Learning New Skills: from terror to excitement
Stepping into the unknown when learning a new skill might sound terrifying, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s a story of how I’ve learned to transform that fear into an exciting journey.
Over my short and sweet 7 years of professional experience I’ve had to learn multiple skills in order to get promoted or even to have a kick-ass start in a new challenge where the role was different from the one I was performing before, and I bet you did this too.
I had to train that anxious voice in my brain that goes “oh crap, I know nothing about this. I’m sooooo screwed!” to sound more like “cool, here’s something interesting I haven’t heard of yet”.
Although it seems a natural thing, to learn new skills (on a personal and professional level) can become overwhelming really quick if you don’t allow yourself to see the bigger picture. The unknown may turn into this giant monster that enhances the fear of leaving comfort zones and the terrifying idea of failure.
Biologically speaking, the human brain is not fond of change (here’s a great article on this matter based on neurologist Santosh Kesari’s research). Change is associated with a threat to the system we are familiar with, bringing with it the dangers of the unknown and the uncertainty around potential failure that will kill our self-confidence. We immediately embrace a fearful mindset and end up reacting defensively to avoid exposing ourselves to a challenge simply because that might end up showing us we are not capable/intelligent enough.
When I asked on LinkedIn for suggestions on what to write about, the community wanted to know more about this exercise of having or needing to learn something new. I then decided to interview a sample of friends and coworkers to understand their thought process in what regards knowledge acquisition, also to understand how biased my own experience could be.
So… here’s a challenge for you: before reading the group’s answers, go and answer the 4 questions, and then compare how similar or different answers are. Questions were:
1– How do you feel when you’re about to start learning/doing something you know nothing about?
2 – What’s the most frustrating part of learning a new skill?
3 – What’s the most exciting part of learning a new skill?
4- Tell me a success story that resulted from learning something new.
Did you take notes? Great! Lets check the group’s answers.
Challenged. Luís Alves
Enthusiastic. Manuela Meyer
Anxious. Ana Pina
Inquisitive. Bruno Cruz
Searching for valid/relevant sources of information. We can find anything online but what’s actually reliable and relevant per subject? Luís Alves
In-person training prices are crazy expensive (in Portugal) so I end up enrolling online/remote trainings instead to save some money but I have to adapt my entire schedule to the trainer’s timezone – a difference that goes from 4 to 8 hours. Luís Alves
Not yet mastering a skill or subject is frustrating which demands that I re-engineer my behaviour in order to fit its learning into my priorities. Manuela Meyer
Sometimes the business world (its demands and culture) doesn’t account for room to learning a new skill in a structured way. The daily urgencies end up resulting in a learning path acquired on the job, without the necessary time to read, learn, proceed, test, and implement knowledge – such environment is highly error prone which is incompatible with nowadays demands of doing things right and in a high performing way. Ana Pina
The moment you are trying to move from the basic knowledge to mastering a skill. In the beginning, it is fast and easy to make progress and to see results of knowledge acquired but eventually we reach a plateau and it becomes frustrating to continue pursuing the learning itself. Rui Brito
Hoping to expand my competences is motivating! Manuela Meyer
To discover that we can actually do it! The great feeling of realizing our increased autonomy through time, and becoming increasingly confident as we perform better and better. Ana Pina
Feeling stronger, more capable, and happier. Rui Brito
When the new learnings acquired start to be applied to daily problems and when I’m able to relate new topics learned with old domain knowledges. Bruno Cruz
My academical background and work experience were insufficient for a straight transition to a Project Management career. Every time I took a look into available positions on LinkedIn, I felt frustrated because it felt I’d be year away from being able to enrol a PM job. To mitigate this, I ran an informal research amongst friends and coworkers working as PMs to understand which skills I’d need to prioritise acquiring to get there sooner rather than later. Simultaneously, I rolled up my sleeves and started to read books and articles on the subject, as well as taking a few trainings. When I finally started getting interviewed, I felt way more confident and capable to communicate in a more direct manner with recruiters in order to prove how my previous experience and learning would make me a great fit for the Project Manager’s position. The opportunity presented itself and I’m now working in the area I wanted to and I’m happier than ever! Luís Alves
When I started reading more about emotional intelligence I could easily identify my strengths and improvement points. Going deeper on this topic made me realise my true issue to resolve was defining a career direction. Acknowledging this helped me progressing but at the same time it felt like I was moving completely in the dark without knowing if the moves taken were the most productive ones. Although it isn’t an easy topic to embrace proactively because we are always so blind with daily operational things, spending time and mental disposition in improving my emotional intelligence skills supported paving the way to defining what I’d want for my career and what to do to get there. I feel my heart is now warmer and my purpose clearer. Manuela Meyer
In Human Resources it is very difficult to act in a structured way as the solutions for challenges encountered highly depend on specific context, sometimes making it impossible to standardise practices/processes. When I started working in this area I was confronted with a brutal reality without any guidelines on how to effectively interview candidates or provide useful support to hiring managers as their business partner. This was tough and required humbleness and critical thinking to keep on asking feedback to my key stakeholders in order to identify what was going well and what would need to be adjusted (and why). Iterating on that feedback as well as exposing myself to different contexts and challenges, allowed me to compare results and to develop more confidence in my competences. Ana Pina
Interesting, right?
