The Mel Lawson Show

Practicing Patience & Leaving The Group Chat | The Mel Lawson Show

• The Mel Lawson Show

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In my first solo podcast episode I share 3 things I’ve learnt recently. Here’s a brief rundown…

1. It takes years to get good at something and it’s good to embrace being a learner


As my Tai Chi teacher wisely put it - shift your mindset from seeking achievement and success to being learner oriented. From my tennis practice to running a biz, I’m getting comfortable with being patient while getting better at something.


2. Don’t go hell for leather on introducing new things


If there’s urgency for anything, it’s usually a red flag. I had to learn this lesson the hard way by dealing with intense nausea after chugging some electrolytes before a team meeting. 😂


3. You don’t always have to have the last word


As a younger sibling growing up in a difficult household, I had to fight to say my bit. But that isn’t serving me later in life. I will be vocal when I see an injustice but I’m learning to let things go when they don’t matter. It’s not worth the agro. 


I hope you take something from this episode that’s helpful. If you do, please leave a review, it helps us get the podcast out there!

Check out my biz: https://www.barebiology.com/

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to my show, the Mel Lawson Show. This is my very first solo episode where I don't have my trusty live by my side to help me and support me properly up. In many, many ways I've been quite nervous about this because, well, various reasons I was brought up to in the 70s. So don't speak unless someone speaks to you and don't go on, don't go on, don't hog the airspace. Is there anything I have to say? Vaguely interesting? So all those things going round your head, but then it'd be a bit of a crap podcast if I sat here and didn't say very much. So, yeah, quite nerve-wracking. But I've had an idea for the format, which I hope you like, which is three things I've learned this week and maybe some weeks. It'll be three things I've tried, or three things I've realized or, yeah, interesting things I can share with you. But this week it's really three things I've learned about life in general, but about myself. Yeah, so I hope you enjoy it. Do leave feedback, but don't be too brutal. The first thing I have realized this week and it's taken me around 51, so long time to realize it is it takes years and years and years of practice to get good at things and I can't believe I've only just it's only really dawned on me and I'll tell you in a minute how it dawned on me.

Speaker 1:

But to give you some examples of in my life so I play tennis, I love tennis. I played as a kid quite well, but then not. I didn't ever get to sort of you know, competitive playing, but I was pretty good and then I didn't play again until my early 40s when I picked it up again. And I've only started playing properly and consistently and by that I mean on average three times a week for the last three to four years and I've only, I would say, in the last few months got to the point where I'm actually not terrible and I'm okay. And I can beat my husband occasionally and I'm okay. But it has taken me so long to get there and it's a really, if anyone plays tennis or has ever tried, it's a really frustrating game because you're so bad at the beginning. I mean children obviously learn way, way faster, but add, adults like you're just hitting it in the net all the time or you don't even hit the ball. It's so embarrassing, you don't even make contact, you hit it out over the fence and it can get really irritating and plenty of times where I've thought, oh, you know, bugger, this I'm not, I don't, you know, I don't want to play this and but I have stuck with it because I do love it and I can actually play fairly well now. So tennis is a really good example.

Speaker 1:

Weight training is another really good example where I've dipped in and out of it over the last 10 years and I know so. The reason I do weight training is really a sort of future proof thing. So when you get to my age you start losing a lot of muscle. Especially as a woman, you have to protect against osteoporosis. So I do it really for long-term health. But when you don't see any gains to use a gym term when you don't see any progress, you kind of think oh, you know, because I don't hate it but I don't love it. Like every time I have to force myself. If my PT hears this, please don't take offense because you're great, but yeah, I don't love it. So I've dipped in and out, fallen off it several times and then for the last two years I have been consistently apart from the odd illness, the holiday doing it twice a week. I can now deadlift my own body weight. I'm much faster around the tennis court because my legs are much stronger, but it's taken nearly two years for me to actually notice and go. Oh, I am stronger Because I don't necessarily look that different and I don't, I think, you know, with going to the gym and weight training, and again, especially as an older woman. You know my son, he's 15, is doing some weight training and I swear, from one week to the next he looks bigger and he, his muscles are more defined, whereas I've been doing it for years and I don't, I don't look any different, but I my husband commented just the other day that he used to be able to do little drop shots over the net and knew I wouldn't be able to get to them, and now I can get to pretty much everything and that's from the weight training. So that's taken two years.

