I had this annoying habit of using fillers like ‘you know’, ‘I mean’, and ‘right’ while talking. But accidentally, I got rid of these fillers. And the way I did that is also how you can get better at anything.
This is what happened: At the beginning of the pandemic, I was doing a lot of Zoom sessions for HabitStrong bootcamps. And whenever I saw myself on the screen spouting ‘you know’, ‘actually’, or some gem like that, I would cringe.
The feedback was instant and literally, in your face.
If you keep repeating something that makes you cringe, it gets wired into your non-conscious brain (somewhat like Pavlovian conditioning).
In a few months, I found that without even trying, I would replace these filler words with silence. And for any audience, when the speaker has nothing to say, the most pleasing sound is silence.
Inadvertently, what I followed is a 3-step improvement cycle:
1. Make a mistake.
2. Get quick and precise feedback.
3. Correct the mistake and retry.
And you can use this process to improve at anything. In fact, this is the key idea in ‘deliberate practice’, an idea propounded by Anders Ericsson, a pioneer in the study of high performance.
What you need is micro-granular feedback, be it from a coach, mentor, colleague, or even a zoom call.
If you keep fixing the mistakes after each feedback, in a few months, your skill level will be unrecognizable.
– Rajan