One of my clients recently mentioned to me that they were striving in their coursework not only for information, not only for behavior change, but also for ‘performance-based’ courses. This may not be new to you, but to me, it represented an important word shift: knowledge, behavior, and performance.
My graduate students read to understand, we demonstrate to isolate useful behaviors, and we practice to get so good that our performance is second nature. Actors call it ‘muscle memory.’ A physician at Illinois’ NorthShore University Health System, referring to their trauma surgeons, said they had “such great instincts” honed over a career.
Perhaps in those times when you said the right thing at the right time, in the right way—even you were surprised by the outcome. Perhaps that goes beyond what you know, beyond how you behaved, and the ‘performance’ was the integration of it all.
Behavior change is certainly good, but performance—well, that may be something different and better altogether.