Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book entitled Outliners says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Gladwell studies the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved success. A team of psychologists in Berlin, Germany studied violin students twenty years ago. In particular, they studied their practice habits in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The musicians were asked this question: “Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?” All of the violinists had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age twenty, the elite performers averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only 4,000 hours of practice. The elite had more than double the practice hours of the less capable performers.
One interesting point of the study: No “naturally gifted” performers appeared. If natural talent had played a role, we would expect some of the “naturals” to float to the top of the elite level with fewer practice hours than everyone else. But the data showed otherwise. The psychologists found a direct statistical relationship between hours of practice and achievement. No shortcuts. No naturals.
Practice plays a key role in successful anger management. You have already logged many hours of anger management experience before even starting this workbook. You now can intentionally use the skills, concepts and techniques presented here to further develop your anger management practice. The following are some empirically based and clinically proven practical solutions to shape the foundation of a life long practice.