When did you last learn something new?
And feel all the awkwardness of being a beginner?
I have always loved to dance but for years I only danced at parties with my friends and yet I kept having this niggling feeling that more dancing would nurture my soul in a way I had been missing. So, I recently returned to dance classes, and I decided to try something new!
Enter the salsa class! And the awkwardness of not knowing what to do, feeling foolish at being twice the age of many of my classmates, laughing at my mistakes and having to practice again and again to try out new muscle movements and rhythms. My body loves to dance but it doesn’t know how to dance in this way so I am having to unlearn muscle memory from my earlier dancing days. It challenges my mind because it so easy to slip back into old patterns and habits.
In a world of complexity and ambiguity, leadership is also all about learning, unlearning and relearning, and yet so many of us were brought up to believe that as the leader, we have to have ALL the answers and we have to have the RIGHT answers. When so much of what we are working with is unprecedented this need to be right can hold us back from being curious and adaptable.
It can hold us back when we believe we do have the right answer because as Daniel Kahneman says in his book Thinking Fast and Slow “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world in which we live” closes our minds to people or information which tell us something different.
And it can hold us back when we don’t feel like we have the right answer because we shrink from sharing our views, and we get defensive as we fear “being found out”, or we “go with the flow” without challenging others’ viewpoints or ideas.
Either way we are not developing ourselves as leaders and empowering our teams to step up and contribute their ideas so that we can find new ways to move forward with today’s challenges.
To face these challenges we need to (as author Carol Dweck says):
“be a novice again and again… to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion”
And to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion we need to embrace both courage and humility. Courage to be vulnerable enough to say I don’t know or I need help, and humility to acknowledge that for all of our expertise honed over many years we need to keep challenging our beliefs, assumptions and habits.
So how are you challenging yourself to be a novice again? To explore new ideas and behaviours with curiosity, courage and humility?
And if you see me on the dance floor please join me and we can laugh together at our mistakes!
with love,
Sue
And feel all the awkwardness of being a beginner?
I have always loved to dance but for years I only danced at parties with my friends and yet I kept having this niggling feeling that more dancing would nurture my soul in a way I had been missing. So, I recently returned to dance classes, and I decided to try something new!
Enter the salsa class! And the awkwardness of not knowing what to do, feeling foolish at being twice the age of many of my classmates, laughing at my mistakes and having to practice again and again to try out new muscle movements and rhythms. My body loves to dance but it doesn’t know how to dance in this way so I am having to unlearn muscle memory from my earlier dancing days. It challenges my mind because it so easy to slip back into old patterns and habits.
In a world of complexity and ambiguity, leadership is also all about learning, unlearning and relearning, and yet so many of us were brought up to believe that as the leader, we have to have ALL the answers and we have to have the RIGHT answers. When so much of what we are working with is unprecedented this need to be right can hold us back from being curious and adaptable.
It can hold us back when we believe we do have the right answer because as Daniel Kahneman says in his book Thinking Fast and Slow “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world in which we live” closes our minds to people or information which tell us something different.
And it can hold us back when we don’t feel like we have the right answer because we shrink from sharing our views, and we get defensive as we fear “being found out”, or we “go with the flow” without challenging others’ viewpoints or ideas.
Either way we are not developing ourselves as leaders and empowering our teams to step up and contribute their ideas so that we can find new ways to move forward with today’s challenges.
To face these challenges we need to (as author Carol Dweck says):
“be a novice again and again… to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion”
And to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion we need to embrace both courage and humility. Courage to be vulnerable enough to say I don’t know or I need help, and humility to acknowledge that for all of our expertise honed over many years we need to keep challenging our beliefs, assumptions and habits.
So how are you challenging yourself to be a novice again? To explore new ideas and behaviours with curiosity, courage and humility?
And if you see me on the dance floor please join me and we can laugh together at our mistakes!
with love,
Sue
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