Speaker 1:

The other thing is running a business. I'm so much better at it now and I'm still always learning. There's still so much to learn because the business evolves, it grows. You learn from challenges, problems, mistakes, new thing, new technologies, new challenges. So you're always learning. But I'm way way better than I used to be at running my business. There's a few things.

Speaker 1:

So meditation is something that I'm laughing because I went through a phase of really trying hard when my mom was very ill and had terminal cancer and I looked after her and I also had. The kids were really young and I just started my business and she moved in with us and it was such a difficult time. So I really tried to meditate, just try and calm down and I just in my head I couldn't do it. I can't I because my mind was racing so much and I've got quite a racy mind anyway and I have OCD, so I have quite a lot of obsessive, repetitive thoughts going on and I just I was like I just can't do this. It's not for me, I can't do it, my mind just wanders off, I can't focus on my breathing, to the point where I actually said to the team we're not doing any newsletters about meditating because that's it, it's a banned subject, it's. You know I'm sort of really irritable about it.

Speaker 1:

But I know I've read so much about it and I'm reading a book by a guy called Joe Dispenza called Becoming Supernatural, and it's really reignited my desire to learn meditation and I'm starting right at the beginning but so far I'm enjoying it. And when my mind wanders, and it did that this morning quite a lot, because I was thinking about well, am I going to say on my podcast? I just thought, well, this is part of the process is learning to recognize that my mind is bonded off and it is insane what meditation can do. I thought I'm just going to do five minutes every day and I've been doing it for the last sort of 10 days and again it's realizing. Well, actually it takes years and years and years and years and you could be, you know, an absolute meditation guru, dalai Lama, and you're still practicing and getting better. So that was a huge learning.

Speaker 1:

And where I've learned this was from my Tai Chi teacher. So a random conversation I had with an osteopath in Costa Rica this Christmas and actually, sorry, a chiropractor. He said I've started doing Tai Chi, it's cured all my knee problems. It's amazing. So I said to my husband that we're in our fifties, I think we need to do Tai Chi. And he's like, okay, this is one of your mad, weird ideas and I just booked us in.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, it's incredibly hard and really hard. And we go every week and there's we have this lovely teacher and there's a group of us and we're all like really random mix of people and we look ridiculous and I have to spend a lot of it trying not to giggle. We've done, I think, six classes now, six hours, and we can barely do the first moves and it's. It's actually okay because that is the whole point in a way. So our teacher said to me you have to change your mindset and not be success oriented, which I am, and I'm quite competitive. He said you have to be learning oriented, which I thought was really interesting, because my mindset suddenly and I'm not I thought, yeah, that's the same with tennis, because you cannot be Novak Djokovic. I mean, you can't be him anyway, but you can't, he still has to learn and get better. And our teacher said you know the, the sort of grandmaster, the Tai Chi grandmasters, also still improving and trying to get better. So that was a real like proper epiphany moment for me.

Speaker 1:

I thought, okay, it's the learning and that's where, in the past, things like I would love to learn the piano. So again, as a kid I was not bad at the piano, but I hated reading music, so I found it really difficult. I could learn things by ear and then play it, and then I would pretend I was reading the music. And then I had this very mean French no offense to French people French piano teacher and she used to hit me with a hammer and she used to hit me on the hand if she realized I was faking reading the music and obviously that put me off a little bit. But I just, I just can't read music. So I'm really bad at maths and there's something slightly mathematical about it for me that I but I just want to learn it by ear and then play and pretend I'm reading the music.

