2023 has brought me many opportunities to be a beginner again. First it started with joining a new boxing gym after a few years away from practicing the sport. Then it was pivoting into a new industry and beginning a new career – twice.
Whenever we’re beginners there can be a lot of doubt and resistance running through our mind that often encourages us to quit. Knowing why our mind does this can help us to overcome this obstacle and help us to graduate from beginner status.
Understanding the Brain’s Mission
While we all have different learning styles, our brains are efficient machines that process and store a lot of information. In fact, our brains use ~20% of our energy every day, the most of any organ in our body. With all the work that our brain does and is responsible for, the brain likes to make things as simple as possible for itself by identifying patterns or putting repeating behaviors on autopilot whenever possible so it doesn’t have to expend so much energy thinking and executing.
As we talked about in this previous post or this previous post, our brain believes it is protecting us with predictability, familiarity, and comfort.
Therefore when we’re learning something new, this can be overwhelming to the brain and the brain might panic and begin challenging the new input instead wanting to default to its old ways because that is what the brain feels is familiar, comfortable, simpler, and safer.
Where the Mind Goes the Body Follows
So while our brain thinks it’s doing its job to keep us safe and alive when it discourages us from trying something new and going out of our comfort zone, the real shame is when our mind gets involved and perpetuates a negative narrative.
Our mind will come up with a narrative that can convince us that maybe it is easier to not try at all or there’s no point in trying because we’ll never improve or get to the level we’d like to be at.
When we start to believe this, our mind seeks out evidence to support these notions and will negate evidence that says otherwise. Once our mind is convinced, then our body has a tendency to somatically follow what our mind believes. Meaning, our body can subconsciously perform to the level our mind believes it can.
To slightly digress, when you watch any type of elite military training (like NAVY SEAL training) they often say that the main premise of some training exercises are as much mental challenges as they are physical challenges that are meant to demonstrate to candidates that they are capable of withstanding more than they think they are capable of. From these tests, many find they are stronger than they think or realize they are. Essentially, when put to the test, we can physically endure more than we think we can, but our mind is the one that convinces us to tap out because it would rather keep us safe and familiar.
How We Can Apply This Information
Often in psychology, once you understand the mechanisms of the mind it allows us to cope and handle situations differently when they come up.
If we can pause and recognize when our brain may think it’s protecting us and doing it’s best to keep us safe inside our comfort zone, we can work to manage our mind in a way that can help us form new neural pathways and reduce some of the fears our mind has to allow us to advance from beginner to expert.
The following are steps and strategies you can take to better manage your mind and decide a better next action when you realize your brain is just trying to keep you safe and comfortable.
★ When it comes to avoiding discomfort, teach yourself to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s not physical danger our mind is trying to protect us from. Sometimes, the threats are actually uncomfortable emotions like failure, embarrassment, fear, shame, and defeat. We can teach ourselves to be okay with experiencing these emotions! When we train ourselves to realize that we don’t have to avoid the emotion we can experience it and learn from it and see that the emotion doesn’t actually jeopardize our wellbeing. In that moment we may feel like we’re “dying of embarrassment”, but a comeback where you pick yourself back up and try and again and improve with the knowledge you’ve gained will eventually surpass the embarrassment.
★ Show some self-compassion and understanding to yourself. Instead of beating yourself up, take a moment to understand that your brain is working on overdrive to reprogram itself. Our brain holds a lot of information. If you’re picking up an old activity you used to be good at, but it’s been so long, and you’re out of practice, and now you feel like a beginner again, understand that the brain has filed away this information and is working hard to bring the information back to the front of your mind and refresh it with the latest updates according to where you are at now in life. Nothing has gone wrong and you’re not stupid, you may just be writing checks faster than your brain can cash them. (Any excuse to try and throw in a Top Gun reference, am I right?)
★ Remember that our brains are highly adaptive and look for patterns. When you learn something again, you learn it faster and better than the last time or when you first learned it. There may be some growing pains, but you will become better at whatever task it is. Not only that, but you will do so quicker than before.
★ Keep showing up. The more you practice something, the more it becomes automatic/integrated in your brain to the point where it becomes more automatic. Expertise comes from hours and hours of rehearsal and performance. You have to put in the time and the work to get the results you want.
TL;DR
Sometimes our mind will tell us a narrative when we’re a beginner that we should quit or discontinue something if we’re not an expert. Our brain thinks it is protecting us. Wether that be from physical harm or mental and emotional harm like failure, embarrassment, shame, or any other form of discomfort.
However, wouldn't you know, the only way to get to expert level is to be a beginner.
One of Malcolm Knowel’s 5 principles of adult learning is that “experience is the richest resource for adult learning”. We learn by doing the dang thing. Your brain may want to keep you safe and in your comfort zone, but taking intentional, continuous and consistent action is how we learn and thereby improve.
“A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” -- B. F. Skinner