Time for another Three Things I’ve Learned post.
I recommend this as a personal development exercise, by the way. Even if you’re not a blogger, though it’s obviously easier if you are.
Each time you have a significant experience in your life, sit down and write about three things you’ve learned from it. It makes the difference between learning them and knowing you’ve learned them.
Anyway. For my birthday, I went rock climbing at an indoor climbing wall. The idea was to celebrate the fact that I’d overcome my fear of heights.
I shot a bit of video with my head-mounted camera, and my friend Duncan took some photos for me, and I’ve pulled them together into this video/slideshow thing:
Fun, right?
Here are three things I learned.
1. Progress short of perfection is OK
What you may or may not have noticed is that, while my friends were climbing to the top of things, I wasn’t.
I could certainly climb a lot higher than I ever could have before. And what I felt, when I reached those heights, wasn’t fear as such. It was caution, an unwillingness to climb higher.
As I talked about a while back, when I was training as a hypnotherapist, my esteemed sensei Roger Saxelby demonstrated the “Fast Phobia Cure” on me. Since then, I’ve been perfectly comfortable climbing ladders and standing on balconies, where once I had trouble going upstairs in a glass stairwell. But part of the Fast Phobia Cure as Roger practices it (and quite rightly so) is to remind the client to practice reasonable caution in the former phobic situation.
The thing with phobias is that phobic people tend to avoid the situations which trigger their fear. This means that they’re not used to dealing with them, so it’s appropriate to give them the suggestion of caution.
That caution is still with me, and I haven’t yet reached the point where I subconsciously trust the automatic belaying devices at the climbing wall to keep me safe. I can climb to about a two-storey level comfortably, but that’s it. For now.
I’m disappointed that I wasn’t as far on as I’d thought, but I’m also pleased that I’ve made the progress I have.
2. Sometimes doing is more healing than resting
I’ve had problems with my shoulder for a couple of months. I was sitting at an unergonomic desk for a few weeks, and it’s my mouse-using side that’s causing the trouble. Then I strained it doing a new kind of situp that the US Army are talking about introducing, which involves your hands being up over your head. I had to go to the physiotherapist a couple of times, and it’s troubled me intermittently since.
It was bothering me when I went along to the climbing wall, but I’d booked it a month in advance to commit myself to doing it, and I wasn’t going to back out. I put chemical heat pads on it for a couple of days beforehand and hoped for the best.
Since the climbing, though, it’s been fine. Apparently what it needed was not rest, but exercise.
I had a cold, too, but again, I wasn’t going to pull out. And again, I felt better for having done something.
My tendency, and maybe yours, is to think that if I feel bad that’s a good reason to do nothing, to rest, to pull back. And sometimes it absolutely is. But sometimes, getting active is exactly what I need in order to feel better.
The trick is in telling them apart – knowing when I need to rest and when I just want to rest (but would actually benefit more from pushing on).
3. Pre-commit to doing what will do you good
Which, of course, leads into my third point.
One reason that I join groups and classes is that if I do, I’m more likely to do whatever it is. I have a time, a place, and some people who are, however casually, expecting me to turn up. It’s booked. It’s in my calender.
I’ve recently been thinking about how to make my ecourses more useful – not by changing the content, but by improving the way that people engage with the content. I have a few ideas, up to and including an iPhone app, but one of the key ideas is to encourage people to book a time for doing the course into their calendar or diary.
Over 500 people have got the second email for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, for example, but fewer than half of them opened it, and only just over half of those have clicked on the link in it to get their ebook.
I can’t blame them. I do that too. I have a course that I’ve paid for sitting mostly unread in my inbox right now, because when I’m checking mail I’m checking mail, I’m not doing a course. When I do open an email for a course, I rush through it. I don’t have time set aside.
When I was planning to start up exercise again, I didn’t do so until I figured out where in my day I could fit it, because I knew it just wouldn’t happen otherwise. There was no point in “committing” to do it in a general sense. I had to commit to doing it at a particular time.
I often say, “I’m planning to do such-and-such”. But unless I have a scheduled time, a booking made, a commitment in place, I’m not really planning to do it. I’m inclining to do it. I’m wishfully thinking about doing it.
I’m not, by nature, a highly organised person. I’m not one of those counsel-of-perfection people who have an empty inbox, an uncluttered house and everything scheduled down to the minute. My filing system is that I generally know where I’ve put things, more or less. But for that very reason, I have to schedule things that I really want to do, or else they’ll get pushed out by the ordinary day-to-day doing.
Action Now
The service I provide here is not that I learn personal development lessons so you don’t have to.
It’s that I learn personal development lessons the hard way so that you can learn them much more easily, by listening to me.
But you haven’t learned them until you’ve acted on them. Personal development always has a practical exam.
So:
- What could you make some progress on, even if you don’t achieve perfection?
- Is there something you’ve been avoiding doing in order to “rest” or “heal” or “keep safe” that would benefit more from taking some action?
- And when are you going to schedule doing something about it?
