The Courage to Be Bad at Something New: Why Being a Beginner Feels So Uncomfortable

Every expert was once a beginner.

But most of us forget that the moment we step into something new.

We live in a world that rewards expertise, achievement, and getting it right. So when we're no longer the expert, when we're learning, fumbling, and figuring things out as we go, it can feel deeply uncomfortable.

The self-doubt gets louder. The inner critic gets stronger. And suddenly the urge to quit starts to feel very convincing.

In this episode I unpack: 

• Why being a beginner feels so uncomfortable and what's actually happening in your brain and nervous system
• Why the discomfort you're experiencing isn't proof you're not cut out for this
• The difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset and why mindset alone isn't always enough
• How nervous system regulation helps you stay in the room when things get hard
• Practical ways to quiet self-doubt and navigate the learning phase with more confidence
• How to tell the difference between something that's difficult and something that's truly not aligned

Growth isn't comfortable.

Neither is becoming someone you've never been before.

But every skill you've mastered, every life you've built, and every version of yourself you've become started with being willing to be bad at something first.

And that's where greatness begins.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Let's face it, you can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're carrying way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome to the Live Lighter Podcast. I am your host, Jessica Berg. Thank you so much for being here. Today we are going to be talking about a phase, a topic, an experience that a lot of people, including myself, find extremely uncomfortable and challenging. And that is when we are in the learning phase of anything that we're doing in life. It is when our inner critic gets loudest. It is when we have the most self-doubt. It is when we have the highest desire to quit and run back to where we were before, where it was known, where we were experts, where we were really solid at what we were doing and comfortable. It's being outside of our comfort zone. It's learning, it's growth, it's building new skills and expanding. And it can be extremely uncomfortable. So for today, we're going to be diving into the messy middle, how to love yourself throughout it, so that you can get onto the other side into your greatness. So to start things off, I want to talk about what's actually going on inside of our system, neurologically, physically, when we are in this learning phase, because understanding this really helps us give ourselves more grace and it makes it more doable and approachable when we are in that messy learning phase. So your brain is literally a prediction machine. It is tracking everything that you have done, the familiar all day long. It is literally taking in information and matching it against what you already know so that it can predict what is coming next. This is how you can do things pretty much on autopilot, where you can go to the grocery store and all of a sudden you're at the store and you're like, wait a second, I don't, did I just drive here? I didn't even, I wasn't really paying attention. Or how you can make your morning coffee without much thought. You do these things in autopilot without consciously running through every single step because it's familiar, because it is the known. And your brain has built a very detailed map of how to do these things, the familiar territory. And when your brain is on familiar territory, it can relax. Your nervous system is not feeling a threat. It is in the known. Now, when you enter the learning phase, you literally step off of this map that your system has created. And all of a sudden, you're in this very unknown territory, this very unfamiliar territory where your nervous system doesn't really know what's waiting on the other side. It doesn't know what's tucked behind this email or this corner. There is no prediction model. There is no template. And all of a sudden, your brain is an unfamiliar territory. Your nervous system is in the unknown and it registers, your whole system is registering this as a threat. So here you are going off on this new venture into the great unknown. And your whole entire system is seeing this as a massive threat. It is going into survival mode. It is sending off the alarm bells and saying, we are not safe. We're moving into fight or flight. And when you are in this type of response, you are moving into a deregulated state. And deregulation comes with more stress, more overwhelm. And when you are in that place, it's really hard for your brain to absorb new information. So being a beginner doesn't just feel uncomfortable. It neurologically is activating the same threat response as actual danger. So this is why the learning phase generates thoughts such as, you know, I'm not cut out for this. I should just quit. Everyone else is so much better than me. I'm not good. I should be better at this by now. Maybe this just isn't for me. What was I thinking? That inner critic starts to get really loud. And none of those are facts, they are just how your system is responding to a threat. That's the physiological side of things, right? That's how the nervous system is responding and the brain is responding to something new. And psychologist Carol Deweck at Stanford has spent decades studying what she calls the fixed mindset versus growth mindset. And a lot of us tend to find comfort in the fixed mindset because this is where we are really good at something and we love being good at something. And when something is hard or it requires a lot of effort, it signals to us that we don't have what it takes. The fact that we are not good at it, the fact that it is uncomfortable is evidence that we are not capable to do this thing, that we don't belong here, that we were wrong to think that we could actually do this and go after this or be this person. And on top of that, the conditioning on how our society tends to reward us. We get rewarded for