Turning a result into practice

A result can suggest many things to work on. Choose one. Pick a pattern or skill that matters for the work in front of you in the next few weeks, rather than the one with the most extreme position. A watch area is a good choice only if you actually want it to show up more.

In Grow, set it as your focus. Grow's suggestions, plan and practice then lean toward that skill, so the next steps you see are about the one thing you chose.

Grow is where Persona turns results into practice. Everything in it is guided and rule-based: suggestions are picked by fixed rules from your focus and your results, and no language model writes them.

• Plan: a roadmap of steps from your goal and the tests you have completed, and what to do this week.
• Practice: a recommended next step, and modes to try: Coach for guided next steps on a topic from your results, Roleplay to rehearse a conversation one moment at a time, Voice to rehearse a spoken answer, Simulation for a short work case with a debrief of each choice, Learn for short lessons with a quick check, and Perception, which asks what you notice first in a still image.
• Progress: your skill signals, a weekly streak and how your results have moved since your first one.
• Proof: notes and evidence of what you practised, and skill badges earned when a skill signal across your results passes its mark.

Your practice notes are yours alone: they never appear in a manager's view or in a group figure.

Good intentions fade when the moment to act arrives without warning. Planning the moment in advance helps: decide the situation and the action together, as an if-then plan. Studies of these plans, which researchers call implementation intentions, find that they make follow-through more likely (Gollwitzer, 1999).

• Execution: "If a meeting ends without an owner for the next step, then I ask who will do it and by when."
• Communication: "If a message I am writing runs longer than a screen, then I put the main point in the first line."
• Learning agility: "If I finish a study session, then I write three questions to test myself on tomorrow."

Write your plan where you will see it at the moment it matters. Grow's practice prompts give you a starting point; the best plan names your own situation.

Skill grows with practice that targets a specific part of a task and comes with feedback, more than with repetition alone (Ericsson and others, 1993). For a pattern, that means short, deliberate attempts at one behaviour, each followed by a moment to notice what happened.

Persona's advice for each skill points the same way: small experiments, feedback loops and short reps, and one visible next action with an owner and a deadline. Grow's modes give you a safe place to rehearse, such as a roleplay of a difficult conversation or a spoken answer you want to get right, before you try it for real.

Habits form through repetition in a consistent setting, and they take longer to form than many people expect, with wide differences from one person to the next (Lally and others, 2010). Practise your behaviour in the same kind of moment each time, such as the start of a meeting or the end of a study session, so the setting itself becomes the reminder.

Expect it to feel deliberate for a while. A skill that shows up less in your answers today is a style, not a shortfall: you are adding a habit, not fixing a flaw.

Memory is a poor record of practice. Grow's Proof tab helps you turn what you did into short notes that back it up, checked by fixed rules and not reviewed by anyone. A few lines after each attempt, saying what you did, what happened and what you will change, give you real material for a later review.

Notes are kept only when you save them to your evidence, and only you can read them.

Practice is easier when someone knows about it. Tell a colleague or a mentor what you are working on and ask them to notice it. If you want to, share the skill card from Grow's Proof tab; nothing in Grow is shared unless you share it.

Ask for feedback about the task, not about you. Feedback helps most when it points at the work rather than the person (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996), so ask a specific question, such as whether your main point came first, instead of how you did in general.

After a few weeks of practice, retake the test. Compare positions, not labels: a pattern moving a little toward the end you practised is the change you were after. Your earlier results stay in My results, each with the scoring of the version you took.

If nothing moved, that is useful too. The practice may have been too general, or the pattern may not have been the right one to work on. Choose again with How to read your Persona result and the skill pages.