But look at how far you’ve come...
Not freaking out when things take time
Sometimes with a client, or chatting to a friend, they’re clearly agitated that they’re not as good at something as they want to be. A bit panicky that they’re not sure what they’re doing. They don’t feel confident and there’s loads of uncertainty and imposter feelings creeping in. And when you ask some questions, it becomes apparent that this thing they’re not feeling great at, is actually something they’re pretty new to. A new job they’ve just started, or a new role they’ve taken on at work, they’re only about a month in, and they’re panicking!
Brené Brown talks about Fucking First Times (FFT), the idea that the first time you do something it feels super cringey, awkward and terrifying. By labelling it as a Fucking First Time, you acknowledge it might be something unformed, experimental and far from perfect but that it’s a necessary evil to get to competency.
She gives us three tools to deal with FFTs. First, name it so that you normalise how you’re feeling. “Oh of course this feels horrible, I’m doing it for the first time, I’m just learning”. Secondly, put in perspective, “will I still feel like this in 5 days, 5 weeks, or 5 years?” And lastly, reality check expectations. Did you really expect your first attempt to be amazing?
I love the idea of Fucking First Time, but often with that scenario I describe above, it’s the not quite firsts that we struggle with. Sure, we expect our first day in the job to feel daunting. We don’t expect to be totally on our game the first week we start. But on the whole I think we’re really impatient to become who we can see we want to be. We’re happy to give it a day or a week. We can go through the Fucking First Time, but then we often expect to be over it, competent and confident pretty soon after that. If we’re not completely on top of this new venture a month or two in, we’re feeling like there must be something wrong with us. This is understandable, but not necessarily helpful.
When we end up in this situation (and god knows I’m as impatient as the next person to become something new) I guess there’s two things we can do. The first, is to look at how much progress we’ve made, rather than only focussing on how far we still have to go. I often find that as soon as I’ve embedded a new skill into my repertoire, I forget that it was once a big deal for me to acquire it. We can acclimatise, learn and grow so incrementally it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come. So yes, we might not be perfect and competent yet, but if we’re making progress then that’s all we can ask of ourselves.
Secondly, and just as importantly, I think we need to remember to give ourselves some grace. We can end up with an imagined person on our shoulder judging the progress we’ve made (or haven’t) and it leaves us mentally justifying where we’re at. But that voice is ultimately just our brain making up a story. So perhaps we need to have a quiet word with it “I get that you’re trying to protect me, but I want to learn this new thing and sometimes learning is hard and takes time”.
Ultimately we can’t become skilled at something without practise, and practise takes time. So we need to practise patience alongside whatever we’re trying to learn, to make sure we don’t let ourselves be overcome by panic!