One format recurs throughout the Managing Your Opportunities workbook: two columns headed “I am good at” and “I need to practise”. They appear beside rapport, beside conversion and elsewhere. It is a small design choice with a big idea behind it. The workbook assumes that skills such as building rapport, questioning, listening and converting opportunities can be improved deliberately, and that improvement starts with honest self-assessment.
This article looks at why experience alone does not guarantee improvement, what the research on deliberate practice suggests, and how to apply it to everyday business skills.
Why experience is not enough
It seems obvious that people get better at things the more they do them. Up to a point, they do. But many people plateau. A salesperson with twenty years’ experience may not be much more effective than one with five. A manager who has run hundreds of meetings may still run them poorly.
The reason is that repetition without reflection tends to reinforce existing habits, good and bad. Once a skill becomes automatic, we stop paying attention to it, and stop improving it. Twenty years of experience can be one year repeated twenty times.
What deliberate practice means
The term deliberate practice comes from research by the psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues on how experts develop, in fields such as music, sport and chess. Their work distinguished deliberate practice from simple repetition. Its features include:
- Specific goals: working on a particular aspect of performance, not “getting better” in general.
- Focused attention: concentrating on the task rather than going through the motions.
- Immediate feedback: knowing quickly what worked and what did not.
- Working at the edge of ability: practising things slightly beyond current comfort.
- Repetition with adjustment: trying again, differently, based on feedback.
Ericsson’s work was later popularised as a “10,000 hours” rule, a simplification he himself disputed. Subsequent research has also found that practice explains less of the difference between people than early accounts suggested, and that its contribution varies across fields. The core insight still holds up well as practical guidance: targeted, attentive practice with feedback improves skills far more than unreflective repetition.
Business skills are not chess or violin. They are messier, and feedback is less immediate. But the principles adapt well.
Step one: honest self-assessment
The two-column format is the starting point. Filling it in honestly is harder than it looks, for a few reasons:
- We overestimate ourselves in many areas, especially those where feedback is weak, such as listening.
- We confuse comfort with competence. Things we enjoy doing feel like strengths, whether or not they are.
- We avoid what we dislike. Skills we find uncomfortable are often the ones most worth practising.
Ways to make self-assessment more accurate:
- Use evidence: results, recordings, notes, outcomes of past conversations.
- Ask others: managers, colleagues and even trusted customers often see what we cannot.
- Break skills into parts. “Communication” is too broad. “Summarising what I heard before responding” is specific enough to assess.
An example self-assessment
Here is an illustrative completed version, covering skills from across this series:
| I am good at | I need to practise |
|---|---|
| Building rapport quickly in person | Listening without interrupting when I disagree |
| Explaining technical details clearly | Asking about budget early in the conversation |
| Following up promptly by email | Summarising and agreeing next steps before meetings end |
| Writing structured proposals | Handling price objections without discounting |
| Preparing for first meetings | Asking satisfied customers for referrals |
The right-hand column becomes the practice agenda. Not all at once: choose one or two items at a time.
Step two: choose a specific practice goal
A good practice goal is narrow, observable and connected to real work. For example:
- “In every discovery meeting this month, ask at least three open questions before describing our product.”
- “When a customer raises price, ask ‘compared with what?’ before responding.”
- “Before every meeting ends, summarise what I heard and propose a dated next step.”
Narrow goals make it possible to notice whether you did it and how well it worked.
Step three: practise in safe settings and real ones
Deliberate practice benefits from both kinds of setting.
Safe practice (role plays with colleagues, rehearsing out loud, recording yourself) allows repetition, experimentation and feedback without risk. It is especially useful for difficult moments: stating a price, handling an objection, delivering bad news.
Real practice (applying the skill in actual customer conversations) is where it counts. Real situations add pressure and unpredictability that role plays cannot fully reproduce.
A good pattern is to rehearse a skill in a safe setting, use it in real conversations, then review what happened.
Step four: get feedback
Feedback is the hardest part of deliberate practice in business, because outcomes are delayed and influenced by many factors. A deal may be lost for reasons that have nothing to do with your questioning skill. Ways to get better feedback:
- Self-review immediately after conversations. Two or three minutes noting what you tried, how it went and what you would do differently.
- Recordings. Where appropriate and with consent, recording practice sessions or internal calls lets you hear yourself as others do.
- Observation by a colleague or manager, with specific questions: “Did I let the customer finish? How many open questions did I ask?”
- Customer feedback. Occasionally asking a customer “Was that conversation useful for you?” or “Is there anything I could have explained better?” provides direct insight.
- Tracking indicators. For some skills, simple counts help, such as how often you agreed a next step or how often you asked for a referral.
Step five: repeat with adjustment
After each round of practice and feedback, adjust and try again. Over a few weeks, the skill should become more natural. When it does, move it to the “good at” column and choose the next item to practise.
This cycle of assess, choose, practise, get feedback and adjust is simple, and it compounds.
