Finding a better way than our own

If you don’t like tea, it’s possible that you’ve been making it wrong. (Image by Terri Cnudde)

Aspiring (or failed) guitarists often tell me of their troubles with strumming.

“I never could get the hang of it,” they’ll say, no matter how long they’ve been trying.

They think the problem is strumming. And they’ve probably sought help from a guitar teacher with the intent of resolving this strumming problem. However, I know the reason it didn’t work. It’s because their problem is actually their chord changes.

Strumming is just a way to dress up your chord changes. It really doesn’t work until you’re changing from one chord to the next quickly and automatically. Get that going, and the strumming is much easier. But if you start strumming before you really have the hang of the chords, you’ll have all kinds of problems: poor tone, unsteady beat, and yes, weak strumming.

This problem is very common and not limited to guitar. When we’re undertaking a project, we often get ahead of ourselves. Despite wisdom to the contrary, we rush through the process thinking that we know what’s next. That’s how you find yourself putting together a piece of cheap furniture and getting to a dead end before you notice that it said, “please attach arms to seat first.” And that’s after you sliced into the brand new seat cushion with a razor blade in a hurry to get the pieces out of the box. Or is that just me?

Our haste leads us to diagnose our own maladies, so to speak, and find remedies for those instead of seeking expert counsel to correctly identify the problem. This can cause years or even decades of pain and frustration as we fail to achieve our goals without knowing why. We don’t realize that someone could have taken ten minutes to show us an easier way. It’s like we’ve been hiking up and down ten flights of stairs every day without even realizing that our building has an elevator.

Virtually any skill, from pottery to poetry, can be improved with support from someone who knows what they’re doing. And often, these resources are free — you might just have to sit through a five-second car insurance ad on YouTube. These days, there’s no need to struggle alone. The collective knowledge of humanity is available, as long as it occurs to us that there might possibly be a better way than ours.

The most capable people I know are the ones who are always learning. No matter how good they are, they know that they can always get better. They never turn down an opportunity to develop their skills and gain new insights from someone else, whether from a book, a lecture, or a workshop. Their habits are in sharp contrast to those who believe that seeking support means you are stupid or weak, an attitude that is all too prevalent in schools and workplaces.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know — and so I hired a coach to help me see what was possible in my business. This completely transformed my life, and rapidly. I didn’t even see the assumptions I had been making or the patterns that were keeping me from progressing, but once Mandi helped me to acknowledge them, I was able to resolve in weeks what I had been stuck on for years. Instead of working all the time and feeling trapped, I was joined by an incredible team that freed me up to take on new projects. I might have thought my problem was time management or marketing — Mandi knew better.

Whatever you are facing in your life, from a difficult relationship to a tricky skateboard maneuver that you just can’t seem to get, there are people who have the tools to help you. But in order to move forward, you may have to let go of not only your insistence on doing it yourself, but also your assessment of the problem. Maybe you need to change in order to resolve the difficult relationship. Maybe you’re struggling with a foundational technique that you already assume you’ve mastered, and that’s why you can’t get the new skateboard move down. We kinda hate it when mentors give us the medicine we really need, but taking the recommended dose can change our lives.

Have you ever had a problem that seemed hopeless yet was resolved with the right support? Was the solution what you expected? Let us know in the comments.