Making good practice a habit

We don’t practice enough in our profession.

We are critical of ourselves, our people, our systems and our clients for not doing things the way that we want them done and for not achieving the outcomes we are looking for but the failing will often come down to simply not having enough practice.

Let me explain what I mean.

We want good practice to be repetitive. We want it to happen every time. For that to happen, good practice needs to become more than just an awareness or an instruction, it needs to become habitual; it needs to be something that just happens.

For something to become habitual we must do it more, and we must keep on doing it until we get better at it and until we reach a point where we do it automatically, as if we weren’t thinking about it.

Take driving a car. How hard did you find it on your first lesson to do the basics of steering, breaking, changing gear? How tired was your mind at the end of that hour? Today, you just sit behind the wheel and go. Do you still concentrate on your steering or do you just do it, apparently without thinking?

If we want to be able to juggle then we must practice, and not just practice but keep on practicing. When we start it’s very hard, we’re not very good at it. We make mistakes. However, the more we do it, the better we eventually get. Without going into the science, the more we repeat something, the easier our brain finds it to do it the next time…until we reach a point where we are apparently doing it without thinking.

Accountants read a book or attend a course and come away with great ideas. They give the instruction for these ideas to be taken up within their firms, but, until they become habitual, until they can happen apparently without thinking, the easier path is always to slip back to how things were done before.

Therefore, if you want to achieve a change of behaviour or of thinking then you need more than just an instruction. You need to put in place a programme for practice that will ensure your change is worked at, time and time again, until it becomes habitual; until it happens apparently without thinking.

Practice makes perfect, surely you were told that in your youth. Google the science, it’s not just a saying dreamt up to annoy those fed up of trying.