being the high achiever, for being the top performer. We do not get rewarded for being messy and being new at something and figuring something out and being okay. We get rewarded when we're the expert. We get rewarded and recognized and accepted when we're really great at something. But the reality is that no one starts something and is great. No one ventures out on an endeavor brand new and becomes a top expert in that field. They actually have to be okay with being okay. And that's actually a few years ago, I went and got my yoga teacher training because I wanted to be a yoga teacher. I wanted it to be a part of what I was able to offer women. And I don't teach anymore because I have actually found it took away from my own personal practice because I was so focused on the teaching part of it and what I was bringing into class. But it what it did for me was it really helped me find comfort and acceptance in this learning phase. And one of the teachers, she is an amazing yoga teacher. Her name is Stacey McCarthy. She goes by Yoga Nama Stacey on Instagram. She's incredible. She's like 60-something years old, one of the original American yogis, and she's still doing like handstands and splits well into her 60s. She's incredible. Anyways, when we were wrapping up her yoga teacher training, she said to us, she looked at all of us in the room and she said, I have one thing I want to say to each of you. I want you to walk out of here and I want you to be okay with being okay, because none of you are gonna go and teach your first few yoga classes and be great at it because you're not supposed to, because you're starting out. And she said, No one starts out great. They work to greatness. And she really doubled down on this when she said, What I would hate to see is you give up because you're not yet great in the early stages. And that really has stuck with me in all areas of my life. It's stuck with me in corporate. It's helped me in starting my business, when I was starting out as coaching, when I was first bringing inner child work and somatic work into my practice. It's helped me in starting this podcast. I know that when I launched this podcast a month and a half ago, that I wasn't gonna start out as the equivalent of Mel Robbins. I knew that it was gonna take time and it was gonna take feedback and it was gonna take a lot of acceptance and grace for myself that I don't have to be perfect. And in fact, I can't be perfect right now. I have to be messy, I have to stumble and learn. And even in this podcast experience, it's been really incredible because I know I'm in the early stages and because I went into launching this podcast and knowing I'm not gonna be great to start. I'm gonna be good and I'm gonna keep getting better. And because I have that mindset, because I've really encompassed the growth mindset, which I'll talk about in a second, it's allowed me to receive feedback so that I can continue to grow. So I have been blessed with this incredible community of women who are my friends, who really are cheering for me and truly, truly, truly want to see me succeed. And the first couple of times I put out episodes, they would give me feedback. And it would be feedback not from a place of judgment, not from a place of I'm gonna put you down and make you feel bad about yourself. It was all from a place of I'm gonna share this with you because I want you to succeed. And that intention was everything. And I was able to absorb that knowing that their feedback was coming from that place. So it would be something like I had one friend who told me that one episode I was talking too fast. I was like, okay, now I can take that into consideration and I'm gonna talk slower in the next one. I had I had a client who reached out to me and she's like, I love your podcast. One thing that I noticed is that the volume fluctuated on this one episode. And for me, that's one of the things that I will tend to stop listening to a podcast if the volume fluctuates. I'm like, oh my God, amazing. Okay, I'm gonna spend some extra time there. So piece by piece, I'm able to get this feedback from people who I know love me and want to see me succeed. And I'm letting myself be messy. I'm letting myself be okay. And then because of that, I'm gonna keep going. Because of that, I'm not putting so much focus in, oh my God, I totally botched this one episode. I'm more so just showing up excited that each time I know I am coming on here and I am gonna keep getting better and I am gonna keep being able to serve and keep getting my voice out there and it's gonna get stronger and it's gonna get better and it's gonna get louder. So buckle up. But that's just a really good example of how I've been able to let myself be in this growth mindset. And it's allowing myself to get to a place where I will be great. And I do plan on being in the top 500, one day, top 100 podcasts out there. So Carol Deweck spent decades researching how people think about their own abilities. And what she has found is that most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum between two beliefs. On one end is the fixed mindset. And the fixed mindset says, I am the way I am. My intelligence, my talent, my abilities, these are all set. I either have what it takes or I don't. It's very black and white. And if I have to work really hard at something, if I struggle and strain and still don't get it quickly, and I look like a fumbling mess, that is proof that I don't have what it takes. Real talent shows up naturally. We just walk in and effortlessly are amazing at something. If you are truly capable at it, it should come easy. This is the belief of the fixed mindset. Now, on the other side, on the other end of this spectrum, is the growth mindset. And the growth mindset says that my abilities are not fixed, they develop over time. The harder I work, the more I grow. I get to expand. I get to be new at something. I get to be messy and fumble because struggling is not evidence of limitation. It is evidence that I am new at something, that I am learning, that my brain and my nervous system are just getting familiar with this unfamiliar. And