Ep. 176: Being a Beginner is Good For You!

In this episode of the Maybe I Can Podcast, I’m talking about why learning something new may be exactly what you need right now.

As this podcast celebrates its 3-year anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on how many things we avoid simply because we don’t know how to do them yet—and how powerful it can be to become a beginner again.

From starting this podcast to learning how to knit after my husband passed away, and now learning Mahjong, I’m sharing how curiosity, challenge, and trying something new helped me reconnect with myself during difficult seasons of life.

If you’ve been telling yourself you’re too busy, too overwhelmed, or it’s too late to start something new… this episode is your reminder that it’s not.

You don’t need a big life change.
 You just need one small opening to reconnect with yourself again.

Transcript

Three Years Of Learning Out Loud

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, and welcome back to the Maybe I Can Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Weiss, and thank you so much for joining me today. As I was just about to hit record, and I looked at what I was going to talk about today, which is why learning something new may be exactly what you need right now, it reminded me that this actually marks the three-year anniversary of this podcast. And it's a perfect time. It was just coincidence. But what it makes me think about is how I resisted starting this podcast because what was I gonna say? What software do you need? What kind of equipment? Like, uh how do you edit? What where do you get guests? It was like, I don't know how to be a podcaster. What the heck do I know? But yet, here I am, three years later, still trying to figure it out. But that's okay, because look, I'm still doing it. And it's morphed and it's changed and gone through different seasons, and it will continue to do that. And I am always learning more, and it is a wonderful thing. What made me really want to talk about this topic is something that I know I mentioned to you a few weeks ago, which was that I have been learning to play mahjong. And yes, I know that mahjong seems to be like, I don't want to say the buzzword, maybe it's pickleball's next reiteration or iteration. But my mother has played this game since she was 20. And when I was a little girl, I used to watch and listen to her and her friends play. I had no idea what they were talking about. It was nothing that I was ever interested in. To me, it was an old lady game, of course, not thinking, okay, she was playing at 20. But to me, it was an old lady game because it was something my mother did. It wasn't something that was popular. How does anyone have time in their busy lives to play a game like this on a weekly basis? At least that's what she did when I was growing up. Now she's retired, she plays a lot more than once a week. It just never dawned on me. It was nothing that I ever had any interest in learning before. And then as I started to get a little older, uh, I would tell my friends, we don't know how to play a game. We don't know how to play anything other than Jin Rami. People who retire, they play canasta, they play bridge, they play mahjong. What about us? We're just gonna be looking at each other. And they would just glow me off. And we once had my aunt try to teach us how to play canasta, but she was a very poor teacher, and I stuck with it through the whole hour of the lesson. But my cousins left after about five minutes. And then this resurgence of Mahjong happened, and I wound up having some other friends who wanted to learn and a friend who wanted to teach us. And so maybe I've had, I don't know, five lessons at this point. But what I'm finding is how much I love learning something new. And I'll tell you, after that first week, I thought, this is way too complicated. I have no interest in this. I am never going to figure this out. It's a lot of rules, it's a lot of different terminology. I have so many other things going on. Like, I'll learn when I actually retire. But right now, I'm too busy. And then I thought, when am I going to get another opportunity like this? Where it's basically in my backyard being with other people who also don't know how to play. And honestly, I didn't realize just how much I needed something new in my life until I started doing it. Because I forgot about the excitement of this. I think the last time that I started learning something new before this was, oh, right when Gary, my husband, passed away. Actually, the week that he passed away, a friend of mine taught me how to knit something else. If I didn't have any interest in Mahjong, knitting was a negative amongst negatives, something, not even a little glimmer of interest. And yet I stuck with it because, as we all know, the name of this podcast is Maybe I Can. And my friend, when I told her, oh no, I don't know how to knit. I can't learn how to knit. I'm not crafty, I'm not creative, I've never been good at any of that stuff. She reminded me, what do you always tell everyone else? That maybe you can. And I thought, oh boy, she has me. And so, off and on, not consistently, but off and on for the last three years, I have become a knitter. I say a knitter, I still don't like to admit that. There's certain things I still don't know how to do, the basics, but that's okay. I do it on my own terms and I really enjoy it. And so now that I'm learning how to play Mahjong, it has also reinvigorated the importance of learning something new and what it feels like to be a beginner. And I think as we get older, we don't like the idea of being a beginner, right? Because it's uncomfortable, you don't know what