A friend of mine is learning German.

She’s trying. But she keeps stalling out.

A brilliant woman with multiple degrees, she is certainly capable of learning a new language. However, she’s getting stuck. “I don’t want to be frustrated like this in my free time.” The process is feeling awfully unpleasant for something she’s doing for fun.

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For learning written music effectively and efficiently, there’s nothing better than backchaining.

However, its usefulness extends to many other areas, from training an animal to learning a sequence of dance moves.

Backchaining is so powerful that I want to show you exactly how it works. I’ve built a process around this basic technique that will allow you to learn easily — and possibly more rapidly than you ever have before. However, demonstrating this practice method using, say, a piano piece is a bit abstract for those who don’t read music fluently. So today, I’ll be showing you how to use my practice method to learn a piece of classic oratory: specifically, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

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Recently, I wrote about the Comfort Scale and how it can help you to calibrate your practice to precisely what is needed. Having briefly mentioned backchaining in that context, I wanted to go into more depth on this magical learning strategy.

Have you ever had the experience of driving home “on autopilot,” where you find yourself in your driveway after making a series of turns you were hardly aware of? That’s how backchaining works: Every action automatically suggests the next one with virtually no conscious effort. This ability to “make it look easy” underpins the feats of successful gymnasts, dancers, actors, musicians, orators, and dog agility champions; backchaining is a fast and effective way to reach that high level.

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When you’re writing an essay, you have to organize your thoughts, create an outline, and incorporate your research, while crafting sentences and paragraphs — and these skills depend on solid handwriting or typing skills, confident spelling and punctuation, and strong mental stamina.

This is a lot to manage. So whenever possible, we want to isolate skills. To do this, we use Tiny Tasks. We want to tell the student exactly what’s expected, ask them to carry out the task, and praise them for a job well done. Then we do the next thing, and offer praise. 

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