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. continue reading…
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