What comes first: knowing how to do something or learning how to do something?
Think about driving. An enormously complex task when we first start, especially if you're learning to drive with a manual transmission.
The concert of accelerator, clutch, and gear lever is truly challenging for even the most natural of drivers, and yet we practise in time. On target, we're now capable of letting driving become a secondary muscle memory task.
How many times have you arrived home and barely remembered most of the drive, distracted by thought, fatigue, or conversation?
And yet, as adults, when confronted with challenge, we often don't give ourselves anywhere near as much rope. We are attaching our egos to our inability to immediately master a task, skill, or subject, and then giving up rather than enduring what we see as failure.
It's as if we've decided the same endurance we demonstrated when learning to walk or drive is now beyond or even beneath us. The reality is, a natural learning process still exists, and it's our inability to move away from the need for blow-by-blow instructions that hinders this natural curiosity that got many of us to where we are today.
Moving away from this ego mind and letting ourselves just be is how we combat this. A perfect example is this post. I'll be the first to admit that I've experimented with AI, training it to sound like me and then spending hours rewriting or re-editing its output. Whereas when I read, and I let myself be with the writer's words, my own writing comes to me much more naturally.
I haven't cracked how to conquer that controlling, judgmental voice in my head, but I can feel its grip on me loosening the more I practise noticing it.
How can you do the same?
I wish I could give you five steps. I've looked for them myself, more than once, hoping someone would hand me the instruction manual for getting out of my own way. There isn't one, not really. What there is instead is a way of seeing the problem that changes what you notice, and once you notice it, you can't quite unsee it.
In his book The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey takes what was, at the time, a very unusual path. Rather than overwhelming his tennis students with coaching cues and inputs, he guides them to see or to visualise the outcome that they're trying to achieve. For us, this translates into seeing the outcome we desire, getting a clear image of what you'd like to achieve, and staying relaxed along the way.
Gallwey called these two parts of us Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is the voice giving instructions, correcting your grip, telling you that you dropped your shoulder again. Self 2 is the part of you that already knows how to hit the ball, the same intelligence that once taught you to walk, to talk, to change gear without thinking about it. Self 1 doesn't trust Self 2. It never has. So it keeps interrupting, keeps correcting, keeps turning a natural process into a conscious one, and the harder Self 1 tries to help, the worse Self 2 performs.
That's my ego mind. Every time I open a blank page and feel that flicker of doubt about whether the sentence is good enough, that's Self 1 stepping in front of something that was already working. The AI experiments I mentioned earlier were Self 1 in its purest form, an attempt to control the outcome so completely that there was no room left for the part of me that actually knows how to write.
What's changed isn't that I've silenced that voice. I haven't, and I'm not sure that's the goal. What's changed is I've started to notice when it turns up, and in the noticing there's a small gap where I get to choose whether to hand it the wheel. Most days now I write first and correct second, the same way Self 2 hits the ball first, and Self 1 only gets to comment on it afterwards, if at all.
I'd be curious what your Self 1 sounds like. Maybe it's a business you haven't started, a conversation you've been drafting in your head for months, a skill you gave up on because the first attempt wasn't good enough.
Whatever it is, hit reply and tell me. I read every one. I can't promise it fixes anything, but naming it out loud has helped me, and I'd like to know if it does the same for you
Cheers!
Paul
