This is a useful question to ask yourself in the midst of change and life generally.
Change often brings a need for new. New beliefs, behaviours, habits, skills and contexts; things we haven’t done or experienced before.
With this newness, comes the need to be a novice too.
Yet as adults, opportunities to be beginners can be few and far between. With habits entrenched, hobbies honed and careers developed, we may have left our beginner days behind with our school bags.
Being as out of practice as we are at trying new things, the territory of being a novice, of knowing next to nothing, of likely failing, and of potentially looking stupid can be enough to stop us from trying at all.
In the context of change, getting good at being bad at things is a useful skill which deserves more attention.
It’s unlikely any of us feel 100% comfortable being a novice, but our levels of discomfort will vary. All sorts of factors in our past and present come into play here. How did we find school? How do we feel when things are uncertain? How much do we care about what others think of us? How have we been treated (and responded ourselves) when we have inevitably “failed”? How often recently have we tried to do something entirely new to us? For a variety of reasons, for many of us, being “bad” at things is really hard.
Developing our understanding of how we find being “bad” things and what helps in this context is time well spent. With this awareness of how we find being a novice surfaced, and with ways of coping to hand, our discomfort is much less likely to be a deal breaker in our efforts to make new things happen.
