From “I’m failing” to “I’m learning”

You know that phase in business where you’re showing up, trying things, putting yourself out there… and it still feels like it’s not working?

This episode is about that phase.

The one where it’s easy to start questioning yourself. Your ability. Your idea. Whether you’re actually cut out for this.

I want to offer a different way to look at it.

Instead of seeing it as failure, what if you’re actually in an apprenticeship?

I break down what apprenticeship originally meant (hint: it has nothing to do with being an expert or getting it right), why we expect ourselves to “be good” way too soon, and how real skill is actually built over time—through repetition, mistakes, and staying in the work.

We’ll talk about:

• why it feels like nothing is happening (even when a lot is)
• how we misinterpret the early stages of growth
• what it actually takes to get good at something
• and how to stop making this phase mean something about you

If you’ve been feeling like you’re behind or doing it wrong, this will help you see things a little differently.

To book a (free) coaching consult: 

https://www.tamarcoaching.com/consult

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, hey, hey! Welcome back to Brave Little Things, guys. So good to have you here. I, by the way, I'm kind of giggling to myself right now because I'm looking over at the side of my desk and I'm like looking at a pile of jewelry. Like necklaces, um earrings, big chunky earrings, bracelets, rings, a whole thing. Because if you know, if you know me in real life, but also maybe you all could can see this also, you know, on my videos or whatever, but I'm a jewelry girl, like that's what I do. I don't do makeup, I don't do fancy clothes, I don't do any of the kind of stuff, but I like my chunky, loud jewelry. So when I sit down to record for you guys, I make sure though to take all of that off because it's very loud. It can cling, cling, cling into the recording. And actually, I remember my coach certification. I was in a bus par certification. You coach live, you know, with your whole cohort there with you. And I coach this one person, and then afterwards, and I felt really good about it, I was so excited, and we're doing feedback for each other. And the one thing that everybody kept on saying is like, it was hard to hear you because your earrings were like banging, banging, banging back and forth. And I was like, oh my gosh. So every time I record for you, I take off my whole thing, and I'm just laughing because it's on the side of my desk. Anyway, that is not what we're talking about today. We're talking about other stuff, not jewelry, but I I could totally do a podcast on jewelry. We could do that one day if that's if that's of interest. Um, but what we're talking today, right? A little bit of a little bit of a mindset shift and just kind of wanting to offer a different perspective and idea that might feel really ah to you, right? And the notion is helping us move from believing we are failing at something to really truly believing we are learning. And not just like pretending and this mantraing and things like that, but like really going from believing like I'm failing at this, I'm not doing this right, to I'm just learning. This is me learning. This is what we do. So, you know, for you know, there's this idea that we should already know what we're doing when we start a business. You know, like even if it might not be something that we say or somebody else says to us, there's just this notion of like when we start this, when you start a business, many of us have come from other, you know, we've worked for other people, other companies, other businesses, things like that. But there's this notion of like we should kind of know what we're doing more or less. And if we're not getting the results we want to be getting, that something is wrong, we're not made up for this, we're not we're not cut out for this kind of stuff. Other people are, what's going on, what's happening here? I imagine that many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Obviously, I'm talking through the lens of an entrepreneur, someone who's building a business, because that's my peeps, that's who we're talking to. But obviously, this is, you know, for many different aspects of our lives. But this notion that we're like kind of believing that we should know what we're doing. But, you know, because if we zoom out for a second, what we're actually doing in our businesses is something humans have done forever. We are simply learning a craft. We're learning not just the craft that we are doing that our businesses are, right? Whether it be, you know, a ceramicist or photographer or a dating coach or all those kinds of things, but the craft of business. We're learning that too. And too many of us go in believing we should know what we're what we're doing, and when we don't, we fall apart. So that's kind of what we're talking about today. This notion of like, can we, is it possible to go from believing that we're just failing this, we don't know what we're doing, this is not working, to I'm just learning how to do this. This is me learning, this is what it looks like. And, you know, in order to do that, I kind of want to bring up this old school word and idea of apprenticeship, which by the way, I'm sure I'm not saying correctly. I don't know why. This is a very hard there's certain words that are very hard for me. This is one of them, but maybe I'm saying it correctly, maybe I'm not. But apprenticeship, which I think is even just you know, saying it whether it's correct or not, but just like hearing it is just kind of is a little bit of a bomb to my soul, a little bit of like a bomb in terms of B-A-L-M, like a feel-good, like a feels good. This kind of like it's a a word from the past, right? A word, a word a word, an idea, a notion, a energy from