Practice ideas for common business skills
Here are practical exercises for skills covered elsewhere in this series. Each is designed to be specific, repeatable and easy to get feedback on.
| Skill | Practice exercise | How to get feedback |
|---|---|---|
| Open questions | Write five open questions before each meeting; count how many you used | Review notes afterwards |
| Listening | Summarise before responding in every conversation for a week | Ask the other person whether your summary was accurate |
| First impressions | Rehearse the first minute of a meeting out loud | Record and review, or ask a colleague |
| Qualifying | Use a fixed set of qualifying questions in every first meeting | Check later which opportunities closed, and whether the questions predicted it |
| Handling objections | Role-play the three most common objections with a colleague | Colleague rates clarity and calmness |
| Stating price | Practise stating your price calmly, then pausing | Record and watch for rushing or apologising |
| Asking for decisions | Plan the exact words you will use to ask for a decision | Note how often you actually asked |
| Asking for referrals | Ask one satisfied customer each week | Count requests and referrals received |
Measuring improvement
Because business outcomes are influenced by many factors, it helps to measure the behaviour you are practising, not just the results. For example:
- the proportion of meetings where you agreed a dated next step
- the number of open questions asked in a recorded practice call
- the number of referral requests made in a month
Behaviour measures change quickly and are within your control. Results, such as conversion rates and revenue, follow more slowly. Watching both shows whether practice is working.
Getting past the discomfort
Deliberate practice is uncomfortable by design: it focuses on what you are not yet good at. Role plays feel awkward, recordings are unflattering, and feedback can sting. Many people avoid practice for exactly these reasons.
A few things help. Start with low-stakes settings. Practise with people you trust. Focus on one small skill so progress is visible. Remember that the discomfort is temporary and the improvement lasting. Most people find that after a few sessions, the awkwardness fades and practice becomes simply part of how they work.
Practice for teams
Teams can build deliberate practice into their routines:
- A short practice slot in regular meetings, for example fifteen minutes of role play on a specific skill.
- Pairing, where two colleagues observe each other’s calls or meetings and exchange specific feedback.
- Shared examples: a library of good proposal openings, effective questions or well-handled objections.
- Coaching by managers, focused on one or two skills per person at a time.
The aim is a culture where practising and asking for feedback is normal, not a sign of weakness.
Practice for founders and sole operators
Founders and sole operators often lack colleagues to practise with or managers to give feedback. Some alternatives:
- Practise with a peer from another business, swapping role plays and feedback.
- Record yourself explaining your offer or price, then review it critically.
- Join a peer group or mentoring arrangement where skills are discussed openly.
- Use customer conversations deliberately, with one specific skill in mind each week.
A worked example
A business owner notices that she often loses deals at the price discussion. This is an illustration.
Her self-assessment shows the problem: when price comes up, she tends to apologise, explain at length and offer a discount before the customer has even objected. She sets a practice goal: when price comes up, state it calmly, pause and ask how it compares with what they expected.
She rehearses with a friend who runs another business, recording the role plays on her phone. Watching them, she notices she speeds up and looks away when stating the price. She practises slowing down and holding eye contact.
Over the following month she applies the approach in real meetings and notes the result each time. Discounting becomes rarer, and she learns more about each customer’s real concern when she asks the comparison question. By the end of the quarter, the skill has moved into her “good at” column, and she has chosen the next item: asking for referrals.
Keeping a practice log
A simple practice log turns occasional effort into steady improvement. It needs only a few columns: the date, the skill practised, what you tried, what happened and what you will try next.
Reviewing the log every few weeks shows patterns that are otherwise easy to miss. You may notice that a skill works well with some customers but not others, or that you practise consistently early in the week and rarely on Fridays. Those observations make the next round of practice more targeted.
Over months, the log also becomes a record of progress. Seeing how far a skill has come is motivating, especially when improvement feels slow day to day.
Common mistakes
Practising strengths instead of weaknesses. It feels good, but improves little.
Goals that are too broad. “Be better at sales” cannot be practised.
No feedback. Practice without feedback can reinforce bad habits.
Trying to fix everything at once. One or two skills at a time.
Treating practice as remedial. Even strong performers improve through deliberate practice; most experts practise more, not less.
Questions to reflect on
- What skill do I avoid using because it feels uncomfortable?
- When did I last ask someone for specific feedback on how I handle customers?
- Which skill, if improved, would make the biggest difference to my results this year?
- What is one small practice goal I could start this week?
Bringing it together
Experience alone does not make people better at business skills. Deliberate practice does: honest assessment, specific goals, practice in safe and real settings, feedback and repeated adjustment. The workbook’s two columns (“I am good at” and “I need to practise”) are a simple way to begin.
The process does not need to be elaborate. A few minutes of honest assessment, one narrow goal, a little rehearsal, some feedback and a willingness to try again are enough to start. Repeated over months, those small cycles add up to a noticeable change in how you work with customers and colleagues.
The right-hand column is not a list of failings. It is a list of opportunities, and working through it, one item at a time, is one of the most reliable ways to improve.
Topics and structure drawn from the Managing Your Opportunities sales workshop workbook (Charlie Pidcock); the explanations and examples are GoCore’s own. Research referred to: Anders Ericsson and colleagues on deliberate practice, and later studies that qualified its effects. Examples are illustrations, not real cases. This article is general information, not professional advice.
