Growing up, we all heard the words of encouragement “practice makes perfect” from parents, teachers, coaches, and others hoping to elicit improvement in the development of a particular skill. In reality, practice may have helped most of us perform better at handwriting, playing a musical instrument, or competing in sports, but perfection remained a distant, albeit worthy goal.

As health professionals, it seems we all too often forget the necessity and value of practice. We get caught up in the daily grind of fulfilling our job responsibilities and neglect to invest time honing our skills. Entire organizations suffer from this same malady by providing initial on the job training, and then failing to promote continuing education for staff at all levels in the club. Finding time to “practice” is challenging in the club setting. Unlike sports teams and musicians for example, who practice tremendously more than the play, as an industry we perform with very little practice.

Over the years, when delivering customer experience presentations, I have often asked audiences how many hours of training they provide their teams on customer service.  The answer is usually none and almost never more than two to four hours a year. The obvious point is that if we individually, or collectively, want to be really good at something, it is our responsibility to dedicate some practice time.

Stephen Covey, in his all-time classic, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, referred to this need for ongoing personal growth as “sharpening the saw”. He believed this discipline was absolutely essential to success.

In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Galdwell took this concept further, dedicating an entire chapter to “The 10,000 Hour Rule”. Throughout the chapter, he shares insight on the role that practice and preparation play in relation to success. He offers that “Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” He goes on to say that “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

Even if being an expert doesn’t excite you, putting in a little practice time will make us better, our clubs better, and our industry better.