like our ancestors from like back in the day. And because people didn't become these masters of something overnight, they didn't take a course or certification and suddenly, you know, be the expert, which is I think what all of us are expecting to be. Like if I just take that one more course, if I just do this kind of thing, I'm gonna be really an expert at it. What? They worked under somebody, they practiced, they messed up, they adjusted over and over again. That was the path. That was the path that culturally was accepted by everybody. That's just what we do. There's like no drama, no identity crisis of like, I can't believe I know I don't know what I'm doing, everybody else does. No, they tried, they failed, they learned, they repeated over and over and over again, right? And not only that, but they also started, you know, from the bottom, quote unquote, in terms of like when they were apprenticing with somebody, right? They didn't start like immediately. Like, for example, our amazing midwives. Again, I'm talking about like such a long time. And of course, there is some level of this in in our time in terms of like internship internships, I think bul I believe, are kind of like a little bit of that, right? Where you're not like directly like a lot of them are unpaid or you know, just like the beginning start of a career. But, you know, what's interesting, I'll actually I'll take you all the way back to the root of apprenticeship, which is you know, always goes back to Latin, which is I gotta say this word, but this is a funny thing, guys. I actually, when it was time to take a language in high school, I did not take Spanish, I did not take Italian, I did not take the, I took Latin, and I was terrible at it. I was like, and I was like, why? And then finally I'm like, wait, why am I taking this dead language? But anyway, so let's go back to the root of it. The root of the word, which is obviously Latin war root root, which is apprenti okay, I'm gonna spell it for you. Well no, I'm gonna say it for you, I'm gonna try to. Apprehendere, something like that. I'm sure it doesn't matter because I'm sure you don't know either. But but what it means, right, what this word means in Latin is to grasp or to take hold of something. And I love that because originally this notion of you know, getting really good at your craft had nothing to do with being an expert or being certified by ten different organizations or proving something to yourself or the world outside of you. It literally meant someone who is in the process, keyword process, of trying to get a grip on something. Right? Like figuring it out. And when you look at how we approach things now, especially with business and growing our businesses and building our business, we actually do the opposite. We want to jump straight to the feeling confident, being really good at it, being the expert, knowing what we're doing, getting results. And if you're not there quickly, we start making it mean something about us and how we don't know how to do this and we're not cut out for this. But if you go back to that original meeting, that that phase when you're like trying, you're figuring it out, you're not sure, you're learning the basics, you're learning the foundation, but maybe you're not really good at that either yet, and then you're adjusting, all of that is part of the package. It's what you go in knowing and expecting, right? That's actually the definition of it. You're in the process of grasping it. And that, my friends, takes time. And we knew that. Right? And there was like uh, okay, yeah, this is just like I'm learning this, right? This is I'm learning how to do this, that's how it works. You know, I think a great example of you know apprenticeship back in the day was, you know, one of the b best artists of all time, Leonardo da Da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci, that's how you say it. L Leonardo da Vinci, right? The greatest artist of art of probably of not of our time, because that was one of our time, but ever, right? He did not wake up and paint masterpieces. No, he did not, right? At age, I think it was at age fourteen, young teenage years, right? He was sent to Florence to learn from the best of the best. Right? He worked under a master artist himself at at that early age because he was excited, because he was turned on by by painting and by art. Right? He then was sent to a different country to learn this, right? Different city to learn how to paint. And also, by the way, he wasn't painting like Mona Lisa right when he arrived in Florence. No, he was probably mixing paints and preparing canvases for the, you know, the one the master artist who was, you know, he was learning from, and learning how light works and assisting everybody else, and probably taking out the trash and you know, making coffee and all those kinds of things. That's what he was doing. And imagine that he didn't expect anything else but that, right? And it's it it's something that we like completely don't have in our lives, have in this, you know, the way we w do things these days. But it's an important thing, it's an important lesson to remember that we're like, you know, especially in the beginning of our businesses in the first five years or so, we are like apprenticing in our own businesses. And if we go, if we would have the mindset of that, of that we're just grasping this craft of building a business. Not again, not even just a craft of what we're doing, because many of us come in and we're actually very good at what we do already, right? We're just now like needing to learn this other skill, which is like building the business, being someone who can market and sell and do all these kinds of things, right? We've got many hats that we have to wear. And so if we kind of gave ourselves a little bit of, you know, slack in that kind of way, imagine what could happen.

