Practice Makes Perfect

At speech courses we hear lots of old sayings and some make sense and some are...  let's face it old wives tales that have no substance.  Some are good and some are half true and some are downright false information.  And if I hear one more Speaker use the one about 'rather be in the box than giving the eulogy' I think I'll scream. What dull poor regurgitated humour.

Now lets get to 'practice makes perfect'... I think practice is a fantastic way to get familiar with what it is you want to be outstanding at so and I suppose if you want to be perfect maybe you will get close if you practice enough.  

My beef with this is perfect at what?

Practice is something that needs to be monitored on a constant basis.  If we want to be the "perfect" person at what we do then that means we are learning how to continually improve until we are perfect because there is no way we are perfect to start with. So like the top tennis player we need to have our coach constantly tweeking everything we say do and think until we almost become machine like in the way we perform.  

The amazing thing about this 'practice makes perfect' regime is if you practice enough at anything you will become excellent at it regardless if what you are doing is excellent or poor.  You can practice enough to be 'perfectly' excellent or 'perfectly' poor.

Find someone to give you the right feedback, to tweek and build on your skills, to make sure you are developing the way you ought to to achieve your goals.

Cheers

Terry