I listened to a Ted Talk tonight while doing some parental leave prep: How to Get Better At The Things You Care About.
Description: Working hard but not improving? You’re not alone. Eduardo Briceño reveals a simple way to think about getting better at the things you do, whether that’s work, parenting or creative hobbies. And he shares some useful techniques so you can keep learning and always feel like you’re moving forward.
In the talk, he talks about how highly effective people or teams deliberately alternate between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone. We get stuck when we spend all our time in the performance zone and it eventually, ironically, hurts our performance.
This is all about a growth mindset and deliberate time for practice and learning, something we talk about in my work but it’s the first thing that seems to fall the wayside when we’re busy. We perform . . . without learning how to get better at our performance.
It’s definitely worth the 11 minutes to digest the information or remind yourself of it. I have little bells going off in my head that more accountability for growth development could actually help with some of our productivity problems in my workplace. I loathe the “just work more and harder” trap we can fall into. I’d rather work smarter and less. Productivity — or rather constant learning and growing so you can improve when you’re actually performing — is the key.
With Love,
Natalie