Dealing with emotions: Finding joy in boring practice

What does practice feel like - finding joy in the “grind”

Practice and the learning associated with it is not just a mechanical step by step process. It is also an emotional process. And being able to expect, deal with and even manage the emotional load is as important as managing the cognitive load.

There are broadly two sources of emotions associated with practice:

1. Feelings about progress and skill level
2. Feelings during and about the practice activities

These are often intertwined but it is useful to think of them separately.

Progress curve emotional rollercoaster

Being good at something is not just something that happens. We grow a skill almost like another limb. It becomes a part of us, our identity and most importantly our comfort zone. Pushing outside of that comfort zone is by definition uncomfortable.

We feel emotions when we enter a new field and we feel emotions when we try to improve.

Beginner shock

It is no fun to be a beginner. You may enjoy the novelty of learning something new for a while but soon you will start to feel like a foreigner lost in a far away land without a guide. Nothing makes sense, you feel like a child or you may start even questioning your own self worth.

Many of the emotions people go as they try to acquire a new skill or move to the next level are very similar to what people go through with culture shock. They not only feel bad, they feel physically and mentally tired, they withdraw and they may even develop a hatred of the new thing.

This may sound extreme, but many people who gave up something often did it because it did not make them feel good about themselves. The initial excitement wore off and all that remained was drudgery. The difference between those who succeeded and those who gave up is that those who succeeded found a way to cope with the negative emotions and in the best case found a way to enjoy the process practice.

Here the lesson is:

Plateau comfort and regression stress

Reaching a plateau is another source of negative feelings. The most common strategy for coping with this is that people think there’s no room to improve. They reached a sufficient level and they do not need to improve. This is probably true for most things in life - we can only improve at so many things. But it is not true in absolute terms. We can always improve at anything we do in one way or another. Even people at the top of their game (or perhaps especially those people) are always looking for ways to improve.

But another thing that happens is even more important and frequent source of why people don’t like leaving the comfort zones of their plateaus is that the first thing that happens as you try to improve some aspect of your performance is that you first get worse at it.

Sometimes this is obvious. For example, I would like to improve my typing by using a more efficient control of the keys. What will happen when I embark on a learning programme - my typing speed will decrease. I am happy with my typing speed - the main reason I want to type more efficiently is to reduce stress on my hands - so I don’t want to go through the pain. The immediate gain is too removed and the work involved too extensive.

But I will take the time to learn keyboard shortcuts of any new application I’m using because I know the benefit is huge and I have a good system for learning them, so the cost of time and effort is small. Many people find that too much work and will forego the benefit.

But sometimes the regression is hidden. I’m experiencing a change to my routines and I am starting to perceive the limits of my current performance. This causes more general tiredness and stress - so my performance suffers as a result in the short term - or very often the perceived effort of anything I do increases and I feel like my performance is less even when it is improving on any objective measure. That’s one of the reasons logging and keeping track of feedback is so important.

Practice activities or Love the grind

The most important thing to know about effective practice is that it mostly is not inherently enjoyable. In fact, not only is it not enjoyable, it can be emotionally draining and dispiriting as we saw above. When we talk about learning being fun, we are often talking about motivation. But the process of learning cannot be all fun.

Repeating something over and over while focusing on doing it as best as possible does not sound like fun because it is not. But it is possible to find enjoyment in it. Many people say they enjoy the pain of exercise because they know it is helping, they know they will feel better after, they like the structure it gives their life, or because they found joy in the moment.

Those who are lucky enough to find the joy on their own will be more likely to succeed. But that joy can be trained with reflection. Many of us did not start by liking coffee or wine but ‘developed a taste for it’. This was not by accident. We saw people enjoying these things and tried to replicate it. And most people succeeded in this. The same can be done with practice.

One surprisingly powerful way to develop enjoyment is mantras - short statements you develop and repeat to yourself while you are performing the activity. It could be as simply as saying to yourself “I’m enjoying this” or “this is getting better”. Many athletes use mantras during performance as a way of focusing and overcoming issues. One of the strategies they use, is prepare and practice their mantras ahead of time to get used to them and try them in context. Yes, even mantras can be practiced and improved.

Repeating a mantra to yourself while writing or speaking would not always be helpful, but you can use them when you are tired or don’t feel like getting started. They don’t have to be words. They can be images or sounds you bring up in your head. Different people have different things that work for them, don’t feel like you have to use exactly the same thing - try what works for you (and, yes, practice it).

Studying vs practicing

Another insight on the question of practice and emotion comes from a surprising place - speed cubing. T Perm a champion speed cuber who makes instructional videos on speed cubing on YouTube observed that he sees two types of players with different preferences [REF]:

1. Studying: Learning new and new ways of doing something
2. Practicing: Repeating existing ways and getting really good at them

He associated the former with older players and the latter with older ones. His claim is that practicing is usually more successful because if you only study without practice, you never develop the speed you need. Those who study new algorithms in speed cubing ignore aspects like improving their finger position on those they already know, or speed of recognition of existing patterns.

Both are necessary to success but without practice, the studying is not enough. This was echoed by a teacher of bluegrass [REF] who observed a similar distinction in musicians and pointed out that this difference has an emotional dimension. Some people are more comfortable learning new concepts and find the ‘grind’ of repeating and improving one thing too tedious. But they end up with a large musical vocabulary they cannot use.

While this is not intrinsically linked to age, we can see that the older and more removed from the school age, the less we would be inclined to repeat something over and over. The sort of repetition that is required for successful practice just pushes us too far out of our emotional comfort zone.

Benchmarking emotions and practice

Most of the time we only see expert performers at their best where we see them perform activities that seem far outside of what is imaginable for us. They make it look easy. We often admire them for the ease with which they seemingly do what they do.

But we are confusing ease for fluency. Fluency is not easy, it takes a lot of work. Luckily, in the age of YouTube and podcasts we have much more access to the experiences of elite performers as they share what they do and how with the rest of the world. And the message is clear: they suffer, they have doubts, they get tired, they hit plateaus.

We understand that they have to put in hours of practice but never consider how they feel during it. This is important. Your feelings while you are learning are the most likely reason you won’t practice. You may supress them by avoiding it altogether or you will be surprised by them and think you are doing something wrong.

It is important to benchmark your emotions - find out about what people in your field say, take it seriously when they talk about feelings. Here’s a personal example.

Most people would consider me good at learning foreign languages. I can usually get to a a very basic conversational level after a few weeks that seems to take many people a few months. People say things ‘you have a good memory’ or ‘you are good at languages’. That is not true at all. I have figured out a way to practice a language in context (using many of the techniques above). I am confident that I can do this with any language given enough incentive. However, it is a painful process. To help others understand it, I once kept a diary of the first two months of my learning Albanian [REF] and you can see how painful and frustrating the process was. I was not as deliberate about it as I could have been but the difference between me and others around me was that I was doing the work and I’d had the confidence that it would work out. The reason I kept the diary was to set a benchmark for what is possible but more important what it feels like. The message was, learning can be done even by somebody who actually does not have a good memory or (as my school teachers can attest), is not good at studying languages. They were not always feeling positive.

So, if you are feeling negative emotions during the learning process, you can be confident that others are feeling the same.