I’m learning to do freestanding handstands.

I’m no expert yet.

I started about two years ago; I’m one of those people that does handstands in the park and looks pretty silly.

When I started, I looked up a quick guide on techniques on the Internet, then just went out and tried to do it.

I fell over.

So I started the easy way, propping my feet up against a tree and holding the position for a time. It takes a bit of time to get used to being upside-down, and your head feels like it’s going to explode.

Then I progressed to freestanding handstands, and this is when the learning process got interesting.

In fact, learning to do handstands has been one of my most interesting learning experiences.

Why did I start doing handstands?

Well, I’m always trying to learn something new.

You have to understand. My job is essentially telling people that they need to learn things and practise them.

I like to practise what I preach, and so if I tell people that they should learn, I feel that the least I should do is learn something myself.

With every skill I learn, I can always take something from the experience and share it with English learners to help them in their process.

On top of this, learning is fun, interesting, and is great for the brain.

It’s a win-win situation.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

Also, I’m a pretty active person. I run, go to the gym, and try out new things pretty often. Doing handstands got my interest because it’s a simple movement that is really difficult to do. Maybe because it’s the opposite of what we normally do: stand on our feet.

Good for the body and good for the brain. “Let’s do it!”, I thought.

What I didn’t anticipate was how frustrating the process would be.

Let me put you in the picture with my handstands. I can hold one for an average of ten seconds now. Somedays I can’t do one at all, and some days I can hold one until my muscles fail. But the average is around ten seconds.

Two years; ten seconds.

I’m not sure if this is normal or not but I get the feeling I’m probably below average on the learning curve. It certainly doesn’t sound very impressive.

When I started, I thought I’d be walking on my hands within a few months!

For me, it’s been really frustrating.

I did a rough calculation the other day of the number of times I’ve fallen over. The conservative estimate is over two thousand.

Two thousand times!

The easy thing would have been to say, “Forget it! I’m done with handstands” after a few months, but I know that quitting would feel worse than falling over thousands of times.

I know it sounds corny, and it is, but it’s true that it doesn’t matter how many times you fall over, as long as you get back up and try again.

I know how frustrating it can be to learn a language. It can feel like a constant uphill struggle.

You feel you’re making progress, but as you make progress towards fluency, fluency seems to move away from you.

Maybe you make the same mistake over and over.

It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make in English, as long as every time you do make a mistake, you learn something from it.

Write down the correction and practise it, and you won’t make the mistake again.

Every time I fall over, I learn something that makes me stay up for a few milliseconds longer the next time I try. It doesn’t matter how many times I fall over because with every fall, I make sure I learn something about why I fell over. And slowly, over time, I learn.

This is the learning process.

A big breakthrough came when I started to keep my legs perfectly straight. From doing this I was able to double my time holding a handstand almost instantly.

There are things holding you back in your learning process.

What are they? What is stopping you from progressing more quickly? What are your weaknesses?

Is it a skill like speaking or listening that you should improve? Or is it a personal attribute? For example, you’re afraid of making mistakes, so you don’t speak as much as you should.

Identify your weaknesses in English, and work to improve them.

Is your weakness speaking? Then speak more.

Is your weakness listening? Then listen more. Spoken English is one button away from you on your TV remote control. Spoken English is one click away on your mobile, which you carry everywhere.

Is your weakness grammar? Get a good grammar reference book and go through it. Read a novel and analyse the grammar in each sentence. Ask yourself why a particular tense is used in a sentence. Ask yourself what the difference in meaning would be if you changed the tense. Analyse the prepositions, articles, sentence structure, etc.

Maybe you don’t know what your weaknesses are.

I didn’t know that my legs not being perfectly straight was stopping me from progressing. I experimented, tried it, and it worked. I experimented with other things, and they didn’t work, so I don’t do them.

Try things.

Experiment.

See what works for you and what doesn’t.

Do more of the things that work, and less of the things that don’t work.

It’s easy to get frustrated, and the temptation to practise less to avoid this feeling can be strong. The brain likes things that feel easy; it only wants to do things that feel easy and good, and tries to avoid things that don’t feel good, like frustration.

And so humans, like electricity, prefer to follow the path of least resistance.

But with less resistance comes less reward.

Travelling on a sailing boat is easy, comfortable, and relaxing. There is very little resistance on a sailing boat.

The bad thing is that it takes you a long time to get to your destination.

When you travel by speedboat, it’s much less relaxing and comfortable. There’s a lot more resistance, and so you feel every bump along the way, but you get to your destination far more quickly this way.

So continue to practise English, and one day you’ll master it.

I’ll continue to practise my handstands, and one day I’ll master it.

Until then, I’ll need to fall over a few more times.

And that’s ok, it’s part of the process.

As long as I keep pushing my feet up towards the sky every day, I’ll get there.

P.S. If anyone has any tips on doing handstands, I’d greatly appreciate it…[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

Photo By Onearmer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons