The psyche experience

It is not uncommon to hear that someone doesn’t know how to box, run a PCR test, or create an app. It is less common to hear that someone doesn’t know how to travel efficiently, communicate with others, or understand what other people want. It is almost entirely uncommon to hear that someone doesn’t know how to feel better, control their emotions, learn how to get into a better place by using an effort. Especially in the long run.

It makes me wonder and think that most of us believe that intellectual and physical skills are something we can master but don’t have initially, the communicational skills are something that is “a little bit known and all of us can figure it out with experience,” and the “getting into a better state” skill is built-in, and we all can do it.

Somewhat disagree on the 2nd one, and strongly disagree on the third one. We are ok thinking that it will take 1-2-5-10 years to master physical or intellectual skills, and there will be a result. Larger or weaker, that will depend on the motivation, level of energy and passion, intensity, pre-history. But why do we think that psychological skills would be any different? Different from doing a particular skill-building thing 2-3 times a week, every month, every year. Writing down the results, looking for obstacles, changing the strategy, trying different things and looking for plateaus, downslopes, making lists of what needs to be done when we need to overcome slow times.
For some strange reason, many of us think that the skill should come easy and the first or second attempt (but not the 1000th) needs to bring clear results. Why is that? I don’t actually know. I know that this was an obstacle for me when I tried to experience some states I wanted to have and tried to change myself to experience something pleasant, if not all the times, but much more often than before. Maybe it’s what we call ego, as it is hard to admit that we fail at obtaining the skill of acquiring decent psychological states. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism that is meant to say that we can do something besides what we have learned at school and continue working. I don’t know.
I know that once we start treating the skill of building up psyche skills, it might take as long as the other skills. But it can be so much more beautiful, although at the same time almost painful.

Just as with physical skills, there is no failure when we continue exercising, as it all can turn into an experience. When we try to master pullup, every time we attempt to do that, we gain something. And every single minute of that takes us farther away from us, not doing anything at all. It reminds me of myself doing strength training 5 minutes a day rather than thinking that “If I do strength training, I need to do it at least three times a week, for at least an hour, I need to get the result quickly.” There comes disappointment. I think it is wrong to believe that every action turns into experience because some would be evaluated, analyzed, and turned into expertise in the future. Some would just turn into bitter artifacts that become splint for the rest of our lives.

I think that having our attempts to change ourselves, day in day out, with the downs and ups, with confusion and total change of directions, is the way to really change. The beauty of the long and persistent psyche development and treating it just like any other skill is that even if we analyzed something and realized that it was a wrong direction, and tried to think about why that was wrong, and planned a new attack on the destructive stages, is that the effort alone is already developing and enriching and strengthening the psyche muscle that for some reason we assume should already exist by default.
We don’t expect to come into a boxing gym and start boxing beautifully after 1 or 2 sessions. Why would we expect to be able to control and enrich our psyche in 2 or 5 minutes? When the muscle is weak, we make a plan and start exercising it.

What we can expect is that every single attempt makes us more experienced, and make us our own laboratory or gym to exercise, at any single moment.