Too many of us who are great at learning want to learn from experts, or we want to learn from a great book/workshop/etc., but we discount the fact that we learn best from experience. (We learn what to do and what not to do from doing things and getting results.)
When we focus too much on learning from others, we have to un-learn things we’ve learned that didn’t serve us, or that weren’t taught to us in a way that was helpful.
Especially things we didn’t mean to learn.
– Like putting pressure on just one book to sell… that’s a New York Rule we’ve assimilated without realizing it, but the rule is based on a system we’re not working inside if we’re indie.
– Like thinking success has to happen quickly, or it’s never going to happen.
– Like believing you owe someone a physical appearance that they find attractive (or tolerable)… that’s a framework we assimilated, not one that’s true.
– Like feeling you always have to be right. (I’m not gonna touch this one… ouch.)
– Like believing all conflict is a bad thing… this is often a trauma response.
– Like taking all the courses, trying to learn information when you haven’t executed on the things you’ve already learned that might be a higher priority. (Again, not looking at anyone directly in the eyes, here…)
– Like believing we only get one chance at this.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
When I talk about QTP (Question the Premise), this is why I get so passionate. Because we’re starting from a baseline where we don’t have all the information. We’ve often assimilated rules we don’t know we’ve assimilated, from situations that have nothing to do with where we are now.
We learned something the situation wasn’t meant to teach us, but we’re now acting on it as though it’s truth. This is why I keep talking about the “Rules” of the different phases of publishing we’ve assimilated. These rules are often invisible.
But we make them through the learning process. In fact, many of us would learn much better from our intuitive writing process than we ever will from trying to “learn” craft. And many of us have learned things about craft that ruined a natural intuition we have about storytelling.
And also, many of us have benefitted from craft learning, and are better writers because of it. This is why we need to learn to question every premise. Not because every premise is wrong. But because if we don’t test whether or not we’re getting the right results, we’re likely to assimilate rules we don’t need to live by.
Just because someone else was super certain it would work.
Rather than trusting the intuition our own learning from experience can provide.
And yes, you can do both. But many of us need to go through the Unlearning phase. Deconstructing things that we need to unlearn that aren’t serving us. Especially the things that are created by fear response (I’m going to put in another plug for reading Claire Taylor’s book here… Reclaim Your Author Career…)
I’ve been going through this phase for basically the last two decades, unlearning things I assimilated that I didn’t need, or that weren’t right, and Strengths has played a major part in that. So has Enneagram. But at the baseline, I still think it’s just QTP. Is this serving me? Or is it something I need to unlearn?
Anyway. Deep thoughts for a Monday morning. I’m going to go do some work now, but… just wanted to open the discussion.
– Becca