By David Dirlam
For Coastal Parent

Four Steps to Mastering a New Life Strategy How do you apply strategy detours to master your own favorite activities? Let's say that you feel ready to make a change, but are not sure if it will really pay off. You could be using strategy A and become inspired to use strategy B. If you are only thinking of getting rid of a habit rather than changing strategies, you will need to think through what it is that you are really doing. Don't think of food vs. not food, but of food type A vs. food type B. Don't think of smoking vs. not smoking, but of relaxing type A (with a cigarette) vs. relaxing type B (some other approach). Once you know what the two strategies are, there are four steps to changing your strategy: 1. Think of three or four basic and important benefits of both approaches. Write them down. 2. See how the strategies stack up on each benefit and make notes of your feelings. 3. Try the new strategy and work gradually to improve the benefits you achieve using the new approach. Keep notes. 4. Reflect on your notes. If you have improved considerably using the new strategy, you should begin to benefit from it as much as from your old strategy. If not, start looking for a different new strategy.

On a sunny day in the 1990s Clara Wise and her husband celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary by helping to remove the bark from logs for an Appalachian Trail shelter. Having arrived early, I was using a very nice debarking tool with a curved blade and two handles to make the job easier.

Clara turned down my offer to trade my debarking tool for the axe that she had picked up. We began working on opposite sides of the same log. Within minutes, I noticed that I was putting in more effort than she and barely keeping up. "You're a master with that axe," I commented.

"We have a saying back here in the mountains." She paused, checked the blade with her thumb, looked over at me, and then continued in her beautiful southern mountain accent. "You know the honeymoon's over when there's dough on the axe handle."

A good user of an axe has practiced many hours to gradually improve the accuracy of each motion. But gradual improvement is not the only change needed on the road to mastery. There are also abrupt changes in strategy. For axe wielding, one abrupt change is when you stop trying to fling the axe and start to let the tool's own weight and sharpness do the work. You begin to see your task not as chopping, but as lifting and letting fall. A second is making sure the axe stays sharp. Another is loosening your grip, so that it is just enough to securely keep the axe from slipping.

Two types of changes occur in mastering any activity. Most people are aware of the hours of practice needed. But we often overlook the need for changes in strategy - and with good reason. When we have practiced one strategy until we have gotten quite good with it, why would we want to change strategies? Why would we want to start all over practicing new habits?

To answer those questions we need to understand how practice relates to strategy. But this difficult problem has puzzled developmental psychologists for a century. It is the problem of learning (practice) versus stages of development (changing strategies). A solution to this problem would help us to master our favorite activities with less stress, more insight and less effort. As we learn, we could also see the differences between our own performance and those of a master more clearly.

Recently, I came across an article that showed how habits relate to strategies in our choices of foods. Carl V. Phillips wrote the article. I had interviewed him to create a mastery profile for health researchers. For me, the article was not just about eating. It also explained why people learn gradually with practice and then suddenly change strategies so radically that they appear to be in a different developmental stage. It provided a solution to the dilemma of stages versus gradual learning.

When we eat, we start with a strategy that will satisfy our needs for good nutrition, good taste, ease of obtaining and familiarity. The high fat, high sugar diet that we get at fast food chains is an example. As we practice, we get better and better at satisfying our needs with this food. In time, we get so good that when we try to change, we are almost always less satisfied. Just cutting back ends up leaving us feeling hungry. We backslide into our old habit patterns.

Eventually for some people, the strategy fails. They take a step back and consider making a radical change. They might try a vegetarian diet. This whole new strategy results in a whole new set of experiences. As they keep trying, they gradually get better at satisfying their four needs with this new approach. When they get as good at satisfying their needs with vegetarian food as they did with fast food, they almost never backslide.

A radical change in strategy that needs practice to get right is what I call a "strategy detour." It applies not just to eating, but to all the life strategies used in complex human activities.

A master singer that I profiled gave me a memorable example. A person joins a musical group in order to obtain skill, companionship, entertainment and richer music than they can produce alone. It might seem obvious that the best way to do this is to focus on their own accomplishments and those of the other players. My singer, however, called this a novice or "catfight" approach to ensemble relations. It too often ends up in people feeling they get less recognition than they deserve. A more advanced strategy is to focus on what the music requires. By thinking about the piece, the composer, or especially some future audience, people achieve the four benefits more reliably than focusing on each player's accomplishments.

The road to mastery is not merely to practice, to gradually speed up performance and to gradually learn more. Those are important contributions. But the road to mastery also involves detours into entire new constellations of habits. Ignore the detour signs and you are likely to end up retracing your steps. Take the strategy detour and you may not only reach your goal sooner, you may have valuable new experiences along the way.

Besides helping you to change your strategies, the idea of strategy detours, can also help you learn from others. Just for fun, next time you see a master of an activity, try to identify her or his strategies. Look for differences between how they do it and others who are not yet masters. If you let the master know what you observed, get ready for one of those great little life lessons, like, "You know the honeymoon's over when there's dough on the axe handle."