From my childhood I had great inclination towards music. I used to get so impressed with the people who pursued music in their life. Among all the musical instruments, Guitar fascinated me a lot. In the race for survival and job I never honoured my inner desire to learn guitar or any other instrument that I admired after guitar. One day I finally made up my mind due to frustration of killing my natural self, that I will give myself a change to learn guitar. So before investing into buying an acoustic, I decided to borrow it. I was feeling very shy to join a guitar class and hence bribed a friend to teach me in the spare time.
“My First and the Last Lesson” – it was a Sunday evening when I visited my friend’s place to take my first lesson. He greeted my warmly and we sat on a very comfortable chair, as he started acquainting me with the parts of guitar and the concepts of scales and chords. He looked so effortless in handling the guitar that gave me the confidence of making it like a cake walk. Playing the tune was a long walk, I was not even able to put the right pressure on the strings and press the right places while striking them. The struggle went to one hour and I got frustrated with the fact that my sound of strings was not as striking and melodious as my friend’s. I decided to leave it for the moment and come back later to it, that has not happened till date.
Do you also face a similar struggle while learning a new skill? Do you also struggle with the hand-eye-leg coordination when you are beginning to learn driving? What makes it so hard to learn a new skill?
To your surprise it is not your INTELLIGENCE but your INTELLECT that plays an important role in learning a new skill. The intellect gives the power of cognition or reasoning. This helps in creating perceptions and judgements. We keep feeding our intellect with the information that we acquire from the outside world through our intelligence. The Intellect works like a busy storekeeper who keeps busy in creating associations and labels in life. These are hidden in our thought patterns subliminally that we can’t even recognize their play in our life.
What happens when you try to learn a new language? As you learn a new word, immediately your intellect tries to create its association with something that your mind already knows. This can be its synonym in the known language. Hence intellect always tries to look for associating anything new with what you already know. When it finds difficult to do so, it creates deep discomfort in us. Like it did to me, as I was trying to achieve a near professional sound of strings with no prior knowledge at all.
So whenever you try to learn a new skill always train your mind NOT to create associations with the known but use your intelligence to create a Blank canvas to paint it new. This will not only expand your intellect but also sharpen your intelligence as most of the times we work with intellect, thinking our intelligence is in play. This certainly requires lot of practice to employ intelligence without the limitation of intellect. It takes a great deal of Self-knowledge, meditation and right perspective to see and experience life AS it IS, without involving challenges created by our intellect.
Imagine when have we learned this way in our life? Perhaps as an infant, when we learned our language for the first time, where intellect has nothing to offer or challenge in creating an association with something already known. It was all intelligence with no limitation of intellect.
Sending Love, Laughter and Joy…… Parth