effort is not a sign of inadequacy, it is actually what is needed for me to grow. So here is how this looks in real life for someone who is a high-functioning top performer. You step into a learning phase of something new. It is hard and it's going to require effort. You do not immediately get it. And this fixed mindset interprets that as I'm not capable of this. Holy shit, get me out of here. What was I thinking? These other people are 10 leagues ahead of me. I am so out of my league. I need to get the hell out of here. I'm going to go back to what I know. I'm going to go back to what's familiar. Or you have someone who enters it with a growth mindset and they interpret the exact same experience as, ooh, this is new. This is exciting. I'm going to build something I'd never had before. This is a whole new territory for me. Look at me, like expanding past my comfort zone. The difficulty is part of the work. If it was easy, everyone would do it. That's what growth actually feels like. That's the growth mindset. So you have the exact same experience, two completely different ways of approaching it and interpreting it. And the meaning you're going to assign to it, the interpretation, is whether you actually stay in the room and become great at it, or you walk out and you go back and you shrink. Now, I want to add something here that Carol Deweck's framework does not fully address. And this is where my work lives because you can understand growth mindset completely. You can believe it intellectually, you can have read her books, you can take the course, you can know a chapter and verse memorized. And still, the moment the learning phase gets hard, the fixed mindset narrative takes over because the threat response fires. It's how your nervous system was built. The growth mindset becomes completely inaccessible. And the reason for this is because it's literally the state of your nervous system. So when you have the parts of your system and your brain that are activated and sensing a threat, you literally cannot access the growth mindset from inside a threat response. The wiring is completely blocked. It becomes a wall. So the work is not just believing that you can grow. It's not just going into this learning phase and saying, all right, I'm gonna be new. I'm gonna let myself get messy. No, you have to go in with the foundation of a regulated nervous system that is ready to feel that discomfort, that feels safe in that discomfort, that is okay with being new and learning and being in unfamiliar territory. It's all about cultivating safety in that unpleasantness. This is why when you have two people who go into it with a growth first fixed, you can have that mindset. And the person who's really going to keep going forward, the person who's really gonna stay in the room and continue to expand and continue to grow and to continue to see their dreams come true, is the one who is able to develop safety in that discomfort, who is able to operate from a regulated nervous system versus going into fight or flight and letting that take over and being deregulated and then eventually going back to what they know. So this is where my work with the nervous system really kind of comes in combination with the growth mindset is it's it's it's not just a mindset thing. It's also having the foundation and the safety to be in the newness. And in that safety, you get to have, and this is where the inner child work comes in too, is you get to have that level of self-love, that nurturing of like, it's okay, we got this. Because there's a little girl inside of you who is scared shitless of messing up, of not being accepted, of trying something new, of not being good enough and not being taken seriously. And we get to rewire those beliefs and we get to hold her tight and we get to tell her it's okay, we got this. I totally see where you felt this. I see where you started to believe this, and it's okay. We're gonna learn this together. So that's where the nervous system and the inner child work gets to come into play with this. So now that we've talked about what's actually happening, we've talked about what is required to really allow yourself to be in that growth, to allow yourself to be the beginner and be messy and f up. Now I want to talk about how can you actually bring this into practice? How can you actually start to step into something new and slowly quiet that inner critic and be okay with not being perfect? So the first thing, and I talk about this in a lot of podcast episodes. And if you have done any type of work with me, you know that this is one of the number one things to do from a nervous system perspective and cultivating safety is name it. So when you are starting something new, going into it and letting yourself know, letting your nervous system know that we're gonna be okay with this. And when I say okay, I'm not saying like we're gonna be all right with how things go. No, I'm saying the output is gonna be okay. It's not gonna be great. It doesn't have to be great. Just us showing up is what is required. Us being able to try something new is our metric of success. It's not how perfect the outcome is because we are learning. So the number one thing is to name where you're at. I'm in the learning phase. This is going to be one of the hardest parts. And it is going to be uncomfortable because it is past my comfort zone, because I am growing and I am safe to feel all of this. And the discomfort and the doubt is not a signal that I should not be here. It is just what growth gets to look like. And this this is not toxic positivity. This is literally naming it so that your nervous system is becoming familiar with what this is. It's like, oh, okay, we we know what this is. All right, learning phase. