When I was in high school I had a great wrestling coach that coached a lot of champions. He was an excellent coach because he knew how to bring the best out of people. My coach had a long history of doing well as a coach. The teams he coached placed in the top four in the state nearly every year. When I started wrestling my freshman year, I was brand new to wrestling. I didn’t have any experience as a wrestler and about half the other wrestlers didn’t have experience either. We were completely new and fresh to wrestling.
Because we were all new to wrestling, my coach had to start out by teaching us the basics. Once he taught us what to do, he made us practice it over and over again. We did repetition after repetition until we were completely warn out. With each repetition we did, our coach watched us very closely. When he saw us do something wrong, he would tell us to do it over again and do it the right way. As he corrected us each time, he taught us a valuable lesson. There is an old saying that, “Practice makes perfect,” but that is false. If you practice the wrong thing over and over again, you will still do it wrong. When you practice something over and over again, you make it into a habit. You cement it into how you do things and it becomes second nature for you to do it again.
The key is “Perfect practice makes perfect.” You must practice the right thing over and over again so that when to have to do it spontaneously, you will do it right again. When you do something perfect over and over again, you are perfect when you do it second nature. My wrestling coach was very successful because he always taught us to do things the right way. As one of his wrestlers, I got in the habit of doing each move right so when I would do move in a match I would do it right. Each move was second nature to me because I had done it the right way so many times before.
How does this apply to you as a leader? What weakness are you trying to improve? Are you practicing doing things correctly to overcome your weaknesses? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!
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