unknown 10:53

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

I think for many of us, we probably think like, oh, if we give ourselves slack, then we're really not gonna be able to do it. We're really not gonna be able to accomplish it. And if we're kind of like, okay, we can, you know, start start slowly and like just mix paints a little bit and learn lighting, you know, da da da, then we're not gonna be able to be successful. But actually, that is the way to success. Mixing your own paints first, learning texture, learning, you know, how to work around a canvas and all those kinds of things. And obviously, you know, that's the metaphor for our the you know what we do in our businesses, but that is the point, right? We would have to be years of doing the small, unglamorous work first in order to become it. Listen, Karate Kid is a perfect example. I'm sure all of you out there have watched Karate Kid, right? He was apprenticing, you know, Mr. Miyago. And he did not come, like he thought, he's like, okay, I'm gonna come that first day and he's gonna teach me the moves, right? And no, and I love that Mr. Miyago did not even explain it. He just like gave him a rag and told him to like clean in a very particular way all the cars, and then he gave him a paintbrush and told him how to, right? And all these things were helping him build these muscles. And it wasn't until much later that he started to actually teach him karate, you know, and this is the notion, this is the idea. We are taking small little steps to build our business muscles, right? And eventually we move towards those expert abilities that we can then be the master and be able to teach other people, you know, how to do the things that we're doing. So I just I I love this idea. This reminder of like how the world used to be, because there is so much wisdom in how our ancestors did things that we unfortunately don't always take on, take with us and and move with it. And so it's rema it's a good reminder to kind of go back to see like, well, how did it work back in the day, right? With midwives, right? With midwives, like, you know, the same thing that you know, other midwives would learn from these like master midwives, and they would be, they would, anytime they would get a birth, they would go with them, and they weren't like helping assist births for a very long time. They were the ones who were, you know, going to get the clean cloths and the hot water and maybe making food for the women just to be around it, right? And so that is a really important shift for us to think about in terms of like, we don't have to be really good. That's not you actually our job. Our job is to feel like we have the time and we have the ability to be curious and to learn and to not be good. Our job is to be like, it's okay if we're not good. That's literally our job. Our job right now is to not be good because that's the reality. And every single day that we show up to our quote unquote apprenticeship, right, our business, we get better and better and better. And so, you know, something that I actually do with my own clients, like within like the first couple of sessions, sometimes the you know, within the first session, especially if I see somebody coming to me mostly because they feel like really not good at the business, they're feeling very confused, they're feeling, you know, which is a lot of my clients, and they, you know, they're very, they're like master level at their craft, and they feel like shit when it comes to their business their business CEO identity, you know. So one of the first things I'll do I'll ask them to do is an inventory of their expert skills and tools. And I'll be very specific with them that I want them to list not only their master's degrees and certifications and things like that, but to really every little thing that's gone into you know, giving them the skills and tools that they have for the business that they're creating. And so this could be things that like they learned when they were like, you know, their first job babysitting, to, you know, when, you know, determination and commitment on the swim team when they were six. And this, you know, retreat that they went on, not as a retreat leader, but someone that they, you know, they went on as a participant. And this is the skills that they've gained from it, whether it be like actual skills that somebody taught them or skills that they learned because of situations that they were in, all of that matters and have them calculate the hours spent on that particular kind of thing and kind of really seeing how much expert expert knowledge that they actually already have and also where they specifically have learned it, because we have put too much faith, or you know, that that that these cer these master programs and undergraduate degrees and things like that are like where it's at. That's where we learn all our stuff, right? Because why? Because we paid a lot of money. So we better have like learned a lot of stuff, but no, there is so much that we have learned along the way, whether it be an official or unofficial apprenticeship, that have taught us so many things that we get to bring into our businesses, right? We want to know like what have you lived through? What have you figured out the hard way? What have you tried, you failed at, and gotten better at? Because that's where your real skills come from. And so when they take the time, my clients, when they take the time to write all of this out, they are shocked and surprised every single time. They are reminded that they did not just get, you know, and for some folks, they might not have even gone through college, maybe not even high school, whatever it is. And so they totally feel like all these thoughts about themselves when it comes to like