much reinforcement needed to ingrain a leadership skill?
There’s a huge difference between learning a concept and putting that concept into practice. It’s the difference between “knowing” and “doing.” By doing, we mean comfortably using a skill over and over as a habitual behavior pattern. That kind of consistent, automatic behavior, of course, is the goal of all skill development programs. But achieving that result means that a neural pathway has established itself in the brain.
And that takes time. When a behavior is performed over and over, this action stimulates filaments on the end of brain cells (neurons), called dendrites, to grow until they connect to other brain cells related to the behavior. With enough repetition, the end result is a fully connected neural pathway that enables the skill. This is why so much practice is needed to cause a skill to feel like second nature.
If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of Tiger Woods, you probably know that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. At the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of changes in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better, but Tiger struggled all year, winning only one tournament and finished fourth in total winnings. But at the end of 2004, his game started to come together for him, and he won two post-season tournaments back-to-back. Here’s the point: Tiger Woods is one of the all-time great professional golfers, and he practices hitting balls several hours every day, but even Tiger had to invest an entire year of persistent effort to ingrain the improvements to his game.
So excellent instruction isn’t enough. Even after the best training sessions money can buy, at first a golf skill or a leadership skill will feel uncomfortable and difficult, and initially you won’t be able to do it well. The brain hasn’t had the time to grow and connect the neural pathways that enable you to carry out this behavior in a comfortable, routine way. And when doing something feels awkward and doesn’t produce the desired results, you’re likely to fall back on old, comfortable habits.
This is why an extended period of practice, practice and more practice is needed to ingrain the new behaviors introduced in training. Because leadership skills are more complex than golf skills, the period of reinforcement could be many months.
- Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., CEO, Performance Support Systems
- Dave Erdman, President, Vital Learning Corporation
