The Practicing Mind – Developing Focus & Discipline in Your Life The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus And Discipline In Your Life: Master any skill or challenge by learning to love the process

The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner is a practical self-development book about developing focus, discipline and patience by learning to appreciate the process of practice rather than becoming overly focused on the final result.

The book explains how the principles of practice can be applied to almost any area of life, including business, parenting, sports, learning new skills and personal development. Sterner encourages readers to embrace repetition, trial and error and steady effort as valuable parts of the journey toward mastery.

The book’s central message is that practice does not have to feel like a difficult path toward a goal; with the right mindset, the process itself can become fulfilling and can help build greater discipline, clarity and focus.

In those times when we want to acquire a new skill or face a formidable challenge we hope to overcome, what we need most are patience, focus, and discipline, traits that seem elusive or difficult to maintain. In this enticing and practical book, Thomas Sterner demonstrates how to learn skills for any aspect of life, from golfing to business to parenting, by learning to love the process.

Early life is all about trial-and-error practice. If we had given up in the face of failure, repetition, and difficulty, we would never have learned to walk or tie our shoes. So why, as adults, do we often give up on a goal when at first we don’t succeed? Modern life’s technological speed, habitual multitasking, and promises of instant gratification don’t help. But in his study of how we learn (prompted by his pursuit of disciplines such as music and golf), Sterner has found that we have also forgotten the principles of practice — the process of picking a goal and applying steady effort to reach it. The methods Sterner teaches show that practice done properly isn’t drudgery on the way to mastery but a fulfilling process in and of itself, one that builds discipline and clarity.