Speaker 1:

So now I picked up piano again in my thirties and I thought you know, I had a young kid's. When they're sleeping and having that, I'll play the piano and I'll, in 20 years time I'll be a grade eight pianist and it's still a dream of mine. And I didn't, I jacked it in because I could very easily find an excuse to. You know, I've got young kids, I'm pregnant, you know I don't have time to practice. I can't practice because they're having a nap and I'll wake them up. But they were just all excuses and that was so my son's nearly 16 years ago, 16 years ago. If I had just done one lesson a week for the last 16 years and not even done any practice, I would be able to play the piano and the thing I also kind of realised, which is so obvious.

Speaker 1:

But when you try to do these things you think, oh, that's going to take too long, it's going to be like I just want to be good now, because I think you think, well, if I'm not good now, this is quite boring and there's not much payback and I don't really have the motivation to keep going with it. But again, it's changing that mindset into I need to enjoy the process of learning. And these 16 years have passed and I'm no better at the piano. In fact I'm worse because I literally haven't and my piano sits there every day and it looks at me like giving me the guilt it's going on here and I'm not actually out of tune now as well, because you left me all this time. So, and I regret that because that was silly, because I wanted to be amazing pianist like that and obviously that's impossible. So I'm going to learn the piano, maybe not this year, but that was a really good example and I'm very lucky.

Speaker 1:

I speak quite a few foreign languages for various reasons, but I know lots of people who want to learn language, so I wish I could speak Spanish, but it takes so long. And, again, I think if you just do a little bit every day, in 10 years time you'll be able to speak pretty well. And it's that mindset around changing it to a learning rather than a success kind of tick-tick achievement thing. So that was my first thing that I realised, and Tai Chi is quite challenging in a way, but I'm getting a lot from it spiritually because it's making me actually slow down and go. Okay, I've got to spend an hour just learning to move my hands in this one way, which is, yeah, for somebody like me it's very Taipei I need to achieve, I need to achieve is also a great practice. So that's my first thing is that it takes years of practice to learn anything and get really good at something. And I mean, obviously there's no point slogging away. It's something that you hate. But if it is something you would like to be good at and a skill you'd like to master I think the classic ones are learning a language, learning musical instrument, learning a sport then just keep doing it and the years will pass and then you'll find you're actually quite good at that thing.

Speaker 1:

The second thing I learnt this week the hard way and I like to learn a lot of my lessons the really, really hard way is that I still have not learnt to not go in all-in health and leather on new things and especially things that I'm introducing to my diet. So I have a very sensitive stomach, I have digestion issues, I have irritable bowel. My stomach is the thing that goes when I'm stressed. I feel sick when I'm nervous. I'm a sort of stomachy person and I've been hearing a lot about an electrolyte brand called Element LMNT. I got heavily influenced by, I think, probably Tim Ferriss, who is my normal key influencer, and also it's co-founded by a guy called Rob Wolves, who I really like, and I was sold on air and I thought, right, I'm going to try that. It was on Tuesday this week. We had our big.

Speaker 1:

We have a monthly team meeting where we all get together, and I got up really early and I thought, right, I'm going to take this electrolyte drink and I'm going to feel amazing Literally going to be like flying all day. I'm going to be so hydrated. And I took a sip and I thought that is really salty and this is the whole thing. By the way, I'm not bashing the brand at all. I think it's probably very good. I just perhaps needed to take it a bit more slowly and I thought that's really salty. I feel like that's going to make me feel a bit sick. Instead of thinking, ah, do you know, I've got a team meeting today. I probably shouldn't just chug something I've not tried before, I just chugged it. I just got into like this sort of you know, tech bro mentality of I'll just chug a pint of this stuff.

Speaker 1:

I felt so ill, I felt so nauseous, and I was driving into Brighton with my husband. He's now joined our team, so he was coming to the team meeting and he's like you always do this. You'd like pick a really bad day and moment to try something new and instead of having a little sip or you just chug the whole thing. And that is such classic me and I do that with a lot of stuff. I've done it with a lot of supplements. Or I've read something about I remember reading about sauerkraut years ago and he, right, I'm going to try that. And I at loads and felt really ill and just, yeah, I just have.

