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Key points
- Learning new skills is exhilarating, until it's not. You may hit a brick wall. Just be ready for it.
- When you get frustrated learning some new skill, take a break and do something you do know how to do.
- Prove to yourself that you do have skills in other areas and then go back to what you're learning.
I’ve been learning two new skills in the last year, tennis and fiction writing. I’ve written and raved to friends about being “a beginner” again—new ideas, new processes, new brain paths. I’ve relished the high-speed learning of trying to come up the curve on two areas that have been out of my interest and reach.
It’s been great…until recently. I pulled a hamstring muscle and found it hard to move on the tennis court and elsewhere. I postponed doing anything about it until my tennis instructor pushed me to see my doctor, who recommended physical therapy. After two sessions and two weeks of exercise, my leg seems to be improving. Amazing. But I’m frustrated that I’ve fallen so far back on the tennis learning curve. I’m overwhelmed (again) with how much I have to remember—from pushing through the ball before follow through on ground strokes, to leaning away to hit high balls, to tossing the ball for a serve in just the right way, to finding my strike zone for groundstrokes…it’s nuts. The wall of next-step improvement looms large and solid. I might never get better.
The same thing is happening with writing. I’ve worked hard to finish my fourth bad novel, struggling to get interesting words down, but most are bad, and I know it. There is SO much to think about (like tennis) and if I try to address one area of weakness, another one crops up right behind it—point of view, “sub-text,” using all the senses, getting into the main character’s head, adding in emotion, taking out extra words…it’s nuts. Like tennis, the wall for improvement seems to go straight up with no ladder to scale it.
I realized that trying to learn two new skills at the same time, and not being very good at either, was pulling me to a spot where I thought, “if it’s not fun, maybe I should stop altogether.” It had become work, not play.
Then, in unexpected ways, advice appeared. A wise writing friend said “go back and do something you know how to do. Write some non-fiction.” Then, in another unexpected move, the tennis instructor invited me to a beginners’ clinic since the time was better for me. And boom. I’ve found a way forward.
I can write short non-fiction—news columns, blog posts, descriptions of my latest trip to Vietnam. I can do that and feel I’m achieving something and…I’ve got the confidence to conquer that blasted wall in fiction writing.
At the beginners’ tennis group, I found I can still hit basic strokes and marshal my backhand fairly well. I even hit a few serves into the right spot. So it feels like I’ve pushed that big wall forward a little bit, giving me breathing space before I go tackle it again.
So that’s my new learning approach: normally we say two steps forward, one step back as a normal course of the learning process, something that we really can’t control.
But, I’m going to use it in a more deliberate way—I’ll give myself the grace to step back for a while, maybe for longer than I normally would. It has been refreshing, made me realize I do not want to stop either new skill but just need to be patient. That looming wall might have some cracks after all.
