Leadership Training Chapter 3 – Your Path to Mastery
Chapter 3 – Your Path to Mastery
How do You Get Really, Really Good at Something?
Over the ages all manner of philosophers, mystics, poets, and writers have looked at the path to mastery. For everyone who has written about it, there are probably many times more opinions on how you can go through the process in life to become good at something.
I want to take a high level, 50,000 foot view of this, and look at a path to mastery that everybody can do – a path you can present to your mentees, trainees, coworkers, your friends, anyone.
The Goal
For our purposes, the goal is being a great trainer, a great mentor, a great educator. We want to get to the point where we can effortlessly teach. There are two parts of this puzzle. One is to become a master at the intellectual property, or content, that you plan to teach. The second is to become equally adept at communicating that information. In other words, know your content, and know how to transfer it to someone.
The Steps
The path to mastery occurs over four steps:
- Discovery
- Training
- Practice
- Teaching
When I discovered this, I took a long piece of paper and drew a line across the bottom, spanning the whole page, maybe three feet/one meter wide. On the right side I wrote where I started. On the left side I wrote where I am today.
To run through this exercise I had to choose something that I felt I had already mastered, so I chose aviation. I’m a skilled pilot and flight instructor – I flew competition aerobatics for many years, I taught in a manufacturer’s training program for high performance aircraft, and I trained a lot of very advanced pilots. I remember sitting at an airport training a competition aerobatic pilot in his
single seat airplane. I was on the ground with a radio critiquing his loops, rolls, and other aerobatic maneuvers and I had this flash of, “How did I ever get to this point as a flight instructor?”
The initial page looked something like this:
Discovery
It’s a big jump, from first flight to aerobatic instructor. What is the process of discovery? I was interested in flying but did not know much about it. I had a job where I was traveling a lot. I thought flying would be great, it will save me a lot of time. So I went to the local airport and got a little 30 minute demonstration flight. We flew around in circles and by the time we got back I was hooked. I immediately signed up for lessons.
That was the discovery part, something that piqued my interest and got me focused on trying something new. I had no expectations of being an airline pilot or being a professional pilot. I just thought, “This is fun. Let me try it.” That’s discovery.
Training
Very close on the paper to the discovery stage is the training stage. This is where I started flight training. I met my instructor and began ground school. I spent the early instruction time flying straight and level, then shallow turns, then learning to fly slowly, eventually learning how to land. That’s the initial training part.
Although it is possible to skip this step – and in many fields people try to skip the training step and learn on their own – in no field is it more obvious that you need a training step than in aviation. Training not only shortens the process, it makes everything dramatically safer. After several months of training, I eventually received a private pilot certificate.
My paper looked like this:
Practice
Next is practice. Practice is about proficiency. The practice stage is as important as training. If you try to skip the practice steps, advancement in training becomes almost impossible because you never master your current level and likely you will practice bad skills. Training Practice Training Practice Training Practice.
I became a private pilot then I did some practice and then I became an instrument pilot. Then I did some more practice and I became a commercial pilot. Then I practiced until I felt I was ready to take this to a much higher level.
Teaching
I got better and better at the skills around flying and situational awareness. I built an airplane, which anchored my understanding of aerodynamics. I taught a lot of very advanced flying. Only then, as an instructor, I really began to learn to fly. The training and practice got me proficient, but the teaching took me to a much higher level.
In training, it’s generally true that if the student learns ten things, the trainer learns 100 things.
The level of mastery begins with teaching.
Exercise
Try this with anything you are good at – software coding, running marathons, writing books, surgery – whatever you like to do. Draw the line. On the right put discovery. Go back and think about the first time you discovered whatever it is you are doing. On the left, see how far you have taken it – hopefully it’s teaching or coaching. Then fill in the steps between discovery and teaching.
