Deliberate practice and the Johari Window
or, the virtue of getting choked 10,000 times
(pic is some old friends doing what is known as “taking the back” in BJJ)
Bear with me for a minute as I talk about Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) again. I know - I’m acting like a vegan or a crossfit enthusiast - everything relates back to BJJ. But I have a general point that I think BJJ does a good job of illustrating.
OK, as I understand the history, judo was created in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō in Japan. It grew out of traditional jiu-jitsu, which was the unarmed martial art of the samurai - the Japanese equivalent of European feudal knights. Traditional jiu-jitsu is a combat art, so there is lots of striking, as well as eye gouging, kicks to the groin, etc. As a result, most of these techniques are taught in a highly formalized fashion where you don’t actually follow through (you can only gouge your practice partner’s eye twice, after all, and pretty quickly no one wants to train with you). This is also true of other self-defense focused arts, like karate and kung-fu. Because jiu-jitsu was practiced by samurai, the emphasis is a little different. A samurai’s primary weapon was the sword. They only used jiu-jitsu if they were to become unarmed. But if you are fighting another samurai, which is what they were training for, the other samurai would be wearing armor. Punching someone who is wearing armor isn’t all that effective, especially if he still has his sword. So jiu-jitsu focuses a lot on taking down your opponent, then striking him (or gouging out his eyes).
The genius of Kano, when he created judo, was to de-emphasize all of the really nasty attacks and focus only on the ones that could be done full-speed, repeatedly, to your training partner without permanent injury. Because judo practitioners could train at full speed against an opponent who was engaging in full resistance, they became very effective, very fast. You can get lots of repetitions in without really hurting your opponent, especially if you are working out on mats. .
(if you’ve never seen a judo match, here’s a highlights reel - I have it clipped to start at a good throw)
Practicing throws with a training partner is one thing; practicing throws with a training partner who is also trying to throw you at the same time is a completely different experience. Without making this introduction too much longer, Brazilian jiu-jitsu has its origins in judo. The main difference between BJJ and judo is emphasis. BJJ practitioners study the same take-downs that judo practitioners study, but BJJ emphasizes what to do once you hit the ground more than judo - that is, forcing your opponent to submit (to cry “uncle” as it were). You can win a judo match by doing a good throw - many judo matches only last a few seconds as a result. BJJ is won either by points or by submission - a great throw is just the start of the match. So many BJJ matches go on for minutes. Having practiced traditional jiu-jitsu, judo, and BJJ when I was younger, I decided to study BJJ when I returned to practice this past summer because, as a man now of a “certain age”, I find being thrown a bit harder on the body than I did once upon a time. Like judo, BJJ is all about practicing live, and at full speed, with a partner. While you try to choke or joint-lock your opponent, he is trying to do the same thing to you. When one of you succeeds, you start over again. Thus, sparring offers rapid feedback on what is working and what is not working. It is far more effective for rapid improvement than punching the air, or working with a compliant training partner (obviously I am biased).
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of mastery taking 10,000 hours of practice. I believe he got that number from a 1993 article by Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, (EKT) called “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.” Gladwell sometimes gets criticized for not adequately emphasizing the point that it doesn’t just take 10,000 hours of practice to master something, it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (as noted in the title of EKT’s article). It’s been too many years since I read the book, so I won’t take up that argument. But I did just spend some time with EKT’s article, and it is interesting to read, especially in light of last week’s discussion of the Johari Window.
What is deliberate practice? Deliberate practice, according to EKT, is “a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further” (p. 368). So practicing isn’t the same thing as deliberate practice. You can do about your selected activity on a day to day basis, practicing, as it were, but not engaged in that process of analysis to try to improve. The key to deliberate practice is feedback - whether your own observation of your performance, or feedback from a coach or training partner. You are looking for the cues EKT mentions.
