The Struggle: When Everything is New
When You've Never Done it Before, Everything is New
To be a beginner again…
When I was a junior in college, I took a course in motor learning for my Kinesiology degree.
We had to do a project where we learned a new skill. This taught us the motor learning and skill development process.
Most of us never learned to juggle and that was the recommended skill by our professor. So juggling it was.
As adults, we often forget the struggle of learning something new for the first time. Previous to that, I don’t remember the last time I learned something new…
Learning to juggle is difficult but just like anything there is a learning curve and once you start to climb it, it compounds on itself and automatizes. Your skills get better, you stop dropping the tennis balls, and then you can think about what you’re going to have for dinner and forget you’re even juggling.
Fast forward two years later and I was a head coach of a junior hockey team. Also something I had never done before. The learning curve is a little bit steeper than juggling.
I was finally crossing over from exposure to experience. Just like you can’t learn to drive in traffic by simply observing, you can’t learn to coach observing at your internship that didn’t actually let you “coach.”
The struggle is everything at first.
Your meetings suck because you haven’t had much public speaking experience.
They also suck because you think you’re a fraud and you think your players are going to expose that deep fear of yours as well.
Why would they listen to a 26-year-old?
He didn’t play D1.
I looked him up on Elite Prospects, he got cut from a D3 school his sophomore year.
He played “club” hockey.
My imposter phenomenon was raging and my perfectionist monster was growing every day. I’m impatient by nature and didn’t like the fact I was struggling.
So I dug in more, wrapped my identity more into being “a coach.”
Wrong idea Drew. Take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself so seriously. Also when you take a year off after this experience, you’ll start to realize how messed up you really got yourself.
The struggle is letting your “coach identity” become all-consuming.
The struggle is letting your perfectionist monster grow out of control.
The struggle is taking yourself too seriously.
The struggle is not being an authentic version of you because you fear losing the room. So you aren’t you.
The struggle is insecurity in who you are.
The struggle is losing self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-discipline all at once.
The struggle is not remembering the first rule of holes… When you find yourself in one, stop digging.
When everything is new, the struggle presents itself again.