Today I finished up studying the motorcycle course material. The feeling has now become a familiar one – that “drinking from a firehose” feeling, that there is so much to know, so much ahead of you to practice. There’s the fear at not being able to assimilate it all quickly enough for how fast you’ll NEED it to save your hide from certain death or dismemberment.
And for me, there’s the anxiety that I’m going to be forced to learn things at an anti-RSTP pace, and in an anti-RSTP way. And, that will drive me crazy, because I KNOW there is a better way to learn things. Experience tells me that I’ll, likely, be forced to move along the learning arc at a pace that doesn’t work well for me, and that will actually cause me to FAIL to learn whatever it is that I’m wanting to learn.
I always remind myself that I can practice off their clock. I’ve done that in the past. It’s what I did with the marksmanship class. I laid my broken, beaten, bruised body, in a huge soakingnd hand motions sequence of a respiratory pause necessary for making a clea tub over in Blue Ridge, GA after the first day and cycled through the breathing an shot with my .22 rifle. As a result, I demonstrated a much higher degree of proficiency the next day at the range.
And, then there’s always anxiety that stems from reading, all in one place, in rapid succession, all the hazards, all the things that can go wrong. It makes you hyper-aware of so much of what can go horribly wrong. But, now I know that’s not how things go in the real world, they come at you a piece at a time, generally, unless it’s kiteboarding, and then it really IS all coming at you at the SAME time. And I know how to take a chunk of instruction that’s too big, and chunk it down into something manageable for myself, and overcome the deficiencies in instruction.
For now, I’ll review all the material one more time before I go in for class on Saturday, layering on one more go at my understanding of the material – which also an important consideration – just knowing that the more times I’m exposed to the material, and attend to it, the more it will sink in – it’s almost like going through the motions, you just review and review, but you have to attend to it. You have to work through it with the purpose of ferreting out any of the distinctions you’ve missed on previous iterations.
Smarter-Not-Harder U 