As the online portion of my two-year Professional Communications program cranks up, the biggest struggle is not fitting the work into my day or evening. No, it’s losing the feeling of competence I used to have.
I’ve been running my own business for close to 20 years. I write every day, and modestly think I do a pretty good job of it. Suddenly, the tasks in front of me are unfamiliar, the language dense and complicated. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t like it.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, life coach Lee Weisser recently sent her newsletter on just this painful experience of change. She quotes French novelist Andre Gide:
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Lee goes on to say that transformational change is indeed an uncomfortable process:
“[It] requires a deep learning process, pushing the boundaries of who you are and revealing your blind spots. Deep learning changes how we think and how we behave…And, in a sense, you have to turn yourself inside out — being curious and suspending judgment — to discover just what you’re capable of.”
So while I have definitely lost sight of the shore for now, I will hope that this sensation of being incompetent is temporary. Two years will fly past, as I know from watching my two sons grow up. And in the end, the achievement will be all the more meaningful for being difficult, won’t it? That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
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For me, first year of university was a humbling experience. Because I had been accepted into a school that had the highest admission standards in the city, and because I had done well in high school, I thought I was going to do fine. Instead, I felt that my professors proved that I knew absolutely nothing. All confidence was stripped away. I realized that it would take me four years to begin to acquire the real knowledge I needed to understand my field of study, English literature. Actually, it took many, many more years to rebuild some of the confidence that I had as a student entering university. So I would say, expect to have the stuffing knocked out of you before you can begin to put knowledge back in. That may just be a sign of a good education.
Thanks, Gloria – that about sums it up so far, having the stuffing knocked out of me! Fingers crossed that the knowledge does indeed make it back in. I’ll take comfort in the fact that you made it through the experience, and look how well you turned out.