- Stress learning skills all the way to automaticity so that participants can use them automatically–and before they consciously decide to.
- Build up layers of related automated skills so that participants can do complex tasks without actively thinking about them.
- Automate fundamentals, but also look for more complex and subtle skills that may also respond to automation. It’s a false assumption that only simple things can become habits.
David Eagleman says in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain that “a professional athlete’s goal is not to think.” They want to be so practiced that when in the “heat of a game,” they react automatically. Listen up musicians — when in the heat of performance, you want to be so well rehearsed that you don’t even think …. you sing with ease and a naturalness. The skills of breathing, tone production, diction are all rehearsed to automaticity. Too often Eagleman says, our own awareness gets in the way. He talks about being so practiced with a skill that our body executes it and “only afterwards does our mind catch up.” How many times must you practice a skill set to get to this point?