On my radio

For those of you that know me well, you will know that I have been doing some radio work lately. I love it.  I present on SusyRadio.com 103.4 (Gatwick area) and it has been a brilliant experience. 

One of the bits that I have valued the most is being a learner again.  When we get to a certain level within our jobs or careers, we are quite comfortable doing what we do. We may have even got to the stage where we can do everything without really fretting. We then get great at what we do and people even ask us for advice. 

Learning to present on the radio has been a great experience for me - not just the radio bit but the learning bit. It is nice to go back to the bottom and start again.  It took me back to all those feelings that I had when learning something new. Also, I am reminded of how hard it is to mess up and not feel, well stupid!  In my twenties, I would have been mortified making mistakes and thought about it for months! In my forties, I am not so fussed but I still don't like messing up. That is the thing with learning, we need a patient teacher. Plus, we need to give ourselves permission to look a bit of a numpty every now and then when we mess up as we learn.  We also need to forgive ourselves quickly for not being perfect straight away - not an easy thing to do.

I am reminded of when I did improvisation training. One of the corner stones is to make sure you make lots of mistakes - one teacher called up 'speed up your rate of failure.'  Let's get the mistakes out the way so we can learn quicker without trying to be amazing straight away.  One teacher (who came over from Canada to teach us) made us all cheer, clap and shout hooray when anyone messed up - especially the person who had 'messed up.'  He said we are all too precious about making mistakes so we had to stand up and say, 'I suck!'  Or 'I am crap!'  or even, 'I f***ed up and it is okay!'  What a great attitude to 'failing' don't you think?

Is it okay for people to get it wrong where you work?  Are you able to remain patient when teaching other people things that are so easy and obvious to you?  It is hard to remain patient with people struggling to learn and if you doubt this, ask yourself this question: Have you ever got impatient behind a learner car driver?  Did you drive up their behind too closely? Did you tut?  Did you zoom past them at the earliest opportunity?!

In summary, adults don't like to fail, we like to get it right first time. We cannot get it right first time and we have to ourselves and our learners permission not to be perfect...

Take care
Paul