you're doing, you're so slow at it, you feel like you'll never get it, you make mistakes, and we're not used to that feeling anymore, especially when we get midlife-ish and we feel like, okay, we've got this down. We we're competent, we feel secure in our knowledge and what we're doing on a regular basis. And so to be a beginner at something makes us feel incompetent. And that's not a good feeling. If we want to learn something new, we tell ourselves we can't, we don't have enough time. Maybe it's that you are a caregiver caring for a family member or a child or you're a mom or a grandmother or whatever it is, whoever, we're all as women, we're all caring for someone at some point in our lives. And we often have a lot of responsibility, and those responsibilities, that caregiving, just takes over our lives, our whole lives, all our time and our energy, and honestly, our identity of who we are, get wrapped up in everyone else and everything else that's going on. We think about and we worry about and we track all the appointments, the schedules, always thinking about someone else, the what ifs, the crisis, all the things. And when we learn something new, it is so refreshing and exciting, and it's almost like a wake-up call. So let's talk about some of these objections, or the objection I think that probably is the one that I hear the most, which is I don't have time. This is immediately what most people think, myself included. So especially those women and caregivers who are juggling everything. I totally get that. But learning something new does not have to be big. It could be s as small as watching a small tutorial on YouTube on something you want to learn. Maybe you're a cook and you like to experiment, and so you try one recipe, or you learn to play a new game, or you just read a few pages or listen to a few pages of a book, or you try something for just 10 minutes. We can all find 10 minutes in a day. But you know what? Maybe before you do that, ten minutes. There must be something. I know there's something that you thought, oh, maybe someday I'd really like to learn this. Maybe I'd really like to grow a garden or learn to write or speak a new language, whatever pet play pickleball, whatever it is. Ten minutes. You can do that before you watch TV, before you take out your phone and scroll on social media and get lost in the algorithm of your reels or TikToks. The goal here is not to add pressure to your life, it's to add something, some small thing that actually reminds you of who you are. It gives you a reconnection to curiosity. And that's exciting, right? You start asking questions, you start being curious. I wonder what happens at this point. What about if this happens? You're interested in something again. Instead of just going through the motions and that whole hamster wheel and being exhausted, it's a little exciting, that curiosity. And over time, you start to build confidence because hopefully your expectations are baseline, you're not going to be good at whatever it is from the get-go. But over time, you'll get better. Over time, you build confidence when you show up, whether it's five or ten minutes at a time to learn something new. It builds confidence because for the first time in a long time, you are willing to give something new a try. It does also interrupt that autopilot pilot. You stop just going through the motions, and something inside of you wakes up. It also reminds you that you are not done. I don't care how old you are, that you are still growing. You are not just a wife, a mother, a caregiver, a boss, a team member. Nope. There is so much more that is a part of you. Now I want to share a story I know I have on this show before, but I think it really bears repeating because I didn't even realize what I was doing when I was doing it, but in hindsight, it saved my life. So let me take you back to 2022, maybe around actually April or so of that year. And I knew that I wanted to launch a speaking career. And my coach at the time said, most people who've launched a speaking career, if they're not a celebrity or have some other amazing thing that they did, I hate to say that, but it's true. They've written a book. And I thought, that's nice. I have no desire to write. I can't write, never had any interest, and I had so many limiting beliefs around this. And then one day I heard a woman being interviewed on a podcast who helped first-time authors get their stories out there, and I really liked her from listening to her interview, and I decided, okay, let me just contact her and hear what she has to say. And I did, and she told me that I could do it. She convinced me, she gave me the confidence. She said she was starting this course, this small group course for first-time authors. And I was so scared. But I did it. Nope, that's not true. Let me backtrack. I didn't do it. I was about to do it. And then Gary, my husband, out of the blue, got diagnosed with terminal blood cancer. And at the time I was seeing a therapist. And after the diagnosis, I said to the therapist, Remember that writing course that I talked to you about? Obviously, I'm not doing it now. I'm so glad I never signed up. It was a lot of money. Blah, blah, blah. And the therapist said to me, Oh, I think you should still sign up. I said, I think this woman is crazy. How can she be telling me to sign up for something when my husband was just diagnosed with terminal cancer? I have no idea what any of our futures hold, no idea what the day-to-day is going to be like. There's so many things up in the air. Do you really think this is a good time to embark on something new? And she said, it is. Because learning something new will give you something separate, just