Lead Us Somewhere New – By Learning Something New
If you have ever tried learning a new skill, then you will know how it feels to be a clumsy and embarrassed beginner.
You totter and stumble, like a baby learning to walk for the first time. But thankfully, in those early days when you tried to take your first steps, no-one ever said to you, “You know, maybe you should just give up on the whole walking thing. I mean, you keep falling over, and you’ve been trying for months now and you still can’t put one foot in front of the other. Why don’t you just stick to crawling, you’re great at that!” Instead you were given abundant permission to fail because there is a knowing that everyone gets there, eventually.
But as adults, we are much more likely to withhold this permission to fail from ourselves. It’s too easy to give up if we don’t immediately get it “right”. The gap between how we are performing and how we think or assume it ought to be done can seem a gap too wide and humiliating to conquer. We have our pride. We have bizarre ideas of what we are capable of and what we are just “no good at”. Our time is precious, and we expect so much of ourselves that sometimes it’s easier to just stay “specialized” and stick to what we know we can do, rather than waste our days on something new that only makes us feel like a failure.
But we often give up right when the prize is literally inches away from our grasp.
Getting Past The Beat
Conductor Benjamin Zander did a hugely entertaining talk for TED where he demonstrated the early, awkward stages a child goes through when learning to play a piece by the composer Chopin on a piano.
The first year of study is characterized by a vigorous nodding of the head and a slow, heavy thumping of the keys with an emphasis on…every…beat. (And I know what this sounds like. I once lived next door to a small child learning to play Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” at 7am every morning. Truly this was “conscious musical incompetence” as an explicit form of torture…)
But with each year the child practices, Zander physically demonstrates how much more relaxed the body of the child becomes. The emphasis on every beat switches to every second beat…then every fourth beat…the music begins to sound less cranky, the head stops nodding like an angry marionette, the stony, emphatic pounding on the keys gives way to phrases that begin to flow…
And right at the point where the child’s familiarity with the skill is finally about to coalesce into something infinitely more magical – the child gives up playing.
By this point the child has spent years learning the correct posture at the piano. The correct fingering. How to read the scrawl of notes on the page. How to coordinate both hands on the keys as well as two sets of toes on the pedals. But after all of this training, and attention and practice – bashing out notes does not make music.
You probably learned to read in the same way – clunky stammering syllables, awkward silences and complete disregard for the nuances of punctuation. The journey from those first words to the plays of Shakespeare is long, methodical and mechanical… you have to clamour through the nuts and bolts of the beast on the page before you can make the words begin to dance as poetry.
This is the hard work we must do before we can stop making something look like hard work.
The real juice is found in pushing beyond the skill itself, to the place where the focus is no longer on you, but on what you are trying to create. To learn to make a new skill “sing”…you must push past the beat.
The Long Line
Getting past the beat means moving into a state of flow, where the task or skill is infused with an inspiration and concentration that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s the place where your eye is not on how to wield the hammer. It’s on what you are building with it.
It’s the point where you can immerse yourself fully in what you are doing with focus and control, but now you are no longer concentrating on how to do something. You are now at liberty to explore, with freedom and playfulness – the why of something.
This “why” is the long line.
It’s the overarching phrase that binds all the little things you are doing together, creating something more meaningful – a narrative that leads us from beginning to end.
We are no longer practicing a skill. We are telling a story.
You know you have pushed past the beat when your question changes from “How do I do this?” to “How can I use this?”.
Why are you singing the song you are singing?
Why are you telling that story about yourself to the world?
Why does your business work the way it does?
Is it because you spent years of your life and piles of your money learning how to do it? Is it because it’s the only thing you think you know how to do? Are you too afraid to start learning a new song? Or are you terrified that the poetry rolling around inside your belly is not good enough to share with the world?
Whatever it is you are doing or learning, make an effort to get past the beat to the long line. Master those unfamiliar words so you can then translate them to others. Work at your new skill until you can show us why it’s important. Keep refining your message so you can then create a vision.
Look at what you’re doing from above. Move people. Show them something about themselves they never knew they knew.
This is the delicious “being in the zone” part of life – where you have put in the effort to master something new, grappled with each unfamiliar step along the way, and then taken the leap to soar from the beginning to the end, like Zander’s bird “that flies over the field and doesn’t care about the fences underneath.”
We can all decide to learn something new. Just keep learning until you know you can push past the beat. Until you can sing your new song by heart, and make it come alive with your eyes on your audience instead of your nose buried in the music.
Don’t just learn to walk. Lead us somewhere!
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Twitter: bretthimself
December 23, 2009 at 5:55 am
Hey Natalie!
Silky smooth writing + cool topic = amazing post.
Most people don’t realize (or only realize subconsciously) that lots of hard work is needed to achieve mastery of a skill. In fact, it requires so much effort and dedication that it’s too much for people and they give up. But for those who stick around through the all the hard work needed to get past the beat, they are rewarded with something magical: “flow” state, where it seems like there’s a disconnect between them and whatever it is they’re doing…. It’s all unconscious and beautiful, like the hand of God is guiding them or something. (just a figure of speech!).
But, you go on to make practicing a skill some high art of self-discovery, for yourself and other people. It’s a truly stunning idea that I wish I thought of!
