Stop Pivoting. Start Practicing.

My four-year-old recently brought home a piece of work from school that blew me away.

In her Montessori classroom, practical life lessons are an essential part of the curriculum and she’s recently taken a particular interest in sewing. Not sewing with a big plastic needle and yarn, but sewing with a real needle, real thread, and using a cross-stitch frame to hold her work.

At this age, many kids are still developing their fine motor skills in preparation for learning how to write. Strengthening your hands and practicing your grip prepare you to hold a pencil comfortably and with control.

In the work my daughter brought home, every stitch is perfectly in line with the shape traced on the muslin and the small, careful stitches are all about the same size (one of the hardest parts to get right!). It is simple, beautiful, and brought a huge smile to my face – and hers.

Practicing stitches.

Sewing is a skill she has been practicing for months now – first with a wooden needle and yarn, then with progressively smaller needles and thread, and always working to keep her stitches tidy and even. This wasn’t something she learned overnight, but something that took practice, focus, and a willingness to learn, which has gotten her fantastic results.

As children, practicing new skills is part of our daily lives. But as adults, we often forget how important it is to practice new skills, techniques, approaches, and processes.

Humans are learning creatures. We’re built to explore and test our environments and then adapt our approach based on the results of our experiments. Our first tries usually fail or fall short, which gives us great data for trying again, finding a new way, or continuing to practice a particularly tricky thing.

To get really good at what we do, practice matters.

Unfortunately, the constant pressure to achieve short-term goals, to perform perfectly in every moment, and to generate new ideas or approaches rather than improve on existing ones make so many of us forget what we’ve known since childhood – that to make progress and prepare for what’s next, we must practice the skills, processes, and approaches that will help us get there.

Over the past few years – when the emphasis has been on pivoting to deal with “unprecedented” times – even organizations that typically embrace taking the time to practice, refine, and improve their approaches may have struggled to get back into that rhythm.

That’s because when you are constantly pivoting, practice becomes impossible.

A smart, strategic pivot can improve your ability to carry out your mission, raise funds, and operate effectively, but it still takes practice to get the new approach right and operating as smoothly as possible. And while new ideas can be helpful in identifying solutions to explore, oftentimes the problem with previous approaches isn’t that the ideas were bad – it’s that the organization didn’t spend enough time practicing the approach or process to understand what was working well and what could continue to be improved.

So how can you create a culture where practice is valued? And how can you make time for yourself and your team to practice? Here are some tips to consider:

• Start Small – instead of a giant overhaul, start by changing one small thing and doing that consistently at least 10 times. This could be creating an agenda for your team meetings and practicing sticking to the agenda, adding one new data capture field to your client intake calls, or starting one new regular activity on your social media channels. Give yourself time to get the hang of one new thing and to learn from that experience.

• Start Slow – in her recent interview on Mary Hiland’s Inspired Nonprofit Leadership podcast, Claire Crum, founder of Calm Ops, talked about incorporating this lesson from firefighting training into other kinds of work: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” If you are adopting a new process – especially one that involves multiple people or areas of the organization – starting slow lets you focus on the individual components of the process to ensure everyone understands their role and can carry out their portion of the process well. Once you’ve practiced doing the components well and making smooth handoffs at each next stage, it becomes a lot easier to speed up the timeline.

• Start Smart – what’s a skill, process, or approach that will help you across various areas of your work? Choose something to practice that can benefit you across multiple workstreams or multiple areas of your life. For example, if you’re someone whose best ideas come when you’re moving or walking around, start taking calls while out on a walk or moving around your house. If you know meetings are always running over and there’s very little time for strategic thinking in your day (or week!), create a calendar hold or meeting invite for yourself to spend time every day focused on developing your strategic thinking, learning, and mastery of your field.

• Start Today – a huge value of practice is that it creates compounding results. Choose something new or new-ish to practice today and then commit to keeping it up. Don’t wait for the perfect thing. Just pick something and get started.