I don’t remember who it was that told me everything in life was a skill that could be learned, but I remember thinking about it for a while. Before that I assumed some people were naturally talented, and others were somewhat handicapped.
I can’t sing, I can’t draw, I’m not good with people, I’m not good with money, might be true at the moment. But they are all skills that can be learned and developed if you are willing to work at it.
The hard part is overcoming the resistance towards learning it. Staring failure straight in the eye as you flounder around without training wheels and feeling the hot embarrassment of rookie mistakes doesn’t make skill building much fun.
There are a few things that have really helped me to be ok with being a first timer. The first is to just be willing to try. I can feel resistance inside of me that used to stop me dead in my tracks. I’m learning not to listen to it, more often than not it’s just my ego talking.
The next thing is to forgive myself for not being perfect before I start. This has been the best way for me to deal with my perfection issues. I’m human. I’m supposed to be flawed and imperfect, I am not capable of knowing all of the things and I’m supposed to learn from failure. I was not born with a cape on my back.
The final thing is understanding that every single thing is a skill and skills just need to be practiced. The internet and google are the best tools ever invented for learning skills. I now google everything from ‘why do people want more money’, to ‘how to make a good first impression’. After you start there are a million rabbit trails to go down.
You can learn people skills, creative skills, friendship skills, sales, magic, and mindfulness skills. The list is endless and the world is your oyster. Once I understood this part, I could finally see how “if you can dream it, you can do it” is true, before it felt like a foreign concept.
So the next time you catch yourself say I can’t, understand that you can, you just have to begin.
The hardest part isn’t learning the skills, it’s the amount of moral effort you need to stare failure straight in the face. Once you know that’s what you’re up against and understand it’s not a handicap, it doesn’t seem so bad and you can see that everything is figureoutable.