The speed with which each person learns and the way they experience this process can vary greatly, but I’d say it’s safe to assume we are neither John Snow nor Chuck Norris. Sounds silly but let’s take a look below.
If the graph above looks like it is inspired by the Dunning-Kruger Effect, it is! This effect measures the correlation between our confidence and our level of knowledge or ignorance about a specific topic, but that only tells half the story. What about effort?
Rui mentions “reaching a plateau” as a decisive moment that may undermine or empower our willingness to continue learning more about something. Seth Godin has written a short book called The Dip where he addresses the relation between effort and results, which may be an amazing resource to learn more on the matter. Below a quote I find amazing:
It’s easy to be a CEO. What’s hard is getting there. There’s a huge Dip along the way. If it was easy, there’d be too many people vying for the job and the CEOs couldn’t get paid as much, could they? Scarcity (…) is the secret to value. If there wasn’t the Dip, there’d be no scarcity.
Personally, I believe that admitting that everything in life is an experience that can either go well or fail is the first step to embrace learning as an exciting adventure.
With a continuous growth mindset I developed during years acting as an Agile Coach and Project Manager, I understood that if the outcome of a new learning is positive, perfect! If it ends up going down the wrong path, it’s a matter of sitting down and noting all the lessons we can take from that experience — that definitely enriches our next challenges and teaches our brains that failing is only outrageous when one consciously decides they won’t learn a thing from a new experience.
Make no mistake: a person’s unique traits will influence their willingness of learning something new. Not everyone has a curious attitude towards the unknown. For me that came easily because I’ve always been excited about new topics in order to have a broader view of the world. At the same time, the possibility of starting to be responsible for subjects I’ve never been exposed to triggers my fear of failure and like everybody else I continue to work hard on my self-confidence, stability, and availability to risk more than I had initially expected.
Here’s a visual represemtation of how my brain processes the reaction of needing to learn/do something completely new:
During 2020, the Operations team I was working with started to position themselves as the go-to team in the department for data analytics (an area I personally didn’t appreciate much nor had much one could call expertise). It was important that each team member knew at least how to use mySQL to run queries in order to find data in our database and with that build some data visuals using dashboards.
I didn’t understand how that need of a new learning was fitting my interests and goals for career development. I felt like there was a complete mismatch from my sense of purpose.
Every time a person said the word data my motivation died a little, and I had to put effort in understanding why this was happening (after all, this was not the default reaction to new challenges).
As a person whose career goal is to achieve proficiency and a robust skillset around Change/People Management, having to start focusing the scope of my daily job in data analysis was absurdly far away from my career goals and life purpose. This was unconsciously telling my brain that learning mySQL was a threat and that I should act defensively by declining such endeavour.
It took me many conversations with my fiancé and my psychologist to understand and acknowledge the trigger, but when I did that it gave me the perfect opportunity to handle things differently: I asked my line manager for guidance in understanding why that specific learning was so important, why it shouldn’t be delegated, and how it would bring me experience and learnings that could still help feeding a career in Change/People Management.
Asking yourself what will a new learning/skill bring you as benefit will motivate you towards the process.
Stephen Covey put it better than I ever will in his “7 habits of highly effective people” book that I keep on quoting and recommending.
Start with the end in mind.
New isn’t intrinsically bad.
Change isn’t intrinsically chaos.
When facing an opportunity or need to learn something, most of us set unrealistic expectations based on pure perfection or failure, pass/fail scenarios:
- Believing that we are going to master the new topic in 2 days (expecting that a magic playbook will teaches us step by step how to succeed and never fail) or
- Trusting that each learning chance is nothing but a threat that is going to show the world how limited we truly are because we are unable to absorb knowledge.
Although both scenarios seem farfetched, I’ve observed them multiple times in people from different ages, academic backgrounds, social and economical status, and these individuals simply deny that they act like this when confronted with a few questions. For some reason I’ll leave for neuroscientists to explain, it’s like their brains erased that behaviour from their memories as a defence mechanism.
Not admitting blind spots will undermine all attempts of personal and professional growth so always make an effort in challenging your own biases by discussing your behaviours and methods with peers, friends, and family members.
In conclusion, there are 4 essential steps to face new skills as an opportunity rather than a threat:
- Be curious about everything;
- Understand the benefit of acquiring a new skill or learning about a new topic;
- Make an exercise to assess how the benefit connects to your career/life purpose;
- Daily work on your growth mindset, accepting both success and failure as part of your self-development.
