Do you quit the first time you try something new.

When we want to learn a new skill people often spend too much time researching before they make a start start on the skill they want to develop. They are afraid they won’t get it the first time they try it and they feel like a failure.

This is often a result of the school environment where there were tests and the result was either pass or fail. With a mediocre to excellent grade on the pass side of the paper. And just passing isn’t good enough. This creates a problem when it comes to learning. You don’t want to risk failure. Anything below excellence is a blow to the ego.

So people spend time looking for assurances that what they want to learn is possible for them to learn. That they have what is need before they even willing to risk trying. This all or nothing approach to learning is sad because it is self-defeating.

We didn’t always fear failure.

We didn’t always have the attitude that says I must get it right the first time I try it or I’ll give up. If we did, we’d have never learned to crawl which was a prerequisite before we learned to walk. And if we gave up on the idea of walking on our first go we’d still be crawling. We wouldn’t be talking and riding bikes. Eating with utensils would be impossible. We wouldn’t be able to use a knife to butter our bread. In our ignorance we didn’t consider it impossible for us to learn, we just gave it a go. We learned to tie our shoelaces and resented when someone else wanted to do it for us. True we experienced frustration and confusion while as we learned and yet we persisted.

We wanted to learn this for us, not to impress others. We did it for, “me”.

As children we were natural learners. We tried and failed in what we set out to do 50 to a hundred times. Yet now we call ourselves adults and it’s all or nothing. ‘I have to succeed the first time I try it or I’m not trying it again.’ We gave up that child like persistence in areas of personal development and learning. We stay in the comfort zone of mediocrity and resist giving it a go, because we know from experience can expect to fail on our first try.

To be continued with….

Why would we want to change our approach?

Till next time