I was listening to Sway’s episode on vulnerability and moved by how we can improve our lives for the better if we can learn to address our esteem patterns. I realized a couple things during that episode: my self-armor to protect against failure is to procrastinate until the end of time (or the end of the year) and even then, it may not get done. Where does my resolve go?
Second, I found something that I need to come clean about in an effort to curb my shame and embrace what I think makes me inadequate: I’m a slow learner.
The upside is that I attempt to be thorough but it comes it at a cost. We all have our learning and intelligence strengths and many of us proclaim to be visual learners or prefer hands-on exercises but for me, it’s time. I look at a picture or a graph thoroughly, absorbing every detail going through it once or twice. I hang on to every word lectured looking for nuance or trying to listen between the pauses.
What that really comes down to is me consuming everything twice. I find myself reading pages twice over, skipping back 15 or 30 seconds to catch that snippet of a soundbite because I didn’t hear it or process it right away. When I get to the end of anything, it’s the beginning that dawns over me and I find myself recursing back where I started with a new sense of lucidity and doubting if I correctly read anything the first time around.
But that’s okay. We all learn differently. And this self-embrace-of-shame (thank you, Brene Brown) is meant to help me put aside everything else I harbor within me that prevents me from putting my best self, my best work, my best ideas out there. This is where it begins.
-ZA