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna simmer down the alarm bells. We're not gonna pump into fight or flight mode just yet. We're pretty sure there's not a tiger around the corner. So number one is naming it. Number two is you have to start to separate your competence from your worth because being a beginner at something means you are not going to know exactly how to do things. You are not going to be an expert. You are not going to be great. And every single person that you are looking at and comparing yourself to that is great, they were a beginner at one point. The only reason they got to be great is because they allowed themselves to be awful and fumbling and okay in the beginning. And being a beginner does not make you less valuable. Being a beginner is the bravest place you can be. So if you are a beginner at something, you get to look yourself in the mirror and be like, I am a badass. Look at me. I'm a beginner. I'm trying something new. It is massively uncomfortable, and that's okay. Third thing you can do is I want you to shrink the window. So if you are in the learning phase and it feels massively overwhelming, chances are you are almost certainly looking way too far ahead. You are looking at the person that is five years ahead of you, a hundred steps ahead of you. You are looking at where you ultimately want to be at the end of all of this. You are looking at way too long of a runway. You need to shorten the window, shrink it. And that could even be like, what's the next step? What's the next thing that I want to be able to do after this? Not the entire journey, just the next thing. Maybe it's tomorrow, maybe it's next week, maybe it's by the end of this month. I want to be able to do X. So shrink the window. Make sure that you're not looking way too far down the line because that is gonna be overwhelming. We wanna shrink it so that it becomes more attainable, more approachable, and less overwhelming. Number four, constantly check in on yourself. So if you are flooded with overwhelm and you are in a deregulated state and your nervous system has gone into threat mode and it's in fight or flight, you are not gonna be able to learn. You're not gonna be able to process the information and have a forward momentum. So what I want you to do is just constantly check in on yourself. Just check in, like, okay, how am I feeling? Am I am I deregulated? Am I regulated? And if you feel like you're in an activated state, that's where you do need to take the foot off the gas pedal and give yourself a little bit of a pause. Do something that's gonna regulate you. Go get outside in nature, go take a bath, go do some breath work, do some meditation, move the body, whatever it is that supports your nervous system to get into a regulated state, do that and then come back. And the last one that I want to leave you with is please, please celebrate the progress, celebrate the attempts. It is not so much about the outcome. It's not so much about having the success, the achievement. It is about showing up. It is the fact that you are trying, the fact that you are learning, the fact that you are allowing yourself to be new at something, massively uncomfortable. That is the thing that I want you to celebrate. Start rewarding yourself for showing up in the discomfort, for not quitting when the fear response kicked in. And that over time will continue to rewire your entire system on your relationship with the learning phase. When you are celebrating, showing up, when you are celebrating, not giving up. It's reminding that your system that this is safe and this is actually good for me. This is not threatening. Let's keep going. And what you will find is you will continue to progress, you will hit your goals, far exceed them, and you'll just continue to expand past your comfort zone and step into versions of yourself you didn't even know was possible, all because you let yourself be messy in the beginning. Now, I do want to put a disclaimer out there that there is a difference between quitting because something is hard and giving up because you're not good at it yet, and quitting if something is genuinely not aligned for you. The learning phase that you would find yourself in that will make you want to quit things that are actually right for you. That impulse to quit is the threat system talking. It's not wisdom, it's not discernment, it's just the nervous system trying to return to familiar ground. The question to ask is not, is this hard? Everything new is hard. The question is, does this align with where I actually want to go? Does this matter to me? If yes, stay in the room. The hard part is temporary. The growth is permanent. And if after time and honest reflection, the answer actually is no, that it genuinely is not aligned, then leaving is not quitting. That is actually discernment. Those are different things, and it truly is worth knowing the difference between the two of those. So as we close out today, I want to invite you to notice where in your life you are in the learning phase right now. Or notice where you have hesitated on going after something because you have wanted to avoid the learning phase. So maybe you have a little bit more courage, a little bit more grace, and a little bit more flexibility to lean into that thing now and allow yourself to be in that discomfort, knowing that on the other side of that is growth and is greatness. And it's not something to avoid. Where can you let yourself have less judgment? Where can you let yourself have more softness? Where can you let yourself be messy? Wherever it is, lean into it with curiosity, name the phase, shrink the window and regulate your nervous system and give yourself credit for freaking showing up and being in the room and saying yes. Yes to the discomfort, yes to the unknown, yes to trying. Because you are a beginner at everything you are now good at. Every single thing in your life that you are good at now, from walking to your career to being a parent, to being a spouse, to anything, every single one of those things that you're really, really good at now, you are one point a beginner. Every single thing. So give yourself the same grace that you would give anyone else who is just starting out. Thank you so much for being here. If this episode resonated with you, please like, share, subscribe. And until next time, be well. All right, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessbergcoaching.com. That's J E S S B E R G C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.