Changing the Broken Record

My grandchild has a record player. She has many records from which to choose. Although we may not have a record player we all have choices about the stories we tell about ourselves. If we don’t like one story or it does not suit us anymore we can change it.

Life and children teaching me.

This week I have been thinking about how we get stuck in our personal and public stories.  Sometimes our story is like a record that we don’t particularly like but since it is the only one we own we keep on playing over and over.  Soon we begin to believe that this particular record is the only one we can ever play.  What I mean by that is that sometimes we identify ourselves in only one dimension for a whole variety of reasons. Most often we have not even scripted our own identity. Think of how often we define our families as intellectual, athletic, etc. How often have we heard someone ask a new parent if the new baby is good? I remember working with someone who used to say ‘Well what can you expect, that particular family is like that’. These kinds of narratives do not leave much room for individual or familial growth.

So… we learn to live in a world of dichotomies. We are either good or bad, weak or strong, smart or stupid, capable or incapable, teacher or student.  You get the picture.

We are much more complex than those oppositional definitions of self would have us believe.  Most days we are a combination of all of those juxtapositions. 

A real life example

We are a lot more than those oppositional definitions of self.  Today I had the opportunity to listen to two teenage girls speak to each other and, to say the least, I was surprised.  One of the girls had not done a simple task previously and the second girl declared her incompetent. 

Children learn by doing.

We all learn by practicing new skills, failing and trying again. It is a good thing!

Many years ago I had a client ask me how I learned to bake cookies. I think about her often and hope that she got to learn what for me is a basic skill. She did not think she was capable of learning. My heart hurts that we tell some young people that they are not able to learn.

Surprises

When did not knowing how to do something make us stupid?   What surprised me was how the behaviour of the second girl changed from someone eager to learn to that of someone who became careless in the task and accepted the fact that she could not learn new skills.  In other words, that child started to play the class clown to garner favour and deflect attention away from the fact that she was learning a new skill.

I stepped forward to help them change the narrative but my efforts had little if any effect on their respective behaviour.  Again, I learned about the power of our peers as we are learning about ourselves and our capabilities.    

Power of Peer Messages

The first girl assumed that she was more capable at the task. The other girl, who was at the beginning of the learning curve, assumed she could never achieve the level of competence that her friend demonstrated.

The example I am using is of two children but as I evaluate all of my relationships as an adult this differential power dynamics amongst those who are learning new skills remains dominant.  How often do we hear the following kinds of statements about self?

“ I could never be creative, I can never figure out computers, I could not do what Mary Helen does in her writing, and so on and so on.”

What is going on in our messages to each other?

There are at least two things at play here.  One is that each person in the conversation accepts that one person is a reliable narrator in their evaluation of self.  The second factor is about power in relationships.  The narrative is that one person is overall more competent than the other and that there can only be one capable person in any relationship.   There is a serious problem with that kind of thinking.

I am reminded of an article that I read many years ago that said if we practice a new skill for 10,000 hours we too will become competent at that skill, If I remember correctly I think the article said we could become an expert and I will address the word expert a little later in this blog.

I don’t want to deny that some people are more naturally gifted at certain tasks than others and in fact, we do not all have the same ability to learn new tasks.  

For some of us learning new things is a passion for others it is a labour, not necessarily of love, but rather a means to an end.   Given time, patience and excellent teaching most of us can become competent in many different areas in which we had previously declared ourselves incompetent or unable to learn.  

There are many things in which I am not competent, mainly because I am not interested, do not need to learn or am not motivated to learn those skills.  That is just fine but if my job dictated that I needed to learn how to weld, run a cash register or build a house I would be much more driven to take lessons. I might never become an expert but could probably learn the fundamentals.

This post is about our narrative and how we talk to ourselves. I am not encouraging delusional thinking.  For example, if I told myself that at the age of 70, I was going to become an expert at flying a plane and fly spaceships s to the moon the likelihood of that happening would be 0% and if I believed otherwise I would be demonstrating delusional thinking in the extreme. 

Some reading this blog might say that I am limiting myself by saying that I have limitations but we do have limitations, mine include age, interest, intellectual capacity, geography, education and so on. Oh yes, I almost forgot. I have no central vision. It is just fine to be realistic about our limits but I think we need to address some of those boundaries in new ways.

For example, in the above scenario, my geography is a limiting factor.  Since I like living where I do and have no desire to move, I am not going to become an astronaut no matter how hard I wish it to be true.  The second limitation is my age and physical ability to fly a plane or spaceship.  It is just fine that I am not an astronaut. 

However, if I was young and had a real desire to become an astronaut.  I would tailor my education, physical, mental and intellectual training toward that goal.  I might still not achieve such an elite goal but might be able to contribute to that world in another way.

The other factors that affect the story we tell about who we include: are our family’s stories of who we are and what we are capable of, race, geography, economic status and whether that is birthright or status we have acquired, gender, education and class which is different than economic status.  The overlying somewhat mitigating factor is how our society, community and culture identify us as humans.   So like the diagram below these factors are multilayered and nuanced by our acceptance or rejection of these identifying factors.

Thank you again for reading my rambling thoughts about what makes us so interesting as human beings.

Deb

Who we are as people is in the middle of the Venn diagram of belonging. What I like about this diagram is that there is room for growth and movement as we grow as humans.