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Have you ever wondered what is really so different between the eight billion and the one thousand? And then you can look at the ten thousand as well… but not many more.
Have you spent sleepless nights pondering why other people can have what they want and you can’t? People seem to have some magic. Whatever they touch, it seems, turns into a result, gold even.
You can’t see the difference, can you?
And I could only see it vaguely… myself. So as a teacher I have not been able to serve you as well as I could have had I seen it.
People, members of the one thousand, the ten thousand, maybe hundred thousand? They can’t and don’t teach it to their students, or coachees, because they themselves, probably never learned it. Like me.
What am I talking about?
I am talking about the building blocks of a successful ANYTHING.
Have I ever shared it with you how I learned English?
When I was ten, my mother hired a colleague of his to teach my brother and myself.
The dude was old. Smelled of stale tobacco, and liked to reach under my skirt, ugh. He also had this annoying habit of putting his hand on your neck, like a yoke… ugh.
Anyway, my brother quit first, and then I quit too…
But I wanted to know English.
So back at the time, we are talking around 1957-ish, there were pen-pal magazines. So I picked some children to correspond with. I corresponded with ten children, whose mother tongue was English, or wrote good English… one of these people was Danish… He even came to visit me ten years after we started writing to each other.
For more than ten years I corresponded with at least ten people. That pretty much meant, that daily I had a letter to read, a letter to answer. Every day.
In between, in 1965 I went to England to learn to speak as well. I volunteered to be ‘domestic help’ for no pay, just food and lodging in a Kent county family. I met there a Canadian actor who spent hours upon hours to improve how I rolled the ‘r’-s… Hungarian sounds are quite different from those in English.
And not consciously, I did this same thing with playing musical instruments, photography, pantomime, singing, the uneven bars, swimming, ping-pong, kayaking.
So what did I do that only a very few do? I practiced. I practiced to get better at what I wanted to do well.
Practiced with intention.
People who seemingly have magic have done that. When you weren’t watching, they practiced certain parts, certain elements of what they did, so they can take to fluency, competency, maybe even mastery.
So it became doing the job for them as easy as breathing.
I used to have a student whose English is very good. He was born and lives in a non-English speaking country. And although obviously he did the work of getting good at this skill, he doesn’t know about skills. He hopes for talent, and courage, and magic in other areas. so he is on his way to not amount to much in life… unless he realizes that it may take hundreds of hours of practice with intention to get good at something. Instead he wants to be good now. Instantly. And, of course, his results are not good.
I used to sing. I sang in choirs, I sang solo, I sang with bands. I sang a lot. And I practiced scaling with my voice, and doing the do-re-me-fa without having to.
Nowadays I often feel like singing. Just because I am happy. But it is an effort to stay in tune, to make my voice hit the right pitch. My perfect pitch hearing didn’t go away, so I can’t enjoy off-tune singing, even if it is my own.
Singing is a skill… and I did not practice it for 40 years… Could I get good at it again? Yes… with a lot of practice. Will I? Probably not.
Why not? I have some new skills to learn. Skills that are more useful for me.
The most important skill I miss is effectively translating the how-to part of many of the skills I habitually use… seeing patterns, connecting the dots, distinguishing, stepping back, allowing, changing the backdrop/context, changing the game (this is new), etc.
And then, there are some skills that unless I learn them to a fluency level at least, I eventually have no business to speak of.
I recently did a course where I learned some painful facts about myself.
I have no idea how to do small talk. I have only some cursory ideas about how to raise curiosity. More: I don’t know how to relate to normal people, who are not clients of mine. I don’t know how to create eye catching graphics, I don’t know what words to put on them. Also I don’t know how to create engagement. And seeing that I don’t know all that, is paralyzing… not literally, but the feeling is that.
So I need to stop, and acknowledge
So I need to stop, and acknowledge that I have been infected with my clients’, with the world’s inane ideas that I should just already know how to do things without ever learning them.
And know that unless I start, I’ll be stuck here… in this deep hole, and will suffer like an eight billion person… ugh, no way. I am not interested.
I also saw that because of all those missing skills, I lie to myself. I lie that I can’t decide on a topic to pursue… while the truth is: I am trying to avoid coming face to face with my lack of skills. So I keep on not making a decision… and time is passing me by.
I have had clients in the Skill Building Challenge who took on skills that are not needed, not useful for their life. And because of that, they took the skill to a ‘somewhat’ level, and that was that.
The same people could have used their challenge to learn something to do well, something that they would need every day. Like the ability to enjoy what they are doing, the ability to allow, the ability to recognize patterns… One skill at a time.
Some skill that takes them closer to competence… competence in life.
But no, they didn’t want to.
None of them, by the way.
It doesn’t matter what you do for a living, by the way. You are probably only passable at what you do right now. No excellence… You are not getting better at it, because just doing what you do every day won’t take you past the passable level.
Without the intention to get better, without deliberate practice you’ll NEVER get better.
Learning new skills, deliberate practice is a worldview. A worldview that says: I can learn it. And it’s worth it.
While the eight billion says: I should already know it. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s not worth it.
Yesterday I fired a long time client.
