Beginner
The diving board thumped as divers hit the water. The place was bee hive of kids and towels. I stood in line with my mother to register for swimming lessons at Andrews Force Base. Realizing I was about to be in a class with strangers I began to panic. I wound up sitting poolside.
I had the same anxiety on the first day of class at new schools. When the car stopped at the curb, I longed to turn around and go back home. I felt lost and clumsy, until I learned my routes—from the front doors to my home room, from there to the lunch room, from the lunch room to art class, from art class to my locker and so on. When I could repeat the obstacle course I began to feel competent.
No one likes to be the beginner. So, we learn to do something one way and we stick to it. The problem is that when competence goes stale and we are reluctant to try new things. We don’t trust ourselves. Ultimately we lose touch with the originality within us.
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Robert Henri said, “It is a wrong idea that a master is a finished person. Finished persons are people who are closed up, quite satisfied that there is little or nothing more to learn.”
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There is struggle involved in learning a new activity. So, we put energy into achieving a level of competence in the new skill, and we repeat the process until we get very good at replication. Competence is the ability to do something well. The opposite, of course, is incompetence, and we loathe incompetence, don’t we?
As long as I stayed the course, I had no shot at learning more about the school. Business cultures that get so good at doing something one way have leaders that resist change and will tell you, “This is the way we’ve always done it.” And, they often miss creating the future for the company.
My first experience with public speaking was a speech class in college, back in the late 70s. The professor assigned us random topics to research and had us speak to the class for 15 minutes. I hated the churning and the breathiness—the sweaty palms and the palpitations. I weathered speech class by learning to memorize every word of my script. I became a competent presenter, focusing on the “how to” and not the reason or the result. It was many years later when I realized that having a real conversation with listeners meant unlearning my old formula for success, taking a risk and allowing a connection to happen.
Stale reruns of presentation skills are a part of unconscious Sophisticated Bull. Being the center of attention and looking bad is the stuff of our nightmares. It’s fine for a youngster to wobble when learning to ride a bike. We don’t ridicule “Hey—that kid needs training wheels!” But adults often forbid themselves to return to the place of innocent and natural learning. We stay safe and increasingly inauthentic.
If you desire authenticity as a speaker, trust yourself. Be willing to break down the act of replication. If you’re giving safe presentations, there is no brilliance, only competence. That is not to say you aren’t using competent skills—but you can become robotic if you stop digging and risking. More next week.
Tags: Add new tag, Authentic Speaking, Public Speaking
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