Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

This episode in our continuing series is another one that’s aimed at me as much as it is at anyone else. One of my abiding temptations is to be an “expert”, and I’ll talk more below about a couple of ways that I’ve fallen into that particular trap.

There are three kinds of education (that I can think of), and three kinds of expertise that go with them.

Just the facts, Ma’am

There’s the kind of education that fills you up with facts but doesn’t give you much to connect them together into any kind of coherent whole – all too common in schools, so let’s call it “schooling” for short.

The expert with this kind of education is the know-it-all. He (or she, but usually still he) can bore you for hours with the details of his particular passion. Think of the character of Ross in Friends.

The problem with this kind of expert is that he doesn’t understand his chosen field as a whole, and, more importantly, can’t achieve anything with the knowledge he has. He’s substituted knowing for understanding and acting. And because he never actually knows it all, he can always use “further research needed” as an excuse to avoid committing to action – so he’ll never change his life.

photo credit: peyri

Having been a know-it-all, I can tell you how I broke out of that particular trap. I started doing things based on imperfect knowledge, and discovering more as I acted. What I learned is that you can’t figure out everything in advance – and if you think you have (see the True Believer, below), you’re likely to take that as sufficient achievement and stop without having done anything with your knowledge.

So if you think you might be a know-it-all expert, here’s the cure: Do things. Learn by doing. Discover in the course of action. And leave theory and detailed knowledge to one side for a while.

I’ve spoken before about how learning tai chi helped me to start a virtuous cycle of self-improvement. That was partly because I didn’t approach it as a know-it-all. I struggled for weeks and months to learn something that had no words, that could only be learned by doing it, by practice. It broke me out of more than one rut. I’m sure it freed up my mental energy as much as my physical energy.

True believers

Secondly,there’s the kind of education that fills you up with opinions and only gives you one way to fit them all together. We also call this “indoctrination”.

The first thing I think of in this context, because I experienced it myself as a young man, is religious instruction in an orthodox (with a small o) community. But I’ve seen it in political opinions of every shade, in conspiracy theories, in the New Age movement, in the kinds of causes that young people adopt passionately – vegetarianism, environmentalism, minimalism – and even in health and fitness fads.

Now, I’m completely in favour of passion, and of at least some versions of most of the causes and commitments I’ve just mentioned (except the conspiracy theories). But the danger of being a “True Believer” expert is that you lose all ability to listen to anyone who disagrees with you even a little.

That’s a large amount of potential wisdom consigned to the outer darkness, and almost a guarantee that you won’t change your life. After all, you’re already right about everything, so nothing needs to change.

The Greek legend of Procrustes, who strapped travelers to a bed and either stretched them to fit it or cut off parts that hung over the edge, is the best metaphor I’ve ever found for the true-believer kind of education.

I’ve been a true believer as well, and here’s my recommendation for escaping:

• Enjoy connecting with people and things as they are, without trying to fit them into your overarching theory of everything.
• Let go of instant judgement.
• Suspend yourself in that space where you don’t know the answer yet or have an opinion. Learn to enjoy being there.
• And draw back from the specifics of your particular commitment – the ways in which it’s traditionally been implemented – and contemplate the principles that lie beneath. Is there another way of living out those principles? Look around for people who are doing that, and learn from them if you can.

It’s a slow process. It took me years. But the starting point is to consider: What if I’m not right about everything? What if other people have a point?

Exploring the principles

Speaking of principles leads me on to the third kind of education.

In the third kind of education, you learn principles – not “theory of everything” principles into which everything must fit, but what’s sometimes called “heuristics”, principles of exploration.

You learn skills, practical skills that you can use when you do things in the field.

You learn to observe – not so much in order to make fine distinctions and categorise (like a know-it-all) or in order to judge and discriminate (like a true believer), but in order to understand and decide on a course of action.

Because exploration and action are the two great methods of this third kind of education. Let’s call it “training”.

Obviously, I’m more in favour of this kind of education than the others. But there are still dangers to becoming an expert this way.

A trained expert (or master practitioner) has put in a lot of practice in the field (the famous 10,000 hours), and his or her brain is now structured differently. The complex patterns that a beginner needs to perform consciously have become built into the expert’s cerebellum, which looks after unconscious use of complicated patterns like movement and speech.

That means that the expert can act without conscious thought. More often than not, this produces the right result – after all, the expert has spent years learning what does and doesn’t work. But in a genuinely new situation, the beginner may have some advantage over the expert, because the beginner approaches every situation without knowing how to handle it, and has to figure it out.

Also, as you become an expert, a layer of sophistication starts to separate you from the simple, human responses that may have been what drew you to the field in the first place. It’s a rare doctor who can simply sympathise with a sick friend, and a rare ornithologist who can take simple pleasure in watching a bird and hearing it sing without naming, categorising and cataloging it.

Zen teachers sometimes talk about having “beginner’s mind”, the kind of fresh approach to any thing or situation that sees it as itself and not an example of a phenomenon.

In order to change our lives, you and I need to approach them with beginner’s mind.

How to be a beginner

In order to be a beginner, I need to let go of being a know-it-all and acknowledge that some things can only be learned when I do them.

I need to let go of being a true believer and acknowledge that I don’t have answers for everything, that some things have to remain mysteries to me.

I need to be prepared to explore, but explore thoughtfully, letting go of being a master practitioner, approaching everything as if for the first time. Even if it looks like something I’ve seen or done before, each time is different.

Because life is untidy and chaotic and provisional, and we can’t live it as experts. If I’m being an expert, I’m not really living. I’m just playing a role.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life – which ends next week with Try for Too Much, Too Soon.