Continuing our regular feature looking at famous quotes that proliferate the personal development world, I offer up here today the much-used notion – practice makes perfect.
Does it?
A couple of weeks back, here in Bournemouth we welcomed Gary Turner to the Bournemouth Hypnotherapy peer support group. He spoke on a number of subjects related to hypnotherapy and told great stories of his own experiences as a man with 13 world titles to his name and having represented his country in three different fighting sports.
At one point, mid sentence, Gary said “..and what does practice make? Practice makes…” and so many people in the room finished his sentence for him mentally and verbally “… perfect.”
That is how the famous saying goes.
However, Gary went on and spoke about the fact that actually “practice makes permanent” and that could be a good thing, or a very bad thing.
You see, if you carry on doing the same thing over and over again, you do become very good at it.
Like people with unwanted habits, or fears, or phobias, or a wide array of other maladaptive issues… They repeat the same thing over and over and become very good at doing it, and it certainly would not be described as perfect for that individual.
With a professional sorts person, if they are amazingly dedicated and keep on practicing and practicing, if they keep practicing the wrong moves, or with the wrong posture, or with a flawed style, for example, they may well just be making that flaw permanent.
Practice is incredibly important for most things you wish to become great at, or get close to anything like perfection, but practicing with insight, intelligence and proper instruction, guidance and the right technique in the first instance is the best.
Within the field of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, I encounter a great many people who practice one particular approach over and over which tends to render it very difficult for them to learn other approaches and skill sets.
Again, there is much to discuss here, but the aim is not to have in depth article here. It is simply to have you think about that often used motivational quote “practice makes perfect” and consider changing it to “practice makes permanent” and that you realise the implications and ramifications of the notion that practice makes permanent.
I’ll be back soon, I hope the sun is shining with you like it is here…
