Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

This morning, as every morning I woke to the sounds of my 1 year old god-daughter clanging about in the living room next to my bedroom. I rose, wandered to the bathroom, and re-appeared in the living room doorway to rapturous smiles from said god-daughter. (One of the best bits of my day.) During the usual routine of getting ready for work I was interrupted by a rather excited housemate who came knocking on my door with news, “quick, come and see what M can do. She can point to the mouse in the book. It’s her new thing. It’s brilliant!”. Dutifully I wandered into the living room and observed M point to the mouse in her book as her Dad repeatedly asked her “Where’s the mouse?” as he turned the page.

Later in a quiet moment, M and I were alone together. On impulse I sat down with her on the floor. We had another go at the “point at the mouse” game, and again M scanned the pages and pointed to the little mouse hiding behind things in the pictures. How did she learn this? I don’t especially remember hours of mouse pointing in the house. Why a mouse? How does she understand “mouse” when she can’t even say it yet?

Not content with the mouse feat, on impulse I started the game of “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” intending on teaching M to recognise the different parts of her body. After about 5 mins, we both got bored and moved on to joyfully building and knocking down bricks.

On the bus in to work this morning I returned to the mouse recognition game and it got me thinking… How did M learn “mouse”? How did M learn pointing at “mouse” was the required response to “where’s the mouse”?

As young learners we learn by repetition. Learning by repetition is hard work. It requires determined intent. It requires consistent commitment. It requires absolute dedication. When was the last time as an adult I had that amount of intent, commitment & dedication to something I wanted to learn?

Perhaps last year when I lost lots of weight, but it’s creeping back on so my consistent commitment and absolute dedication are questionable. Perhaps when I learnt to scuba dive last summer, but it’s not something that I do everyday so again I’d question my dedication.
What about in my leadership? When was the last time that I learnt a new skill or behaviour and really put in the work to make it part of my everyday vocabulary and repertoire. Hmm…? Now that is a tough question…

All this reminded me of a really interesting article I read on the net “Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership” by George Ambler on Wednesday, November 1, 2006. http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2006/11/01/passion-and-deliberate-practice-results-in-great-leadership/ The article reflects on the work of a psychologist at Florida State University, Anders Ericsson, on what makes a superior performer a super performer:
“But it isn’t magic, and it isn’t born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery…… These people don’t necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort.”

Passion is just one of the magic ingredients but you can’t make it happen without the hard graft. According to most self-help / self-improvement programmes it takes 21 days of consistent repetition to form a new habit and the minimum effort to form the new habit is 15 mins a day. (There are lots of resources on the net about this. The best summary I have found is via Google Questions http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/786165.html )

So the ultimate question for me is, if M can master “mouse”, then what leadership skill or behaviour could I master with just 15 mins investment per day?
R x