Building New Muscle

I’ve enjoyed a lot of great experiences and even successes in my work. I’ve lead teams, workshops, business strategy sessions in countries across the world. I have been able to translate principles into language and examples that have been extremely helpful for sales and marketing teams in many situations from product and technology launches to new purchases of businesses. Lots of diversity and lots of complexities to overcome.

So why was it that when I wanted to simply add a scheduling tool to my coaching practice did, I find myself in such a fight?

I got advice to look at several on-line scheduling tools. My coach guided me toward one that “is simple and yet flexible to use” (his words NOT MINE). Easy to download. Check. Easy to connect to register an account…sort of check. Nothing came easily after that.

I spent hours attempting to customize with a picture and then connecting to my Google calendar and developing my personalized message to go with the invitations for appointments. Each task was painful. Every time I thought I had it…. the change didn’t stay, or the picture was too big, or the message was in the wrong place or something.

Honestly, I began to think 2 things:

There must be something wrong with me I should stop messing with this and hire it done!

While thinking about the second one, it hit me. Even though I had a lot of experiences around the planet and enjoyed success - all of that was in a band of skills I had developed over time. I was using “muscle memory” each time I did my thing in new countries or markets and each time I was building up a bit more.

Now in this new arena - the arena of something I was unfamiliar with - I had no “muscle memory” to build on. Instead, I floundered with trial and error. I got a little bit of direction from my coach and then BAM! Suddenly I made progress. The progress lead to more progress. The screen instructions and placement of materials began to follow a pattern I could see. It made sense. 30 minutes later - the scheduling tool is up and running.

My aha’s from this include the following:

I need to let myself be uncomfortable to learn new things….It’s okay. Learning anything new requires some resilience - there will be a breakthrough and then acceleration - this a way to build new muscles! I can tend to organize my life to only do things I already know how to do (use the muscle memory from prior experiences) - there’s nothing wrong with that but I want to be careful to NOT avoid learning NEW things.

Can you relate? Is there a time when you wanted to learn something new and hit resistance? What did you discover?