This should be easier by now
The standard need never be that we get it right on the first try. Or even the hundredth. (George Eastman Museum)
I started learning a fun little dance last night.
It is not a hard dance, but it was hard for me because I struggle with body awareness. I mean, I struggle with knowing my left from my right. So I went into this project fully expecting that I was going to produce dismal results at the start.
Knowing that I was not going to be very good at first meant that I could relax and enjoy the experience of learning. I worked for more than an hour, seeing steady progress, until a sharp decline in performance let me know that I was too tired to keep going.
It’s likely that it will take me a few hours to learn the dance, whereas it would take someone else just a few minutes. I’m okay with that. I know that my talent lies not in the dancing, but in the learning. My ability to accept being bad at something and keep practicing anyway is a skill that I have carefully honed.
If you’d like to get better at tolerating the early phase of learning something new (truly the gateway to growth and development of all kinds), there are a few elements that go into it.
On a practical level, you’ve got to be able to break something down into small parts. If you find that you can’t do that on your own, working with an expert can help.
I was working on my own, so I broke things down by watching clips of just three or four seconds over and over (twenty or more times each) until I could isolate a step or move to try.
The next skill that came into play was self-acceptance. When I’d go to try the step I had just watched a dozen times, I would immediately lose the ability to visualize it. I didn’t get mad at myself; instead, I watched the clip another handful of times and tried again.
Failure tolerance was another handy skill. In fact, I resisted framing things in terms of failure. I was simply moving through a process, one that included lots of attempts before I accomplished the micro-goal I was after. There was no sense of, “This should be easier by now,” or “Maybe this is hopeless.” Instead, every attempt, no matter how awkward, was a step closer to the desired end result.
Another skill was the commitment to celebrating wins. This is the opposite of the hyper-vigilant, hypercritical energy that many of us bring to assessing ourselves. Rather than staying alert for what is going wrong and berating myself for it, I looked for signs of progress and got allowed myself a moment of satisfaction whenever I found one.
My management of the overall process was also a key driver of my enjoyment of my learning experience (and of my ultimate success in learning). I knew when to take breaks and when to get back into the game. I knew when to persist and when to quit for the night.
Meanwhile, my awareness that learning is not linear helped me to move on from a particular step even when it wasn’t polished, knowing that a good night’s sleep would do more for me than additional reps could ever yield.
I’m eager to get back to the dance today and watch myself keep getting better. That’s the mark of a good practice session: It leaves you not demoralized and beaten down, but excited about the next chapter.
I’m not promising that I will get dazzling results from my continued efforts to learn this dance. But I will definitely improve, and I am committed to having fun along the way. I know what I’m doing is working.
I encourage you to try something new to give yourself an opportunity to practice the skills involved. It may be uncomfortable at first, but I promise that you’ll see gains the more you work at it — both with respect to the thing you’re learning and the process of learning.
