Do you have times when you feel like giving up?

 
It was hard to believe any teacher could be this patient.

There we were recently, at Performing Arts Family Camp (on vacation!), working on learning to sing some bluegrass tunes.

When I took the class a few years, I worked on the guitar parts. This time, I decided to put my guitar down and see how it felt to be a singer.

It was easy enough to learn the melodies. I can learn a melody in a few minutes.

But as bluegrass singers, our job was to learn the multi-part harmonies.

We had a vocal coach working with us. When he’s not teaching at camp, he directs a choir. He explained that over time, we will get to the point of easily hearing the harmonies. In other words, it shouldn’t be that difficult!

He gave us our opening notes, in the chord, going higher: “La, la, la!”

And then – we kept doing it wrong. Again and again!

We got the melody. But I couldn’t hold the harmony.

I was frustrated! Tuning in to the voice in my mind, I could hear some harsh words, “Why are you even trying this? You think you can be a singer? You’re never going to get it! There are small children, and teenagers, and plenty of adults, that are so much better than you. You’re never going to get it!”

This was discouraging.

I felt like giving up.

I wondered why I was trying in the first place.

It feels bad to hit the wall like this – and be stuck.

It wasn’t fun. I wasn’t experiencing the “joy of learning!” I wanted to go do something else. But I couldn’t, because I had committed to taking the class that week, and performing in the final all-camp show.

There was a lesson here – just not the one we expected.

So how do you do stay with something that feels hard and uncomfortable? Here are three ideas:   

1. Think about your “Why?”

We’ve written often about the importance of finding your why.

The more that we can recognize our deepest motivation, the more energy we have for behavior change.

Sometimes the “Why?” comes from pain: We’ve been hired to work with nonprofit boards to lead conversations about race and racism after some terrific Black, Indigenous, and People of Color left the boards in frustration, or after these organizations lost funding opportunities due to a lack of diversity.

And sometimes that why comes from a positive image we have of ourselves. I’m determined to get better at singing and express my voice. When it feels hard, I go back to that image and intention, and find my energy renewed.

2. Make it smaller

Learning and behavior change often stop at overwhelm.  When we work with people on strategic planning, they struggle to understand the whole process.

People feel more in control when they can bite off a smaller part of any process, rather than the whole thing. We talk with clients and students students about how to start strategic planning and take one step at a time.

In the case of the bluegrass harmonies, I recorded our vocal coach singing the higher part. Then I listened, and sang along, and practiced again and again and again – until it started to feel more comfortable.

3. Find a mentor, coach, teacher, or facilitator

We can get so much better and go so much further with the support of experts who have traveled the path before.

There’s a difference between reading a book about “how to do strategic planning” and hiring a trained facilitator. A book on strategic planning might give some common steps to the process – but would not have the pattern recognition skills of an experienced individual who has run many processes in the past.

And I could read a book on three-part harmony, but that book is hardly going to show me the path to finding those harmonies while singing! It was the feedback – and encouragement – from our vocal coach that kept us going through the challenges.

I’m a lifelong learner who reads voraciously and learns from YouTube videos. Yet I work with coaches and mentors when I’m learning new skills – in every domain.

After working years in this field, assisting nonprofit boards and coaching executives and volunteers, I can still feel the frustration of not ‘getting’ something right away. Your examples might be smaller annoyances, like my path to learning harmonies, or much larger issues, like staff or board retention. Regardless of the size, taking these steps will help to refocus, update your approach, and hopefully gain some better insight on how to make the change you hope to see.

So what happened at the final all-camp show? We had improved through practice. The three-part harmonies worked sometimes, although not always. We sounded good and received some applause as audience members could see how hard we were trying. There’s more to learn – and we could see the path ahead.