by Caroline Leach | Jan 31, 2016 | Careers, Change, Learning
When you’re learning something new, there’s often an expectation that you’ll pick it up easily. That it will be smooth sailing. That you won’t skip a beat.
After all, the world moves faster every day. The competitive landscape is more intense than ever. Time is in short supply. It’s one sprint after another to learn what you need to know. Learning curves can feel like vertical climbs.
But when in your life have you learned something new and performed it perfectly right from the start?
As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the book Outliers: The Story of Success, it takes about 10,000 hours to master a skill.
The hard part is the feeling of incompetence that comes along with learning. Two things happened this week that made me think more about being bad at something new.
First was reading the work of Erika Andersen in an HBR post, which was the subject of my blog post yesterday. She wrote about how to identify the next skills you should learn.
In that was an angle on having to be bad at something before you can be good. The important thing, Andersen says, is to continue on through the bad phase so you can get to the good.
In fact, it’s the subject of her new book coming out this winter called Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future. Sign me up. The pre-ordered book will download on my Kindle app on March 8.
In a Forbes post that may have inspired the book, she gives great strategies for How to Get Good at Things By Being Bad First. One of them is managing your self talk and being deliberately encouraging in how you speak to yourself.
That brings me to the second thing that happened this week. I’ve been trying different yoga classes, looking for 2 to do consistently each week. In addition to the serenity, stretching and balance benefits, I’m training to do paddle board yoga in the spring and summer.
And I’m moving through being bad into being good. One of my yoga instructors gave me a little smile this week when I at last managed to transition into Warrior II with the correct arm in front.
And my first experience with stand up paddle boarding last fall left me with a patch of broken skin on my thumb from holding the paddle the wrong way. The skin healed, and I figured out a better way to paddle.
Something the teacher in yesterday’s yoga class said made a big impression on me. He advised us not to condemn, judge or demand. If we let go of these mindsets and expectations, we will be calmer and happier.
These could apply to others. They could also apply to ourselves. By letting go of judging ourselves and demanding perfection, we are more free to experiment and learn.
That’s what Andersen is saying too. Most everyone will be bad at something when they first start. But by having faith in your ability to persevere and learn what you need to know, you can get good.
Another great book, What To Do When You’re New by Keith Rollag gives strategies for you to perform new things in front of people who aren’t familiar to you. Focusing on learning and getting better, rather than being good right away, is a great tip.
And his HBR article on being new gives good guidance on asking questions: consider what you want and why, determine whom to ask and if the time is right, ask short to-the-point questions and express thanks.
It’s humbling to recognize what you don’t know and what you need to learn. To try to ask the right questions, even when you don’t know what you don’t know. To take a crack at doing the new task. To learn from and recover from the inevitable mistakes. To start building competence.
This is what I’m doing in my new career role in marketing. This is how I navigate new community leadership roles. And this is how I approach my exercise classes. It’s not easy, but I keep moving forward.
As I learned from my yoga teacher, don’t judge yourself or demand perfection. Be kind to yourself and let yourself experiment. You’ll achieve much more, much faster and much better than you ever thought you could.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 30, 2016 | Change, Learning, Work/Life
With the torrential pace of change in our world, how will you decide what you need to learn this year?
Even if you’re not tackling a new job as I am, every field is changing rapidly. This makes lifelong learning an imperative for all of us.
Richard Bolles had an early inkling of this. While he’s better known as the bestselling author of the annually updated What Color is Your Parachute?, he also wrote The Three Boxes of Life.
In it he argued that we should not think about our lives in a linear fashion of education followed by work followed by retirement.
Instead, he advocated that all 3 boxes of life should be woven through every stage of our lives. This has never been more true than today, nearly four decades after the book was published.
Our education has to continue in parallel with our careers. For those who loved formal schooling, as I did, this is welcome news.
And for those who didn’t, there are many new ways of learning – by online courses, by doing and by observing, to name a few – that can make it more fun and intuitive.
And weaving in elements of retirement with its passion projects, travel and leisure refreshes and inspires us. This is why what we do on weekends is so important.
Thinking about all the things I need to learn in my new role, a Harvard Business Review post by Erika Andersen caught my eye this week.
How to Decide What Skill to Work On Next gives a great framework to focus your learning efforts. Andersen links the framework of Jim Collins‘ hedgehog concept from Good to Great with learning.
Collins found that great organizations have 3 areas of focus:
- What drives their economic engine
- What they can be the best in the world at, and
- What they’re most passionate about.
Linking that with learning, Andersen advocates asking yourself these questions:
- How can you learn and grow in a way that will help your company succeed? What will drive the bottom line?
- Of those areas, which ones could you become excellent at? If you’re good at similar things, those are ideal starting points.
- How passionate are you about those areas? And she shows that passion can be learned by looking at the benefits to learning and how it will create a better future for you.
This is not only a manageable and efficient way of making a personal learning plan, but it’s also inspiring and exciting.
It’s helping me narrow my focus and pick the highest-impact areas in my learning project. And it’s reassuring to know that I don’t have to learn everything, right away.
Like so many things in life, it’s about identifying the highest priority areas, taking initial actions, assessing progress and course correcting. It’s taking steps forward, day after day.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 24, 2016 | Leadership, Learning, Social Media, Work/Life
How do you spend your Sunday?
