Monday Moment - Learning to be Fully Alive

Last week I had one of those intense learning situations which always convince me that I am fully alive.

The process is often quite similar. I go in knowing very little outside my own frame of reference. I’m required to climb a steep learning curve to learn what others already seem to know. Along the way, I find ways to apply what I do know to a whole new situation, and I find my brain being bent in very interesting new ways.

I learn.

The fully alive part comes when I reflect and realize that any time I’m faced with one of those steep learning curves, parts of my mind – and my very essence – wake up and shake off the dregs of apparent hibernation.

The first month on a new job, walking into a room full of people of whom I know not one, being asked to defend a position when I cannot anticipate how to best express my views so that someone who may be important to my future can really hear what I have to say – all, in retrospect, are situations in which I felt fully alive.

And yet, I have a very strong – and I believe commonly shared – aversion to feeling dumb. Which is exactly what I feel when standing at the bottom and looking up at all I have to learn. If I anticipate that a situation might cause me to feel dumb, I might well do all I can to avoid being in that situation. Which means that I might lose out on all the learning and its subsequent fully alive feelings.

How dumb is that!

Here’s wishing you a week of feeling fully alive – even if that is preceded by a situation that feels uncomfortable in the beginning!

Sally