Yesterday during BJJ practice, I was working with my colleague Bill (not even close to his real name). Bill wanted to work on escaping a position called side control, which is where one player is laying flat on his back and the other player is chest to chest, but at a 90 degree angle. The player on top is obviously in the dominant position. Unlike judo or wrestling, you can’t win simply by pinning your opponent in BJJ - your goal is to submit him. Side-control gives you lots of attacks if you are in the dominant position, so if you are in the inferior position, you want to get out of it. So Bill asked me to engage in deliberate practice with him - I was to just try to maintain side-control, while he tried to escape. I wasn’t supposed to attack him, and if he escaped, we would reset back to me on top and bill on the bottom. While we went through this exercise, Bill received direct feedback from the effectiveness of his efforts. But I was also making observations about his efforts as well, and giving my input on what I felt he was doing well. In fact, we were discussing his performance while we were engaged in the exercise, with him telling me what he had been feeling (where my body weight was, how I had responded) and how he was trying to think around that. Had he not told me, I would not have known, but since he did, his disclosures informed my feedback in a virtuous cycle. We were working together to help Bill discover and interpret more cues, in effect engaging in peer coaching.
(click here to see the source article)
Deliberate practice, like the scene I just described of Bill and I, opens up the Johari window that I talked about last week. Bill asked me to provide feedback on his side-control escape, and while we were working on it, he was disclosing what he was trying to do, and what he was experiencing, pushing box 1 into box 3. When he did that, he opened up more of Box 4 to me.
With that additional knowledge, I was able to provide him additional useful feedback, and help him move more into Box 4 himself.
The gains from this session were not as dramatic as my diagrams imply. That was 10 minutes of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that SKT talk about. However, because BJJ allows full speed, full contact training, the practitioner can get a lot of feedback in a short period of time. What I love about a good martial arts school is everyone is expected to be a peer coach. Good schools have a deep culture of coaching among all of the students, and everyone is a student, including the teachers.
One of the things that really resonated with me from the SKT article was this quote: “We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance. In addition, engaging in deliberate practice generates no immediate monetary rewards and generates costs associated with access to teachers and training environments.” We often laugh in BJJ practice after someone has choked us or arm-barred us, or some other unpleasant outcome that we pay for the privilege. And yet, we do. We pay to come be part of the process. Was my session with Bill inherently enjoyable? We actually had some laughs while we were doing it, so yes, but it was hard work, too. It made us both happy in the eudaimonic sense (happiness of accomplishment, not happiness of the moment). SKT’s article focuses on athletes and musicians, and their examples of deliberate practice include a lot of solo practice, like doing scales or free throws for hours, so I can see where that sort of practice is not enjoyable. There are some limited solo drills you can do to improve your BJJ skill, but most work is done on the mat with a partner.
Combining the idea of deliberate practice with the Johari window is useful for me because it expands my thinking about what I need to be doing to improve on the things I care about. With BJJ, I know I can get it. I can get my repetitions in because the art is designed to allow meaningful, deliberate practice. It lends itself to many, short sessions like the one with Bill. It combines quick efforts, with feedback directly from the exercise as well as from coaches. But how do I go about getting meaningful feedback, how can I go about detecting the cues about the other things I want to work on? What about things you are working on? For example, I’d like to improve my writing. It’s part of why I do these newsletters. Each newsletter is a rep. But am I really engaging in deliberate practice? Or am I just doing reps? To be deliberate practice, I need expert feedback. That’s one example. Same with my podcasts. I like doing them, but I want to make an excellent product. How do I go about getting meaningful feedback? These are things I am thinking about. If you’ve made it this far in this newsletter, you probably have things you are working on, things that you care about deeply, too. And you would benefit from not just practice but deliberate practice.
I have some ideas about this. In the next newsletter, I will talk a bit about Kathy Kram’s concept of a personal development network - the potential source for the feedback and coaching that we all need. Till then, willing good for all of you!
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Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363. https://mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesnew/8.%20Research/Explicit%20Instruction/Deliberate%20Practice.PDF
Quarry, The Johari Window model: A feedback model of self-awareness https://www.quarrymagazine.com/2020/12/18/the-johari-window-model-a-feedback-model-of-self-awareness/