Masterclass: Invest In Your Skills

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Skill acquisition experts tell us that it takes around 10,000 hours or 10 years of focused practice to develop expertise in a skill!

Whether your goals are to play for Australia, recover from a bad season, take your game to another level or simply get the best out of your ability, these goals will not come easily or without effort.

The best investment you can make in achieving your cricket goals is to put in the time and effort to develop the best possible skill set you can. Let’s face it, to score runs for example, is a huge challenge when you have 10 ways to get out every ball and 11 opponents whose job it is to see you fail! Your best protection against this challenge is an excellent array of skills that you understand and can apply consistently. To attain them you have to put in the work, there is no way around it, however, the benefits of striving to be the best you can be are well worth the effort required to achieve your goals.

The off-season, presents an ideal opportunity to make the effort to invest in your skills, whether it is to build consistency and precision around your existing strengths or to work through a change strategy to turn your weaknesses into strengths. The benefit of working hard through the off-season is that the out of competition period offers an opportunity to experiment and work through change or extend your capabilities away from the competitive pressures of a match. It also presents you with the chance to accumulate the hours of focused quality practice you will need to master your skills.

Good luck

Mark

Mark Atkinson

To date Mark has amassed extensive professional experience as an elite player with the Tasmanian, the Prime Ministers XI, Australian XI and Australia ‘A’ teams and an array of clubs in the United Kingdom and New South Wales. Mark’s elite level cricket experience is complemented by a Bachelor’s degree in physical education, which has enabled him to apply his knowledge of bio mechanics, skill acquisition, sport psychology and learning methodologies to his own career as a professional player and coach. His coaching credentials and expertise have been further enhanced through the attainment of his Level 3 cricket coaching accreditation from Cricket Australia. Mark has a Master’s degree in Business Administration, from Southern Cross University, Australia.