Cultivating your talent in 17 steps

1. Buy a notebook and write stuff down and reflect on it
2. Watch the skill being performed
3. Choose 5  minutes a day every day to practice
4. Practice alone
5. Think in images
6. Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake
7. Take a nap
8. Read, close the book, write a summary
9. Stop before you are exhausted
10. Just before you sleep, watch a mental movie of you performing your talent
11. Embrace repetition
12. Don’t waste time trying to break bad habits – instead build new ones. Ignore bad habits. Build new habits by gradually increasing the difficulty, little by little.
13. To learn it more deeply, teach it.
14. Give a new skill a minimum of 8 weeks
15. When you get stuck, make a shift.  Do it slower, faster, upside down, inside out.
16. Cultivate your grit
17. Keep your big goals a secret.

After reading ‘The Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle, I decided to write down the main points that I thought were relevant into 17 steps above.  Now I’ve just got to get round to doing it and one day in the future, teaching this to my girls!