expert identity. But when they see, and then and folks who have gone through that, but then see also all the stuff outside of that, all the skills they have gathered outside of those, you know, institutions, they're blown away and reminded at what an expert they are at all these things already, from from all these different experiences, how how much they have gained from it, from learning, right? Simply from learning. I know for myself personally. I have I graduated from high school, I have an undergraduate degree from NYU university, I have a master's degree from um Hunter College, I have a doula certification as well as a life coach certification, and I could probably go on and on. But the bottom line is that when I did this for myself also, this particular exercise, which I highly recommend for you guys as well when you get when you're done with this episode, to sit down with yourself and really ask, okay, what are, let me list out all the things that I have done that could that would contribute to who I am and what I do today. And, you know, go as far out as possible from as young age as possible to, you know, working at the record store, to running that lemonade stand, to whatever it is, to that conversation I had with my hairdresser or whatever it is. But I realized that that really that is everything that I did outside of those institutions, all those trainings and those programs that really helped me, you know, make it happen for myself here. Like I know, for example, like a l, you know, one of the that one of the main jobs that I did before I became a life coach was a program director, coordinator for a teen traveling program. And so, you know, people from the outside kind of like, I there's no what are there's no similarities here? Like, how did you go from there to life coaching? But I cannot tell you how many hours I sat with these kids, who, by the way, now are all like parents, and like I have connections with some of them, and it's so sweet. But I sat literally sometimes till three in the morning, having life altering conversations with these kids, right? Talking about growth and what we want to do and who we want to be and all these kinds of things, like life coaching, like actual life coaching, right? And so there's so much that you have that you're missing out on knowing when you just think, I got my knowledge from this four-year, four-year undergraduate certification, not certification, maybe degree, right? No, there's so much more. So they want you to do a real intake there and see, okay? And listen, like your business isn't something you're supposed to already be good at, right? It's actually the place where you become good, right? Always say, like, we could spend our lifetimes on the sidelines talking about, discussing, trying to make decisions about certain kinds of things, but that will not take us anywhere. We have to be in the game. We have to be in the business to become good. Right? We're not supposed to be there already. It is part of the job, it's part of the process. And so I really like, right? I really like this idea, this notion of thinking about the at least certainly the first few years of business as a paid apprenticeship. Like you're literally learning how to sell, how to serve, how to lead, how to show up, right? And people are paying you while you learn. That's really cool. Not every apprenticeship gets paid, right? You get to get paid. And I think it takes the pressure off, right? If you're in business right now and you don't feel confident, and you're not seeing momentum yet, and you're questioning your expertise, I want you just to like think about that for a second. To take the pressure off for a second and just say, like, okay, you know, I'm an apprentice. That's it. I'm an apprentice in my own business. I'm apprentice in my own business, and I am really going to allow myself to learn. And for a little while, I'm gonna be, again, mixing the paints and doing the like unglamorous kind of shitty work, which is basically like, you know, in our terms, you know, making the real, putting it up and getting zero likes and zero engagement, and putting out a workshop idea and nobody going forward, and doing all these kind of unglamorous, very unglamorous, very unsexy, and really kind of very challenging kind of things, but I'm doing it knowing that eventually I'm going to be on this, I'm going to be on this road and journey of becoming a master at this craft of building a business. So I hope that that kind of little mindset tweak helps. It definitely helped me, I know, when I was kind of like, oh, maybe I don't have to be good at this yet. Okay, that's interesting. Right? Maybe I get to try something, I get to fail again and try again and fail again and try again, and maybe that's not even a problem. Maybe that's even the freaking path. Maybe that's the only way to do it. And if I'm okay with that, then I won't be stressing about it, and I'll actually do it. So I'm sending this idea, this notion, this sh mindset mindset shift off to you guys in hopes that you'll be able to approach your business in this kind of way. But I'm just here to learn. I'm here to get better. I'm not good yet, but I'm if I continue to show up to my apprenticeship, I will become very good. Anyways, guys, as always, if you are wanting support here, this is what I do. This is really what I do. I really help my folks really take those deep breaths and make business building not this very confusing, complicated, I don't understand kind of thing, but something that is actually very simple and very doable. And I'm here for you. And you can book a consult with me at tomorcoaching.com slash consult and we can get that on the books and make that happen. I love you guys. Have a beautiful day, beautiful week. I will see you next time.