I’m not great at small talk.
Sure, I can start there. The lady at the bus stop talks about the weather and the barista at the Starbucks talks about the weather and I engage in kind.
“Yes, it is cold!”
“Ha, true. My eyeballs are also freezing.”
But three sentences in and I’m talking about whether or not the angels sing above us and people, rightfully, get uncomfortable.
The early stages of everything can feel a little uneasy and be rather hard.
Conversations, relationships, learning an instrument and, you guessed it, training can often get off to a rough start.
We are not alone in this. Even the greats start off slow and awkward. I bet Taylor Swift’s first few songs weren’t exactly “Blank Space”. Michael Jordan famously got cut from his varsity basketball team. We’ve all seen Bieber’s bowl haircut on the cover of People magazine in 2005.
But, the flip side is also true. Motivation is super high in the beginning.
You wake up, sit on the edge of your bed and are convinced in no time you will be the next Joni Mitchell or Arnold Schwarzenegger or, at the very least, have hair as cool as Elvis.
So you get to work. You learn your first few chords or you actually get to the gym three times per week and you start to grow out your bangs and you are on your way.
But then it inevitably happens. You hit a point I like to call “The Dead Zone”.
The Dead Zone isn’t a horror movie (although maybe it also is) though it can be equally unnerving when you are in it. You’ve committed. You’ve spent some time and some money and you are pretty sure you must be doing something wrong because you still aren’t where you want to be.
Your fingers are still clumsy when changing chords. Your bangs are now in that awkward stage and you look less “rocker cool” and more “page boy trapped in the British feudal system”.
Sure, you’re lifting heavier weights. And you can walk up a flight of stairs without having to look around for an AED machine, but you look less like Arnold and perhaps more like a slightly scrawnier version of your two month-ago self.
And this is where most people quit. They convince themselves it’s never going to happen for them. This moment is so popular in the world of fitness there are memes about it.
“Quitters Day” which occurs two weeks after New Year's Day.
The often paraphrased “all these newbies will be out of the gym and it will be back to normal by mid-February”.
These are cliches because, sadly, they are true.
But here is the other thing that is true, nearly everything in life - particularly the worthwhile things - take longer than we hope they would.
But just because you aren’t totally shredded or a virtuoso doesn’t mean nothing is happening. In fact, plenty happens before you recognize it.
Behind the scenes, muscle is being gained. Myelin is getting laid down on your nerves and your movements are getting more intuitive. And these things will reveal themselves if you just stick with them a bit longer.
And that is the real trick. To keep the training going when it seems like nothing is happening. To keep practicing when everything feels clunky and non-musical. And to keep the conversation going beyond the small talk until you get to something real and vulnerable.
Everything in your mind might tell you to stop. That it is only human to experiment with something new. To start over, yet again, in the hopes of finding something that might actually work.
But experience and knowledge proves that what you are doing are the things that actually allow you to progress. It’s how Arnold and Chuck Berry and all the others got to where they wanted to go.
You are going to want to stop.
But the secret doesn’t lie in doing something different. The answer is to just grit your teeth and keep moving.