for yourself, outside of whatever is going to happen in your life. And I said, What if I don't show up for the course? And what if there's homework and I don't complete it? And what if? And she said to me, Who cares? And I thought, that's true. Who cares? I don't have to be an A student. And I am excited about this, but I'm scared. But let me give it a try. And I'll tell you, the minute that I signed up, I did get excited. I was petrified, but I was excited and proud of myself that I actually did it. And what wound up happening was that those weekly coaching calls were something I cherished. I protected those times. Any time that I could make a doctor's appointment outside of that one hour a week, I absolutely did. That one hour a week, I told my husband, you rest, if you need me, call me, but I'm gonna be upstairs on a call. And from there, I started writing. And it was hard, and I didn't know what I was doing, and it was frustrating, and it was all the things. But once I got going a little bit, and once I got a few stories on paper, I started to believe in myself. And that just fueled my fire. It fueled my excitement. I would schedule something in my calendar, some time frame in my calendar to work on the book. Whether I did it before my husband got up in the morning, I would get up super early, maybe five o'clock in the morning, and I would write then. If he was in the hospital, I'd bring the computer with me, and when he was sleeping or went down for a test, I wrote then. And some days I'd write for five or ten minutes, and other days I wrote for an hour. And some days it didn't work out, but that was okay. I just kept at it. And my therapist was a thousand percent correct. This was life-changing, and it got me through one, if not the hardest period of my life. So much so that when my husband passed away on December 30th, 2022, I was three chapters shy of finishing the manuscript, and I was supposed to have the manuscript to the editor on January 15th. And of course, they said, Oh my goodness, we're so sorry, you don't full extend the deadline, you just let us know. And I said, Thank you. And then about a week after he died, when everyone went back to their lives, and I was left alone in this room that I'm recording from right now, which was a room where my husband spent the last year of his life. I thought to myself, this is even harder than the day he died. How am I gonna get through this? And that's when I realized this book got me through the last six months. It's gonna get me through the next. And I made it my business to write and to finish that first draft of the manuscript by January 15th. And I was proud, very proud. But really, most of all, it saved me. It saved me, and I was proud because I didn't allow all the excuses. I've got too much to do, I don't have enough time, I have too much responsibility, I don't have time to learn anything new. I didn't let that stop me. And now here I am, almost three and a half years later, learning how to play mahjong, something new. It's not about business, it's not about the outcome, it's not about being productive, it's about connection with other people, a challenge, because it is a challenging game, curiosity to learn, because now I have so many questions. The more you learn, the more curious you get about strategies and different things. And it's something, again, that I'm doing for myself. There's something really powerful about doing something simply because it interests you. There doesn't have to be an end goal. Just the fact that it's something that interests you, that you're curious about, and that you enjoy. It's everything. As a matter of fact, the other day I was driving in my car thinking, okay, now I'm learning how to play Mahjong. What do I want to learn next? And it brought me back to thinking about a time where I kept saying, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get a keyboard and I'm gonna take piano lessons. And I will get to that one day. Right now I'm working on Mahjong, still knitting, but that quest for curiosity has not, should not, and will never end, regardless of what any of us have going on in our lives. That's just a story that you're telling yourself. And the reason I know that is because for years I told myself the same exact story. I can tell you that my life has really blossomed since I started embracing curiosity and becoming a beginner again. So, what about you? What have you always been curious about that you've maybe been putting off that you told yourself you didn't have time for? Remember, you can keep it simple and small, and you can even keep it to yourself in the beginning if you want. You don't have to share it with anyone. I know that you don't need any more pressure. None of us do. You just need a small little opening, and I can assure you that this is it. This is the small opening that will bring you back around to yourself again. Before I say goodbye, I just want to make sure that you know that on my website at DebbieRwiss.com, I have a bunch of free downloads. There are something about Kickstart to change and your inner power, and I'm also adding, I don't know if they're on there yet, but I'm also adding two different caregiver-specific free downloads. They're simple tools to help you take care of yourself, even in small ways. So remember, you don't need a big life change, you don't need any more pressure, and you don't need hours of time. You just need something that is all yours. Because even in a season where so much is required of you, you still deserve to always have something that brings you back to yourself. Thanks for listening. Make it a great week, and please message me and let me know what you'll be learning.