Inspiration abounds in the Sunday Routine series in The New York Times. Each week, a different New Yorker shares their weekend rituals.
And Laura Vanderkam‘s book What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend made me much more thoughtful about planning and enjoying the precious 60 hours from Friday night to Monday morning.
She helped me understand the important of planning “3 to 5 anchor events” every weekend. These might be fun day trips within a short drive from home, dinners with family and friends, time for yourself and more.
It’s especially important to plan fun, relaxing and meaningful weekends as a means of refreshment after a busy work week.
Here are a few activities in my Sunday grab bag. They aren’t things on every Sunday’s menu, but they’re favorite things that I order as often as possible.
Enjoy exercise. Sundays are perfect for longer-form exercise than during the week. Today, for example, was cardio on the treadmill, followed by a yoga class.
The added bonus during treadmill time? Catching up on favorite shows with TV everywhere on the DIRECTV app. (Full disclosure: for many years I’ve worked at DIRECTV, which is now a proud member of the AT&T family. Opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
Spend time with family. Whether it’s an excursion to a park or other local landmark, a religious service or a special meal together, Sundays are perfect for family time.
In our house, we often have an early Sunday dinner. My husband loves to cook, thankfully, so we often get to enjoy new recipes he’s trying. Our teens are in the middle of high-school finals and college apps, so there’s plenty of work to be done on weekends too.
Get a jump on the work week. Before the hustle and bustle of Monday begins, it’s great to create a plan for the week. In the relative calm of the weekend, it’s an ideal opportunity to spend focused time on an important project. And it’s a good time to clear the decks of accumulated email and open actions.
Focus on special projects. What side projects do you have going on, separate from your day job? For me, it’s blogging.
Although my blog often explores professional topics in marketing and communications, blogging is filled with intrinsic motivation for me. I enjoy it so much that I get lost in the flow of the experience. Whatever your flow state is, devote some of your weekend to it.
Spend time in nature. Especially in the winter during the shorter, darker days, it’s important to spend time outside on the weekends. Whether it’s exercising, gardening, dining or a myriad of other outdoor activities, the outdoors has a restorative quality to it. Connecting with nature is grounding and soothing.
Of course, those on the east coast of the U.S. will have to do this on a weekend other than this one. The snowstorm there is one instance where no action can be the best course of action.
Catch up on reading. Weekends are a great time to read a wider variety of materials than during the work week. Maybe it’s reading the longer news stories you didn’t have time for during the week. Or maybe it’s the latest business book. Or a novel that has lessons about leadership and life.
Enjoy favorite TV shows. If you work in an entertainment-related business, as I do, this really fun homework for my job. Streaming shows on the DIRECTV app (see: exercise, above) is a great twofer – exercise and entertainment.
Today during treadmill time I streamed Jobs for G.I.s on the AUDIENCE network. It’s a compelling look at the challenges veterans face as they transition from military service to civilian life. It makes me proud of my company’s focus on hiring and supporting veterans.
Learn something new. What do you want to learn this year? Whether it’s personal or professional, weekends give you the time and space for learning, whether it’s in person or online. A new book out this month called Stretch is full of ideas for how you can future-proof yourself and your career.
Have fun and enjoy life just as is it. Perhaps most important is to enjoy the moments and the special people in your life. The past is done, the future isn’t here yet and the present is right before you, waiting to be savored.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 23, 2016 | Social Media, Work/Life
Are you looking for more fun in your life? Would you like to connect with friends and family? Do you want to research the fastest growing social network?
Those are the reasons I joined Snapchat today. I want to learn how I can use it in my personal life. And I’m interested to see how businesses are using it to build their brands.
It’s a feeling not unlike the one I had upon joining Twitter. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I didn’t fully know why I was there. I couldn’t yet articulate what I wanted to accomplish.
And that’s okay. Part of learning why you’re in a social network and how you can use it for personal and/or professional objectives is to experiment and play with it.
That reminds me of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick‘s opening to their book The Art of Social Media.
“We are in the trenches of social media, not in a “war room” back at headquarters,” they wrote. “We acquired our knowledge through experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry and conference attendance.”
That’s what I’m doing with Snapchat. I’m learning as I go. I’m making mistakes along the way.
And while I’m not quite ready to share “how to be social” in this network in the way I did with LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, that day will come.
Today I set up my profile and found a few friends. To maintain at least a few boundaries, I didn’t click on younger family members or professional colleagues.
To my surprise, a handful of my Facebook friends were on Snapchat, so I connected with them. And I convinced my spouse to join, so we could learn together.
In the meantime, there was an unexpected benefit to joining Snapchat.
Not surprisingly, my daughter doesn’t want to interact with me in social media.
But when I told her I joined Snapchat, we had fun looking through her Stories and Snaps together. She showed me how captions and geofilters work.
Best of all, she finally followed me in Instagram. And I was able to follow her back for the first time.
Now I just need the next big social network to come along, so she’ll be my friend in Snapchat.
by Caroline Leach | Jan 17, 2016 | Leadership
On this Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, I’m endlessly inspired by these timeless words from Dr. King:
“If you can’t fly then run
If you can’t run then walk
If you can’t walk then crawl
But whatever you do
you have to keep moving forward.”
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