I finally admitted to myself that he is unwilling… he willfully refuses to change his mind… and unless he changes his mind, he will never become teachable. And will never have any skills.
I decided to stop beating my head against brick wall… and just let him go.
There is a saying that I hope is true: if you let go of ‘good’, something better can come.
I also have a huge craving for PhD level conversations… and to try my hand on taking someone to The Promised Land who doesn’t need me to teach them kindergarten level stuff for a decade.
But truth be told, kindergarten level is a misnomer. Kindergartners, I hear, watch a cartoon, want to hear a story many many many times… So kindergartners know that without countless repetition nothing is enjoyable… without repetition everything passes like the smell of a fart. Everything is a ‘so what?‘
And a life filled with ‘so what?‘ is no fun at all.
I am planning to create a challenge where you’d commit to develop or sharpen a skill. Sharpen a skill that will allow you to get way way way better doing what you already do.
One of the issues most people face is that they are stuck.
Stuck is a state where you find yourself at the bottom of some well or ditch, and all you can see is what one can see inside a ditch. The sky and the walls of the ditch.
You imagine your life outside of a ditch… but it just makes you feel more stuck.
The way to get out of that ditch is to gently climb higher in the ditch. The way you do that is by getting good at what you are doing. Too good for being stuck in the ditch.
You may need to spend some time determining the elements, the component skills of what you are already doing. Communication, for example. Or setting the context. Or learn allowing, learn setting an attitude. This thing can be a doing thing as well. If you work with a software, learning to use it better. Faster. Or learn to direct your attention, pull it back when needed. Learn to manage it.
Unless you get too good for your place in the ditch, you’ll remain in the ditch.
My challenges are not free. Why? because you need daily support. You report to me, you ask questions. And I am there for you. Or if your attitude is hoping that you can monopolize my attention, or argue with me: I gently kick you out.
If your relationship with me is not trust, then I am sorry, I can’t teach you. And I won’t.
But for now, I am going to give you, if you are interested, some food for thought.
The hardest part is, I think, is to decide what to use the skill-building-challenge for.
Unless you pick ONE THING, and one thing only, you’ll be wasting your time. You won’t get better at any of the skills you picked.
Surprisingly when it comes to the end of December, people have more clarity.
So to stimulate December in September, imagine that you are setting up a New Year Resolution. Whatever you’ll pick will be whatever you pick. My interest is that you actually look. Try not to make a decision. Yet.
Try to think of everything you could pick as a skill building project, where you are more interested in the skill that you can build than in the actual result of the project.
One of my students picked riding the unicycle as his project.
When I asked what she got out of doing the project, this is what she wrote. I am editing it to make it shorter: she has a tendency to write a novel.
I have learned a surprising amount of things that tie directly to my life and how I do things. I’ve learned that the only way to move forward is to let go, even if it feels uncomfortable. That there are NO shortcuts. I tried to find some shortcuts. And that if you don’t ‘ratchet in’ how it feels when you’re in balance, you’re basically starting all over again the next time. I learned that if you don’t take the time to ‘set up’ properly before moving, no amount of practice gets you anywhere. And maybe most of all I learned that there’s no magical point where you just ‘get it’…it’s tiny baby steps all the way.
I started out thinking I already knew how to learn to ride it
I started out thinking I already knew how to learn to ride it, and that it shouldn’t take that long, and that one day it would all fall into place and become clear. All of that was dead wrong.
I didn’t start making any progress at all until I accepted and allowed that there’s no shortcut, no magical day, and that if I wanted to ride it, it was going to be a long slow process and I was going to have to be consistent and committed. That wasn’t until many months of trying hard, thinking I was doing everything right, and getting nowhere. Then I determined maybe my brain just couldn’t do it, rather than just getting to the work.
The parallels are mind-boggling…how much it shows that how I do anything is how I do everything.
It seems to also help me with humility, because I can’t be arrogant or condescending when I’m practicing, especially where people can see me. It seems to give me humor, because it’s funny and a little ridiculous. I think it might help with the TLB issues I have, because it’s exhausting and even though it’s fun I sometimes have to make myself get out there & do it.
I’m seeing this as my thing that I put my energy into that has a result without fixing anything. I think continuing to work to make it a skill could be useful for all of these things.
About a year and a half ago I had a 10 session (BIG) workshop on growing yourself to abundance.
Abundance isn’t an outside thing. Lots of people have a lot, but no abundance. And lots of people have a little and have abundance. I am of the second kind.
Life, when you live in abundance, inside, is very nice, very pleasant, and even things, if and when they go wrong, and they do, life continues to be nice and pleasant, and dealing with issues is no big deal.
And, of course, if it is true that what you are is what you attract, and it IS somewhat true, then when you are abundance, not as a slogan, but really, then you do attract abundance. People, opportunities, health, and work you enjoy.
Anyway, this offer is just for one of the two-hour sessions of that course. I just listened to it, and it will shine light onto a lot of things that you haven’t known that are scarcity…
Sidenote: I think I have a little bit of Tourette syndrome… I hope you can forgive me for my occasional language in this course.
Use this session to ponder what skill to develop
