An aspiring baseball player doesn’t think or feel like a baseball player the first time he steps up to the plate.

His body is not yet familiar with the mechanics. His stance is awkward. His swing is awkward. He doesn’t exactly understand all the rules of the game.

As a result, he doesn’t yet consider himself a “real” baseball player. And he certainly doesn’t yet look like a “real” baseball player to his friends and family. Chances are his going to make quite a few blunders throughout the course of his first few games. This phase of our self-improvement can be embarrassing and frustrating.

How to overcome the awkward phases of self-improvement.

• Acknowledge your discomfort.

A big part of emotional maturity is acknowledging how you feel, not just avoiding feelings because they are unpleasant. If you want to be serious about self-improvement, then you need to be honest with yourself. There’s a good chance you will suck at something when you first start out, so it should be expected that you will occasionally feel embarrassed, frustrated, or angry. Try your best to accept these feeling, and then move on.

• Understand the path to success.

It helps during our “awkward phase” to try to imagine the bigger picture of success. It’s often a windy road with many hardships and failures. At times it can feel like we are going backwards, but that is all a part of long-term self-improvement. Once we understand and prepare ourselves for a long-term commitment to our goals, we’ll find it easier to stay dedicated and focused, even when times are tough. Here is a nice illustration of what we think success looks like compared to how success often looks in the real world:


• Practice and experience.

There is no substitute for practice and experience. The more you expose yourself to something, the more familiar and natural it will become. Repetition is the key to building new neural pathways in your brain. And the more you condition yourself toward certain thoughts and behaviors, the easier it will be to re-activate those pathways in the future. Aspiring baseball players often go into a batting cage to get their swing right. The more time they spend there, the more they build the brain pathways and muscle memory associated with hitting a pitch. All habits have an underlying structure in our nervous system which can be built through practice and experience. (Related Article: Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity.)

• Ask yourself if this is what you really want.

Upon reflection you may find that your goals aren’t aligned with what you really want. Maybe you only played baseball because your friends wanted you to, but the truth is there are other interests you find more important. Maybe the “awkward phase” of your self-improvement is actually a sign that you are pursuing goals that aren’t congruent with your core values. It can be a tough call to make, but sometimes you need to abandon a particular goal because you later find out it’s not for you. However, if you ask yourself “Is this what I really want?” and the answering is a resounding yes, then you’ll know in your heart this is what you should pursue.

• Be open to a new version of yourself.

To make any kind of self-improvement you have to be open to a new version of yourself. If you believe your personality is static and unchanging, then you’ll stay stuck in old ways. However, if you believe you’re always growing, then your actions will reflect an attitude more open to personal development. Attitude is important – sometimes it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If every time you go up to bat you say to yourself, “I’ll never get a hit,” then you’re going to sabotage yourself from performing to the best of your ability. (Related Article: Self-Talk Can Improve Sports Performance.)

• Find a mentor or role model.

During rough phases of our self-improvement, it can be very beneficial to interact with a mentor or role model. Research has shown mentoring programs can be effective across a wide range of domains including behavioral, social, emotional, and academic. Having a mentor improves your motivation and accountability. It can also be an important source of insight if your mentor relates to your troubles in a meaningful way. (Related Article: How We Find Motivation in Other People’s Struggles.)

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If you’ve ever read anyone’s success story, then you have undoubtedly found out that their victories weren’t absent from previous failures and struggles.

In many ways, those past failures are what make successful people who they are today.

Recent research has shown that when we focus on both the failures and successes of our role models, we are much more likely to be motivated and inspired by them to improve ourselves.

This is because when we see ourselves going through similar struggles as people who we look up to, we can relate to them much more. We see them as humans, and imperfect, just like the rest of us – regardless of how perfect they may seem inside our heads.

By acknowledging the more humble, imperfect, and “human-like” characteristics of our role models, we feel much more capable of overcoming similar obstacles and achieving our goals.

The truth is that even the happiest and most successful person in the world experiences downfalls every now and again. We should therefore expect to have similar struggles when pursuing our own values and goals.

A related study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that students who learned about a topic in science, as well as the struggles scientists go through when discovering their theories, ended up better understanding the curriculum when compared to individuals who didn’t learn the history of scientists’ struggles.

Researchers say this is because students often hold a stereotype that scientists are big brained, super geniuses. In other words, they hold an ideal about who these people are – and it’s an ideal they can’t relate to. Therefore they think scientists are somehow “special” and different from us.

But when students learn about the background of most scientists – they find that they aren’t that special, and often times they go through their own frustrations and failures.

Their success is just as much based on hard work and perseverance as it is their genes or biology. Knowing this, students become more motivated and inspired to overcome their own struggles and frustrations.

The big lesson here is to be careful of idealizing mentors, role models, and other people who we may look up to. They are, in fact, human. And they often share much of the same pain we do when trying to improve ourselves and achieve our goals.

Once we understand that even the most successful people go through rough times, we feel more capable of overcoming rough times of our own.

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This Week’s Playlist:

• Pretty Lights – Change is Gonna Come
• Nujabes – High 2 Lows
• Jay-Z and Kanye West – Lift Off (featuring Beyonce)
• Killer Mike – Follow Your Dreams
• Four Tet – Angel Echoes