The Perfection of Practice

My daughter, who is 8, refuses to learn how to ride a bike. Point blank refuses. What 8 year old does not know how to ride a bike?! It does not matter how I bribe her . . . she has her mind set on the fact she will be bad at it, and does not want to practice something that she will “fail” at.

We might think this is silly and criticize it a bit . . . but how many of us are like this when it comes to real life and trying something new?

The very definition of “practice” is that you are working to get better at something you aren’t good at yet. When we are young, we don’t mind being bad at things, or at least that’s what is expected.

But as we grow into adulthood, there is a conscious or subconscious expectation that we should be good at things—and quickly.

It has taken me a while to figure out why yoga is called a “practice.” After all, other sports — running or weight-lifting or barre — are never referred to in that way.

But this past Saturday, I was sweating my way through a Vinyasa practice and realized that the teacher was having us do the same set of moves over and over again (for you experienced yogis, this may be extremely obvious!). Each set of moves gets both smoother as you learn the flow and harder as your muscles fatigue.

But one thing the instructor said this past week stuck with me: the mat is the perfect place to practice failure. I’ve fallen out of a pose many times, as did even the more experienced (“stronger” and “better”) practitioners around me.

Without a willingness to fail, our fear will always keep us from trying something new.

Ultimately, we must practice something, anything. Because practice forces us to be okay with failure.

In this particular class, we were flowing from a Warrior II to Airplane to Warrior III (that’s the one where you’re balancing on one foot, one leg reversed, with your arms forward). I managed to do that flow decently well, but stumbled through many of the other exercises. And this wasn’t even Power Vinyasa! I was more than a little humbled.

But after I got home, I was searching on my phone for something and found a random video (probably from one of my kids) of me attempting some yoga moves at home in the Covid era. Trust me, I will not upload these here for the sake of ALL involved! But gosh, four years ago I could barely even do a Tree pose, let alone a Warrior III!

My point is this: practice takes time. And you are probably getting better at these hard things than you think.

I see this every day with the recruiters on my team. They are getting better at having the hard conversation, of asking the question behind the question, and identifying that right fit.

I see it in other business leaders I work with, working through economic uncertainties we did not see coming.

We cannot practice being perfect. But we can get really good at the art of practicing, and failing, and getting back up.