I’m facilitating a one day event for the Scottish Association of Transactional Analysis on August 20th 2016. The day will be exploring some ideas that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year to with some of the parallels between achieving (or struggling to achieve) therapeutic change and the challenge of learning complex practical skills, such as mastery of a musical instrument, a sport, or a second language.
My goal for the event is to explore the lessons therapists and their clients can borrow from the learning of complex practical skills, such as performing music, playing sport, or gaining a second language.
In music, sport, and second language learning, we know that acquiring skills takes deliberative practice. In order to establish new grooves, ones that we can rely on even when under pressure, we have to repeat them many times, often slowly, and we have to repeat them right.
Teachers and coaches have much experience of how unhelpful habits can impede a student’s learning and growth. And they know a lot about what it takes to unlearn bad habits and replace them with new and more productive ones. They also have a good understanding of how new learning that feels secure in rehearsal or practice, can collapse in the face of performance pressure.
If these ideas are of interest and you can’t make the event, then I very much hope to be writing some of them up here or elsewhere.
Update (Mon 22nd August 2016)
Slides from the day. Some of these won’t make much sense out of context! I’ve also put up the handout from the “plinth” activity.
Learning New Life Grooves (slides)
Activity #3 – Standing on a Box (handout for “plinth” activity)
