After reading about it on Ali’s blog, I went to read this interview with Katrina Kennison. And there’s so much good there but this one section resonated with me above all:

As he placed my beads into my palm, he looked into my eyes with such pure loving acceptance and acknowledgement that my own eyes immediately filled with tears. It is a powerful experience, to be seen and loved in that way. And in that moment I realized that perhaps I could make that kind of love my own offering in the world as well. It was definitely an “ah-ha” moment, because it made me see that life didn’t have to be as complicated as I made it out to be; that in any given moment, or whenever I felt confused or unsure, I could just choose the loving gesture, the loving word, the loving path.

This is hard to explain in just a few words, but I will say, learning to pause and ask myself the question, “What is the loving thing to do here?” has given me a new assurance.  It helps me to see when I’m reacting out of fear, and to choose love instead.  It has made me at once more courageous and softer,  more confident and less attached to being right.  I don’t have to be right; it is enough to be loving.

It’s enough to be loving.

I love that idea. I love love love it. I love it because, for me, it means I don’t have to work so much. It means I don’t have to fight and stress and worry. It means I don’t have to struggle so hard. This sort of made me think about my self-kindness goal for March and how it’s about doing the loving thing for myself.

And while it’s magnificent for me and for my way of thinking, it’s incredibly powerful when approaching the world and others. I had a long and struggling day on Friday. I came into a call with a lot of energy and optimism and felt completely deflated, confused and small by the end of it. Whenever I am in these situations, I feel a strong sense of overwhelming sorrow. Sometimes when I am really sick, I can’t remember how it felt to be well. It’s like being sick consumes me and even though intellectually I know it will go away eventually, emotionally I can’t remember how being well felt. This is how I felt after the call. Like I would never be well again. Like I should just give up on this particular goal and stop the pain of learning/growing/struggling right now.

I knew this was coming (even though a small part of me wished I was wrong, of course.)

And I am trying to let myself feel it and sit with it and learn from it and not run in the other direction. Not take the easy route.

But reading this passage made me think. What would be the loving thing here? How could I approach the whole situation in a loving way? Here are some ideas that came to mind:

• I could be loving to myself and allow myself to acknowledge the hurt and that learning something new can be a struggle and being judged and graded can be tough. I can give myself kindness, love, and a hug
• I can be loving towards the other person and assume they are committed to my growth and learning and want me to be the best version of myself
• I can choose the loving path here and be grateful for all the learning and love the opportunity to get it one-on-one
• I can choose to love the process of growing and learning
• I can remember that I am still at the beginning of this path and i have forever to get it “right”
• I can love the process and not focus on the outcome
• I can assume the other person loves me and i love them and we both love the process and we’re both invested in my improvement.

And when I list all those, I feel lucky, blessed and grateful. Grateful that I have “time” to get it “right”. Grateful that there are people who will take time and effort out of their own lives to help me improve. Grateful that I am still choosing to learn new things and improve myself.

And, above all, grateful for this new perspective.

My son, David, and I have started a daily practice of working on his academic knowledge. We spend 20 minutes a day together on either Reading, Writing or Math. Looking at problems, trying to understand passages, etc. This is for a multitude of reasons but the biggest among them all is for me to see exactly where he’s at. What he’s weak at and what he’s really strong at.

He’s a good student and he’s only in the second grade. This makes it relatively hard for me to assess his abilities too well. So I figure by spending some time together, I can see his thinking process and understand his way of learning a bit better to see where I could encourage him to grow more and where he might need to be challenged more, etc.

He’s not always the most positive person and I can already see some “I’m good at this and I’m not good at this” behavior starting. I am strongly against the belief that we’re born intelligent or not. I believe that, like most things, success in life (and whether that depends on intelligence is highly debatable) comes with hard work more than anything else. So I told him that he only needs four things to succeed:

• Focus
• Discipline
• Purposeful Practice
• Time

I’m a firm believer that these four things lead to success each and every time. If you really want to learn/achieve/improve, you need to first work on your focus. If you’re distracted and paying attention a million things at the same time, you’re not really paying attention to anything. I noticed, for example, that David gets stressed when he doesn’t immediately see the way to solve a tricky problem. He then panics which ends up being counterproductive cause the panic kicks in the fight/flight response and shuts down the brain. And the brain is exactly what you need to solve the problem. So panicking, stressing, worrying doesn’t help solve the problem. Focusing does. Thinking out of the box might. But the first thing the problem needs is your undivided attention.

Once you’re focused, you also need discipline. You need to keep showing up. You need to not give up too soon or too easily. I personally think this is harder than focus. This is the reason we walk away from our resolutions. It’s easy to eat well for one day. It’s much much harder to eat well every meal of every day. It’s hard to keep showing up day after day.

Purposeful practice is related to discipline but it’s a bit more sophisticated. It’s not just showing up everyday but it’s also learning from your mistakes, paying attention to where you need to grow more and focusing on those. If I am learning to draw and I get the perspective wrong each time, unless I pay attention to that or look differently or try some new ways, I will not get it right even if I try 100 times. I need to know what problem I’m trying to solve. I need to be purposeful about my practice. So this means reflection, paying attention and practicing in a particular way.

And lastly, the hardest of them all: time and patience. We each take different amounts of time to learn things. Some of us need a few hours where others need weeks. The more you learn, the easier it gets to learn. Once I’d studied six languages, the seventh was much easier, but with the second or third one I learned, I needed to study and practice a lot longer. Time always rewards if you have the other three things on the list. Patience is hard, especially if progress isn’t quickly visible. But, in my experience, if you’re persistent, time always rewards. Always.

And that’s what I told David. I said you don’t already need to know this, you don’t need to be more intelligent, you don’t need anything except for these four things. You need to want it badly enough to do these four things. In my opinion, these are the keys to success every single time.

To be fair, I believe luck plays a big role in life, too.

But I also believe Louis Pasteur said it best: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”