It’s like you can use your super-skill to bend the world – and people- to see your light, and guide them towards self-discovery. How? By transcending what appears to hold us back through the total mastery of a skill, which exposes our love for life and for our skill – nay, our art. That is true expression breaking out, shining on everyone and as welcomed as the sun parting the clouds during a miserable day.
And I forgot how much I loved Benjamin Zander’s TED talk – it almost moved me to tears the first time I watched it. The ending is just brilliant – truly, we can measure our positive impact by seeing how many shining eyes are around us. And the part about the Holocaust survivor… Just chilling.
Never say anything to anyone that you wouldn’t say if it was the last thing you ever said to them. Powerful, powerful video.
But I’m getting sidetracked.
Quick round-up: I love flow, I love making everything an art form, I love this post (and you). Keep it up!
Brett – DareToExpress.com´s last blog ..Check Your Default Expression For Signs of Life
Brett – thank you!
I love this – the idea of bending the world through the intensity of our expression.
Thrilled to have you here Brett.
Gorgeous post.
Full of brilliance. And truth. And insight.
I’m always kind of amazed at how we, as adults, seem to give ourselves almost no room to try something new. And, as a result, how small our world can become.
But if we give ourselves even a little bit of space, how much awesome can happen.
I also loved the Benjamin Zander talk. Right on.
You continue to rock. Lots.
Fabeku´s last blog ..The Songs That Saved My Life
Looking forward to pushing past the beat with awesome musical peeps like you in 2010! Thanks Fabeku
Beautiful post, Natalie!
I’ve just begun singing again after a decade-long hiatus, and my first lesson started out with me breathlessly fumbling–a little off-key on the minor notes, wobbly and hesitant as we approached the head tones.
Yet, a short while into the lesson, when my singing teacher created a frame by holding the underlying beat with her voice, we improvised and scatted together for nearly an hour in patterns so fluid, spontaneous and inspired, we were flying.
The thing I realized was this: I’m really comfortable improvising, because it’s what I’ve done in my work for thirty years, and it’s also how I live my life. The flow is always there, you just have to step into the river.
The ease with which you enter the river is the fruit of practice, skill, and the trust that builds each time you become one with its flow. But it can also emerge from rusty skills when someone else holds the beat. In community, someone else becomes the banks through which the river can flow.
Love to you!
Hiro
Hiro Boga´s last blog ..Sunday Poem #14: Buddhist Chronicles 4
Twitter: acdolph
December 24, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Hi Natalie!
I am a giant fan of Benjamin Zander. In fact I just used his TED talk as an example of great presentations being great storytelling on my blog a week or so ago.
His talk and your post reminded me of the day I learned to sing. It really was one day that changed everything. Understand, of course, I had been studying voice with a wonderful teacher and performing for a number of years. But there was one day when I had reached that critical level of technical mastery that I could let go of the technique.
I knew that my voice teacher had been working with a movement teacher was trained in both the Feldenkrais Method in the Alexander Technique, and I knew that what she was doing was somehow different. I had no idea. Fortunately, my voice teacher set up an opportunity for those of us in her studio who were interested to take a daylong workshop with Julia Balter, the movement teacher that she had been working with.
I had done quite a bit of Feldenkrais as well as other body work, energy work and various other things, so I thought I knew what this was about. Boy was I wrong. Julia’s process is about using the Alexander technique as a way of creating the freedom and space to allow something to come in. What that “something” is, it’s extremely hard to describe. The term that Julia uses is “impulse.” Sometimes, she also describes it as a divine spark. I think that both of these words begin to suggest what this is about. The idea is for you to not move, but instead to allow yourself to be moved by the impulse.
Then, the idea is to allow that impulse to generate singing. So that you are not singing, but allowing yourself to be sung, rather than creating the music, you’re allowing the music to come through you.
I feel like I’m wrapping a lot of very flowery language around something which may be inherently indescribable, but hopefully you get the idea.
Maybe the best explanation of it that I’ve ever heard comes from Victor Wooten’s book, “The Music Lesson.” where he talks about Music as a sentient being, a spirit that we as musicians, when we’re at our best, get out of the way of, and allow to come through us.
But coming back to your post, I believe that this is only possible once a level of technical proficiency is well rooted in our bodies and our minds to allow us to let go of having to think about technique. I believe that it’s only then that we can let go enough to let that Spirit move us.
Thank you for such a wonderful post!
Be well, and take care.
Andy
Andy Dolph´s last blog ..Music that moves me
Thank you for this inspiring post! I can SO relate to what you wrote. I am at the beginning of a new journey and so accustomed to always being good at what I do. It’s easy to give up and continue what I’ve always done when things get hard. But you’re right! It’s only after the work is put in that we find the state of flow.
And thanks for the link to the TED talk. I’m going to bed full of ideas and inspiration tonight! Thank you!
darrah´s last blog ..view 18 :: herstory
Twitter: flowjunkie
December 30, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Such a thought-provoking and insightful post, Natalie!
Even when we reach a state of technical competence and relative ease, it’s so easy to focus on getting *even more* technically competent and achieving “perfection,” and forget that without the why and the story-telling it’s all kind of meaningless. Thanks for the eloquent reminder!
Renita´s last blog ..Five Ways To Flex Your Gratitude Muscle