Good morning…
Like expanding the limits of an aging dog, I learned some new tricks this summer. Adobe. Lightroom. Photoshop. These terms were not part of my brain’s vocabulary until I sensed the Spirit say, “Sue, let’s add pictures to our everyday blog.”
I have heard it said that a new habit begins establishing itself after it is repeated religiously for thirty consecutive days. For one full month now I have included photos with our posts, a quiet daily task I was not sure I would ever accomplish.
From the start, snapping pictures day and night has been joyfully easy. But then came downloading to Lightroom, editing in Photoshop, and sizing each photo into a banner, before saving, loading, and transferring pictures to my desktop, to our website, and into each post. This multi-faceted process has been hard, hard, hard. For this technology-challenged girl, learning these new skills has been hard, hard, hard.
Yet much like an old dog learning a new trick, I slowly began to embody the wisdom taught by Tarmo Toikkanen in his 4.11.17 post, “The Effective Way to Practice New Skills.”
- Deliberate practice is the secret to becoming a master at anything.
- No one has ever become talented at anything without first being a novice, and developing their skills over time (often to the exclusion of many other pursuits).
- To become an expert, you need a lot of purposeful practice, practice which requires a suitable challenge that brings you out of your comfort zone along with keen focus, attainable goals, and a strong motivation to keep practicing.
- You need a teacher or mentor or coach that will give your personalized guidance to improve your skills.
Hour after hour, my patient web designer sat with me at the computer, repetitively practicing a simple-to-her process. Step-by-step, step-by-step she supported me as I gradually learned. Then day after day, on my own, I practiced some more, then practiced some more, then practiced some more, until this quote from Thorin Klosowski became my experience:
“Every time you learn something new, your brain changes in a pretty substantial way… Essentially, the more adept you become at a skill, the less work your brain has to do. Overtime, a skill becomes automatic and you don’t need to think about what you are doing. This is because your brain is actually strengthening itself over time as you learn the skill. The more connections between neurons are formed, the more we learn, and the more information we retain. As those connections get stronger, the less we have to think about what we’re doing, which means we can get better at other facets of a set of skills.”
Like expanding the limits of an aging dog, I learned some new tricks this summer. Adobe. Lightroom. Photoshop. These terms were not part of my brain’s vocabulary until I sensed the Spirit say, “Sue, let’s add pictures to our everyday blog.”
You created me and put me together. Make me wise enough to learn what you have commanded (Psalm 119:73, CEV).
…Sue…
P.S. I joyfully passed along a portion of your gratitude gifts to our web designer to cover her time. Reciprocating with gratitude, she texted me a picture of a new stone path descending through her expansive garden, a path our funds helped to pay a landscape artist to create. Under this new path in Black Mountain, North Carolina now lives a black snake who helps to care for pesky intruders, harnessing the power of God’s cycle of life.
