Oscar Peterson, my favourite jazz pianist of all time, famously practised ten hours a day so he could improvise on stage, as I wrote about in: “Masters practice incessantly, then improvise“.
Today more thoughts on the value of putting in the time, of mastery, of investing at the start and always in order to make a higher impact.
One day last week, I had a regular meeting with a peer, exploring and learning from each other and reminding ourselves of what we had learned over our collective decades of learning and experience as coaches and mentors. Even with all our experience, we have these sessions every few weeks to continue our own growth and learning.
Later that day I then had a meeting with another experienced leader who had recently decided to get into coaching. They had found a useful model and were about to dive into being a leadership coach, with, it seemed, very little training and learning in coaching, leadership and organisational methods and structures.
Having the two meetings on the same day has me reflecting, and my thought is: Put in the time before you improvise
This was particularly true in the advice I gave to the leader turning to be a coach, of the importance of investing in the specific skills and knowledge around coaching in order to effectively transition from being a superb leader to the coach of other leaders. Shallow learning in coaching would greatly reduce their ability to make a difference by bringing their own leadership experience to the fore in a coaching and mentoring space.
As with most deep skills, highly experienced coaches may look like they are improvising, but in truth they are only doing that having first accessed the value and depth of all they have learned over a period of years.
One way to gain a ready understanding of this concept of putting in the time to then improvise is to watch or listen to a selection of #WhatComesNextLive shows. Each of these is a concise thirty minutes of conversation with a leader on “What Comes Next”. Each guest has a wealth of experience that they are drawing on, even if it is not something “spelt out”. They may therefore appear to be “improvising”, but at all times they draw on their vast experience, they have “put in the time”.
In closing, and in this week where this daily blog celebrates three years so far, one of my most read stories tells a story of improvising in a group coaching environment. You may enjoy it, it even involves a panda 😉 : “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist“.