Effective Practice Is An Art

Shout out to Natalie for sharing an awesome article in the private Arena Ready Facebook group on Wednesday - it's titled "My 11-year old son auditioned at Juilliard, and we both learned a lot about how top performers practice" (click for the full article).  In an very successful (and well played, I might add) gesture of flattery Natalie cited the article as being "like a greatest hits mash-up of Arena Ready's most inspirational blog posts, applied to becoming an 11-year concert cellist."

Aw shucks. Your check is in the mail, Natalie (P.S. how awesome is it to have Natalie back at Arena Ready... and now Bob C, too!?).  But seriously, it's a great read and we can only hope to inspire our athlete members as much as this article (and Natalie's posting of it to our community) inspired Sarah and me. 

Here's a cool excerpt (full article located here):

The first 3,000 hours of cello lessons are learning how to recognize a wrong note and stop and fix it. And now he has to learn how to recover from failure, very quickly, so when he plays a wrong note in competition he can move on immediately. Even though I don't know if he's sharp or flat, I do know that if he's sulking about making a mistake he can't focus on not making the mistake.

Resilience is about being able to get back up on your feet on your own, so I teach him not to rely on other people to prop him up. "You don't need a teacher to tell you how great you are. Tell that to yourself. Right now."

It's a hard concept. On different days I tell it to him differently. And then I watch hopefully, because I tell that to people I coach all the time and I know it's hard, even for adults...

... It's impossible to put all your energy into something really difficult if everything is riding on the result. The people who are the best at reaching big goals have an obsessive drive toward the goal, but also, they are able to break down the process of meeting the goal into tiny, bite-sized pieces and then take pleasure in completing each part.

When someone is unable to relish the small steps, they just stop, because process starts to seem hopeless if you constantly focus on the end. You have to have a proclivity for hard work (which might be as crucial and inheritable as talent) combined with the ability to take joy in the process itself...

-Penelope Trunk

WOD for 07-13-17:

AMRAP 16 Minutes:

100 Double Unders

80 Walking Lunges

60 Kettlebell Swings @ 70/53 lbs

40 Handstand Push-ups

20 Kettlebell Sumo Deadlight High Pulls