How To Get Better At The Things You Care About

Most of us go through life trying our best. Could this attitude be holding us back?

In his illuminating Ted Talk, Eduardo Briceño explains how the most effective people deliberately alternate between two zones: the Learning Zone and the Performance Zone.

In the Learning Zone, our goal is to improve — we expect to make mistakes, knowing we will learn from them. In the Performance Zone, our goal is to execute at our best, working hard to minimize mistakes. The Learning Zone maximizes our growth while the Performance Zone maximizes our immediate performance. However, in competitive business and educational environments, we are often required to spend our time in chronic high-stake high-performance mode which hinders our growth, and ironically, over the longterm, also our performance.

The solution, Briceño suggests, is to find “low-stakes islands in an otherwise high-stakes sea.”

At SpeechSkills, we emphasize the importance of practicing communication skills in very low-risk settings – like chatting with the barista at the coffee bar, or having lunch with friends, or interacting with the vendor at the farmer’s market. By practicing in these low-stakes environments, your skills become habits that follow you in the door for your high-stakes conversations.