One teeny tweak for happier learning

Even when things aren’t going very well. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

You’re practicing some Bach or your tennis serve or a purl stitch…and then you hit a wrong note, whiff the ball, or drop a stitch off of the needle.

At this moment, you have a choice! Do you:

a) Tell yourself, “It’s okay! You got this.” or

b) Tsk yourself?

I’m here to ask you to stop tsking. It positions you against yourself as a harsh, humorless coach and makes the learning process a lot less fun. Every time you do it, you are training yourself to dislike or even avoid the hobby you’re working so hard to master.

If you think I’m making too big a deal out of merely clicking your tongue against your teeth, imagine this:

You’re being coached by Bach himself/Roger Federer/your grandmother whose knitting skills are family lore.

When you mess up, this coach whom you hold in such high esteem, whose opinion means the world to you, goes, “tsk.”

Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be crushed! You’d be crushed.

Next, imagine that you are the coach and one of your favorite children in the universe, one that you would shield from the Avada Kedavra curse with your own body, is the one learning. When she messes up, are you going to tsk her? No way!* You’ll cheer her on as she tries again, then give her a fist bump and heaps of praise when she nails it.

When you realize how awful you’d feel being tsked by someone you admire or tsking someone you adore, I hope you can make the connection to realize the harm you’re doing by expressing disappointment in yourself, however briefly and subtly. New skills are fragile. It takes effort and guts to put yourself out there and try, especially as an adult, and the last thing you want to do is shame yourself for mistakes. Mistakes are to be expected and ignored, breezed past like highway exits that have only Subway and Arby’s on the blue sign. You don’t need to dwell on them — just set yourself up again and give it another shot.

Sometimes, we tsk in order to acknowledge to any witnesses that we know we messed up. Perhaps the rationale is that to mess up and not know it would be worse than messing up and being aware of it. But this self-consciousness doesn’t help us get better and doesn’t put the other person at ease, either. Learn from the onstage demeanor of professional musicians: They pretend that they didn’t mess up even when they did, and no one can tell. Let go and move on — without the tsk.

I happen to know that Roger Federer would be way too kind to tsk anybody (Bach and my grandmother, I’m not sure about). He would nod encouragingly and motion for you to try again. It would make all the difference.

* If your answer is yes, please stop doing this. It’s not nice.