Hey Team!
On Monday, I talked about letting your routine carry you into your practice, yesterday I talked about how you can complete your practice even if you aren’t feeling enthusiastic about it, and, today, I am borrowing another technique from my writing practice and encouraging you to be willing to be awful at things.
When I am coaching creative people (myself included), one of the most common challenges they face with writing or making something is that they are trying to make it good when it might be better to let themselves be awful.
I know, that sounds weird, but it’s true – the key to creating something good is the willingness to be awful.
Often, when my clients are writing or drawing or working on a piece of music, they are trying to get it right the first time so they either have trouble starting because they are editing before they even get anything out there or they are correcting themselves so often that they aren’t actually getting anything done.
Instead, I recommend letting ourselves be awful at the thing we’re trying to do. And I don’t just mean the willingness to be awful while you are learning and so you’ll be better as you gain experience – I mean that any time you do your practice, I’d like you to be willing to let yourself be awful at first and trust that you’ll make it better as you go.
When writing, that means getting any old words down on the page – we can fix them later.
When drawing, that means getting some rough lines down so the idea can take shape over time.
When meditating, it could mean letting yourself wiggle a bit or recognizing that refocusing when your mind wanders is part of the practice.
When exercising it might mean making a mess of the plan, or executing the movements imperfectly, or enduring the feeling that you will never do this right.
When I’m learning a new pattern for Taekwon-do, letting myself be awful is part of the process, otherwise I get stuck a few steps into the pattern and I can’t move beyond that.
And, yes, I know that it is important to use correct form (for safety) and that it is important not to spend too much time practicing something incorrectly (otherwise you will have to unlearn it) but there is a lot of space in imperfect practice before you will be doing yourself any harm. You can learn the safety basics and learn how to correct your practice overtime and still give yourself a lot of room to be awful.
You can, in fact, give yourself permission to get all kinds of things wrong, to feel all kinds of foolish, to take as much time (in a single practice or over time) to get things to feel right.
The only thing I hope you *won’t* do is let concerns about being temporarily awful* stop you from proceeding.
So, Team, today I am inviting you to try and let go of your concerns about being awful (and/or your concerns about feeling like you are awful) at the practice you are building. It’s ok to not to get things right the first time (or the first umpteen times) and it’s ok to have to work up to being even somewhat decent at the thing you are trying to do.
And here, as always, is your gold star for your efforts – the efforts you are applying to your new practice, the efforts you are putting into letting yourself be awful, the efforts you are putting into being kind to yourself. No matter how big or how small your efforts are today, they all count and they are all moving you in the direction you want to go.
Go Team Us!
Be kind to yourself out there!
*By the way, you can also feel free to continue being awful at things if you enjoy them but aren’t necessarily going to get much better at them. I am not a great singer nor am I a great dancer but I have so much fun with both of those things that I just go ahead when I get the chance. No one will be buying tickets to see or hear me but that’s completely irrelevant to my fun.
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