We did it! My wife and I finally managed to get married on the 25th of March. Third time lucky! It was an amazing day and finally I get to be marred to the woman I love. I’m sure some of you are thinking of getting us a wedding gift, my wife and I like the look of those Tesla cars…the model 3… long range all wheel drive… in grey… with black interior… 🙂

In all serious folks, I wasted little time getting back into Deliberate Practice (DP) once I restarted work in early April. So quickly in fact, that I almost made a post earlier than anticipated. The post would have centred on reflections and realisations I had from a client session; in that I had realised some new when it comes to how I respond to client hesitation (for recent context go here). Before these reflections became a post however, I got some feedback from my wife (I can say that now!) and Nathan, my DP coach, on what I had written. They kindly told me to pump the brakes, that the reflections were a little too much like a journal entry and raw for this space – after all this is a blog on Deliberate Practice and not my inner Kanye letting loose on twitter. Lesson here: always be getting feedback!

I do respect my inner Kanye though, he’s an important part of the process, so in future if I need to let him out I’ll start a Deliberate Practice journal, which I keep private.

I have since taken those raw reflections and started to spin them into something more practical. What did you do? (I hear you ask) I took those ‘journal entry’ reflections and I thought them over, I thought them under, I thought them sideways, I thought them on a bus, I though them on a plane… for I do not like green eggs and ham, sam-I-am. All this thinking lead to the decision to go over client session audio recordings and analyse myself, so that I wasn’t just thinking. I’ve now gone from Kanye mode to Batman mode – I stuck to the guns of my process.

While listening to the recordings I made the decision to create a ‘checklist’ of all the behaviours I do when it comes to responding to perceived hesitation or even when I’m just anticipating hesitation. I noticed a category of the checklist called ‘giving reassurance’, which refers to me trying to reassure the client, which had taken my interest the most:

Now of course I don’t ALWAYS engage in these behaviours in response to hesitation. There are times where I call out to the client what I’m observing when it comes to hesitation, I ask them to describe the feeling alongside and explore where the hesitation is coming from. The reassuring behaviours can slow down that exploration happening, so the hesitation can became a clog in the pipe, making it trickier to move forward.

What happened after I wrote the checklist? I made the decision that I was going to focus on ‘catching’ the checklist behaviours in my sessions. I’m wondering what happens if I practice this for a while, to see if I could actually learn to catch the reassuring behaviours.

What does that look like? I think I can show you. There’s a Formula One driver by the name of Pierre Gasly, before each race he does a ‘tennis ball routine’ with his trainer. I’m guessing this is to help get him into a state of flow and hone his reflexes before the race start, you can see a video of him doing the routine for 15 seconde here (don’t worry about the warning, the ‘watch on youtube’ link below works):

It’s not just watching Pierre catch tennis balls that resonates with me, I’m not a Labrador, but it’s watching his level of concentration and how he and his trainer are working in perfect sync -that is where I go with my Deliberate Practice.

What I see happening in my sessions is the ‘tennis balls’ are my reassuring behaviours from the checklist, I’m Pierre and the client stands in place of the trainer. I’m catching those reassuring behaviours and every time bringing the ball back to the client. Every. Time.

Knowing me, you can bet I’ve already started down the path, testing ‘catching the tennis ball’ in my sessions. I’m starting to see some interesting and positive results, but I’m going to save talking about that for a Part 2. I want to give myself the opportunity to get feedback on what’s happening from Nathan at our next coaching session at the end of the month, before I share more. Tune in next time to find out where the story goes next!

Till next time and as always – thanks for reading.

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