Why Being a Beginner as an Adult Feels So Undignified

The swimming instructor tells you, kindly, at normal volume, in front of eight other people, that you are breathing “a bit like a startled goose.” You are a grown adult with a mortgage, a pension and a laminated parking permit. You have not been publicly, obviously bad at anything in about fifteen years, and you had forgotten what it does to your face.

This is an adult swim class, the kind for people who can technically already swim. You swim the way anyone does who spent childhood summers thrashing across a lake: enthusiastically, with no discernible technique. You signed up to swim laps without feeling like you were drowning politely.

In the fast lane, two teenagers move through the water like they were designed for it. Your lane holds you, a man who keeps apologizing to the pool, and a woman who was clearly an excellent swimmer in 1994 and is visibly negotiating with that fact.

The first ten minutes are fine. Then everyone is asked to do something with their arms while also doing something with their heads, you do neither, and you become aware that you can feel your own ears.

What the “no time” excuse is protecting

On the drive home the excuses line up neatly. Work, the commute, Thursday being Thursday. “No time” is a very good lie because it is partly true.

But it was not time. For one hour you were the worst person in a small room, and you have spent two decades arranging your life so that would never happen.

Think about how adulthood narrows. In your teens and twenties you try things because everything is new and nobody expects you to be good. Then you find the two or three things you are decent at, the world rewards you for doing more of those, and by your late thirties there is a whole identity built out of competence. People ask your opinion. People assume you know. That reputation is load-bearing.

Being a beginner feels like a crack in it. That is the problem. Not laziness. Not busyness. Dignity.

The useful news about the crack: it is mostly visible from the inside. In a set of four studies on blunders and public failures, people who imagined a social mishap, or who actually failed at an intellectual task in front of others, expected to be judged more harshly than the onlookers really judged them. Part of the reason, the researchers found, was that the person who slipped was fixated on the slip and forgot how much else observers take into account.

Lane three works the same way. The man apologizing to the pool is not grading your breathing. He is busy apologizing to the pool.

The same reflex hides in how people describe themselves. “Not a sporty person.” “Terrible with languages.” Half of those lines are descriptions that expired years ago, kept in use because they are cheaper than finding out.

Go looking for the awkward part

The standard advice is to tolerate the discomfort. There is a better trick, which is to make the discomfort the target.

That idea was tested in five experiments with 2,163 adults, one of which ran in improv classes, a setting about as exposing as a swimming lane. People who were told to seek out the awkward feeling, and to treat it as a sign that growth was happening, were more motivated and felt they had achieved more than people given the usual instructions. The effect only appeared in activities where the discomfort arrives immediately. A beginners’ class qualifies.

So lower the bar until it is lying on the ground. Buy eight sessions. Not a distance, not a stroke to master. Eight sessions of being bad on purpose. Turn up eight times, end exactly as bad as you started, and you have still done what you said you would do.

It sounds like a trick, and it is. It moves the thing you can fail at. You can no longer fail at improving. You can only fail at showing up, and showing up is a far easier test to pass on a tired Thursday.

Expect the first few weeks to be unpleasant in a low, humming way. Not agony, just dread with a swim bag. No study promises which week it lifts. What tends to happen is that at some point the pool stops being a room where you are evaluated and becomes a room you go to on Thursdays. You hear about the apologizing man’s sister’s dog. The 1994 woman gets her backstroke back and everyone pretends not to watch.

You get better too, eventually. It turns out to be the least interesting part.

The eight-session rule, written down

The version to copy:

• Buy a fixed block and define success as attendance. Eight is not a magic number. It is enough Thursdays for the room to become familiar.
• Pick a small audience. Eight strangers who are also bad, ideally. Not something you would have to be bad at in front of people whose opinion you care about. That is the hard version, and you do not need the hard version first.
• Count sessions on paper, not ability. A meta-analysis of 138 experiments with nearly 20,000 participants found that prompting people to monitor their progress helped them reach their goals, and that it helped more when the record was physically written down. Ability moves in ways you cannot see early on. A row of eight boxes on the fridge does not, which matters when your brain starts building a very reasonable case for quitting around session three.
• Tell one person. The same analysis found bigger effects when progress was reported or made public. One friend who asks every Friday how the swimming went is public enough, and makes disappearing more awkward than just going.

Mostly, though, stop waiting to feel like someone who does this. That feeling shows up late, if it shows up at all, and waiting for it is how a person ends up 45 and still good at only the things they were good at at 25.

The goose comment never fully leaves. Neither does the first kilometer you swim without stopping, and only one of them was ever going to happen from the parking lot.