Allow Yourself to Suck

Yeah, I know.

The perfectionist in you is cringing. You can’t do it. Your whole life has been spent trying not to suck. And now I’m asking you to let yourself suck? What kind of nonsense is this?

Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to suck forever. I’m just asking you to suck for a little while.

When there is something that you 

•     are scared to do
•     don’t know how to do 
•     are apprehensive about
•     Or whatever

THAT is the time to allow yourself to suck. 

The good thing is, when you are starting up on anything like this, very few people will get to see it. So, it’s okay if you suck. 

It’s only by sucking, but you can get better. You can’t get better at something if you don’t start. And generally, when you start something new, you suck at it, at least just a little bit, at least for the first while. 

Embrace that.

When you first learned to walk, you sucked at walking: 

•     you fell down regularly,
•     you wobbled,
•     you wove, 
•     you plopped, 
•     you stumbled, 
•     you face-planted.

No unbiased person would have looked at those first few times that you tried to walk and said there is a walking star.

The biased people in your life (which in the case of a baby is everybody), they probably celebrated every wobbly step, cheered every attempt, whooped and whistled whenever you got it right, encouraged, comforted and supported you throughout the process when you didn’t get it right. Even though, objectively, you sucked at walking. 

But each time you took a few sucky steps, you got better. Especially when you were encouraged and cheered. 

With each foray into walking you gained confidence and skill until you mastered walking with confidence and eventually without even having to think about it. 

Sure, you may still occasionally stumble and fall. You may sometimes faceplant, even with decades of experience, but your walking is pretty darned masterful 99.9% of the time. 

You had to get through the sucking part to get to the confident walking.

You have to get through the sucking of “doing whatever it is you’re trying to do”, to get to the confident “doing whatever it is you’re trying to do”.

It helps if you have somewhat biased people encouraging, cheering and supporting you along the way. Like the people inside the Productivish Facebook Group, for example. 

So Embrace sucking.

Allow yourself to suck so that you can get better and no longer suck.

 Because it is only through sucking that you get to confidence.  

I can’t wait to see what you suck at next!