We don’t know the extent of what we know. Or how much we know. Or how well we know it. In March of 2016, I started my first six week writing course. I was qualified. I’d written countless books and many of them had become bestsellers I wrote every day, I considered it my meditation practice and I was well versed in what good and bad writing was. But when I announced the class, I was afraid no one would sign up.
I was happy to be wrong. The class filled up right away. I took only seven people so I’d be able to pay attention to everyone and I thought I was prepared but when the time drew near, I became anxious. I’m not a fan of public speaking. What if I couldn’t think of anything to say? I reminded myself that this wasn’t public. This was my living room. I knew everyone who was coming and they knew
me. They were eager to learn, but what if I couldn’t answer their questions?
They started arriving at 6:30 PM. I hugged each of them as they showed up and I invited them to take a seat. I sat at the front of the room and tried to slow down my breathing. I looked directly at each person in the room to make a connection and I stopped at my close friend, Laurie. She nodded. I had invited her to join the class so
she could support me since she’d been a dance instructor for decades and she knew the ins and outs of teaching. “Just be yourself,” she had said. “If you make a mistake, you can just laugh and fix it. These people are your friends. You’ve been teaching for years with each project you’ve done, even though you didn’t call it a class.”
She was right. I’d been teaching for as long as I’d been writing, guiding my celebrity clients through the stories of their lives and helping people write the truth about their feelings. But the critical voice inside kept telling me that just because I knew how to write didn’t mean that I could teach. I was choking on a heavy dose of the Imposter Syndrome. Who did I think I was? What made me think I knew enough to help these people write?
When it was time to start, I pretended to be cool and collected. I smiled at my group, I thanked them for coming and I began to talk about what writing meant to me. I had a lot to say about that and pretty soon, I was speaking easily. It felt so natural. I led the class in a short mediation so we could all get focused. Then I gave them a suggestion about what to write, I called it a prompt, and they wrote for forty-five minutes. When it came time to read their pieces out
loud, I saw that they were nervous and I encouraged them to stop thinking about the other people. “Just focus on what you’re reading,” I said.
When the readings were over and my students began to ask me questions, I was surprised at how much I knew. The upshot was that many of them kept coming back and to this day, nine years after we started, the class continues.
When I’m afraid to do something, anything, I think about that first class and I remind myself to just walk through it, whatever it is. When we do something we haven’t done before, it’s like a speed bump in the road. We can decide it’s too hard to tackle and turn around. We can barrel into it and hit a wall. Or we can slow
down, gently approach the obstruction, stay mindful and before we know it, we’re on the other side. We’re triumphant. We’re home free – until the next speed bump shows up. It will, you can be sure of that, but if you face it head on, the obstacle will become a puzzle and when you solve it, you’ll realize that you didn’t really know how much you knew.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “Knowledge increases in proportion to its use.”
In 1993, my agent called to tell me about a famous diva who wanted to write a memoir. The trouble was that she had fired her first writer and she was a little gun shy. She wanted me to write a chapter of the book in her voice before she hired me, even though I’d never heard her speaking voice. The chapter was about a concert she did for thousands of people and she had gotten rained out. She stood on the stage, the rain was pouring down on her, but she stayed there and guided the people out so there was no dashing or trampling.
The materials her assistant sent me were two paragraphs that had appeared in the newspaper. That was all. I was paralyzed for a moment but I decided to give it a try and see what happened. I could bow out at the last minute if I had to. I put myself in her place, I felt the rain and I saw the hordes of people walking out. I wrote it, submitted it, and to my amazement, she liked it and she hired me. If I had decided that I didn’t know enough to write the chapter, I would
have missed out on a great chapter of my own life.
There is a common expression that says, “We teach what we need to learn.” That doesn’t ring true to me. I’d rather rephrase it as, “We teach what we need to practice.” The way I see it is if you don’t know something, you aren’t qualified to teach it. But if you know something that you want to develop and improve, everybody wins.
It takes trust and self-confidence to jump head first into a new possibility but if you give it your all and keep putting one foot after the other, chances are it’ll work out. If it doesn’t, remember Scarlett O’Hara’s last words in the book, “Gone With the Wind.”
“After all, tomorrow is another day.”
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