Three Tips to Get Out of Your Own Way
I was coaching softball at a small Division III school in Boston, when a star soccer player approached me in the preseason.
“I’d like to play softball,” she said. “Even though I’ve never played before.”
As a coach, it’s rare to get a player who shows up to you without any prior experience, and therefore, any preconceived notions about how to play the game. Usually, athletes have had numerous coaches by the time they hit college.
This player showed up as an empty vessel when it came to softball. She had no bad habits to break, no competing information in her head about how to swing the bat or play the field.
She approached everything with a beginner’s mind, and as a result, turned into a solid hitter by the end of the season. It's not that I did an amazing job coaching her. But she didn't have any bad habits to unlearn, and she had no expectations of how things should be done, because she'd never done them before. So she was open in her learning and relaxed in her performance.
Shoshin is the Japanese term for beginner’s mind and is a concept from Zen Buddhism.
I often have clients tell me that they can’t get out of their own way – usually meaning that they’re overthinking and over-complicating the process. Which isn’t hard to do when you look at the overwhelming amount of information we’re exposed to daily.
News, books, social media, conversations, emails – our minds are overflowing with information, worries, expectations and stories in everything that we do. And within that information is often competing suggestions about what will or won’t work.
So what can you do to start shifting into more of a beginner’s mindset?
1. Meditate – or even just pause a few moments to start the day.
Even if it’s only two minutes a day. I’ve been starting my day with meditation pretty consistently for the past nine months. It not only eases me into my day, but I find that taking the time to focus on the breath is an anchor that stays with me throughout the day. When I’m feeling overwhelmed or scattered or distracted (or all three at the same time) I can come back to my breath, which helps to quiet my mind, even if it’s only for a few seconds.
2. Pay attention to how much “should” is driving your actions.
I often ask clients to make two lists when we start working together. The first is a list of all of the things they feel that they should be doing. The second is a list of all of the things they want to be doing.
The first list is usually quite long. The second is usually much shorter, because we haven’t taken the time to think about what we actually want, because we’ve been driven for so long by the shoulds.
What should happen is based on your preconceived notions and ideas. Especially as we age and continue to compare ourselves with younger versions of ourselves.
What if you approached a situation with a fresh mind, as though you’ve never experienced it before? The outcome would be the outcome, with zero expectations of the result.
3. Be coach-able.
Having a beginner's mind might feel more natural when learning something new, but figuring out how to drop the expert's mind in situations you've been in before can be an important practice in learning.
My soccer player turned softball player was very coach-able, because she had no competing information and no ego about her performance. There is a lot of freedom to make mistakes when we start something new, because we expect to make mistakes.
Sometimes it's hard to drop that expert's mind, especially in situations that we've been in a number of times before.
But imagine if you could come into a familiar situation, without any of the old stories or expectations?
Easier said than done for sure.
But an interesting experiment nonetheless.