Speaker 1:

I'm hoping now that I finally learned the lesson and I will just remind myself Okay, just go slowly. I don't know if anybody can relate to this, but just yeah, try things slowly and gently and just introduce them, especially if it's something you're eating or like a supplement, and when we advise that with our supplements in my business is, don't go like all in, make yourself feel ill. So, yeah, take things slowly when you're doing new things. This is my second lesson from this week. My third again lesson. Let's say it is a lesson and something I learned about myself. Well, I already knew this, but I've I've this week. I thought this is time to change.

Speaker 1:

This now is and my husband really enjoying listening to this is my need to have the last word is not serving me well and I don't really know where it comes from. I mean, I sort of do, probably I think as a child I've got an older brother is a very strong character and you know we were quite competitive, but I, as the younger sister, I wanted to always like I wanted to win the argument. Also, we had quite a difficult house and I had quite difficult well, very difficult father and I felt often that I felt a lot of injustice. So I always wanted to make sure that I had said my bit, which often got me into trouble. But I really always as a child I hated any sort of. If someone was bullying someone at school, I'd like to go piling in and I just have this thing in me, which sometimes serves me well and it makes me I defend people a lot and I don't get pushed around, but sometimes I just need to not have the last word. So I had a couple of things this week have come out of this exercise.

Speaker 1:

But I was part of a WhatsApp group and I'm sure you'll all probably know where I'm going with this with the WhatsApp groups and it's a sort of business scene networking type one. I don't really know anyone on it. I don't really know anyone on it, to be honest, and don't really participate. And then a subject came up and business related and I put in a comment about something and then somebody who used to work with us, who's on that group, basically had a go at me, sort of indirectly, but it clearly was having a go at me. I literally had to hide my phone from myself to stop myself from responding, and I had to.

Speaker 1:

I've been listening to Liv's, who you'll meet on this podcast, who's one of my team, who's also, she's a coach, she I remember her saying you have to sit with these emotions and really sort of think about where, where's this coming from. So I sat with it and my anger, my need to reply and thought why do I need to reply to this? It was this feeling of well, I don't want other people on that group thinking that she's right because she's totally wrong Because, also, she hasn't worked in the business for a long time and she doesn't actually know what she's talking about and is very wrong. And I don't want people thinking that she's got, she's scored a point and all this like ridiculous human competitive, like the whole LinkedIn thing of like competitive posting around. You know, we're doing this and this, which we I don't really do either, but but it really Made me think why do I need To prove something to group of people I don't know who, probably don't? Well, they don't care, they don't care, they probably they don't know who I am, they don't know who she is, nobody cares. And it's just this thing I have of I need to have the final say and be like I'm right and You're wrong and you don't know, and I'm very happy to admit when I'm wrong, but when I know that I'm right, as the law of the wrong thing, I hate to say.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, I slept on it, even though I kept waking up thinking about it and that again my brain and I know I'm sure you relate to this where you replay these things over and over and then you rehearse what, what you would say then, or what if they say that back, and Just such a bad use of headspace and energy. And so I didn't reply. It took a lot of self Holding back not to reply, but actually it was the right thing to do, and often not responding is a more powerful Communication message. But that's not why I did it. It was to teach myself To not have to have the last word, because actually was really not important. And so that was two things. Really is I recognize that in myself. It was not a good use of my energy or headspace.

Speaker 1:

Also those Lid, what's hot groups. So this morning I was telling live about it ahead of this episode and so I just leave the group. And so I left the group and I feel really good because it was just the thing that was just bothering me and I wasn't getting anything from it and it's, and now I just Don't need to even think about it. So, yeah, I think there's a few things in there that maybe you can take away, but I don't know if any of you like me and you do get that need and I think at home and in relationships and With partners it can be that temptation to I want to have the last word. Maybe just try not having the last word and see how that goes. And yeah, if you're in any of those WhatsApp groups, maybe just leave Right.

Speaker 1:

My three things this week are Takes, years of practice to get good at something and embrace the learning rather than the successes. Don't Go all in health and leather on new things, especially if they're things you're putting in or on your body. That's not it really it's a really bad idea. And Number three, if you're one of those people that feels you have to have the last word, try Not having the last word and see, see how that goes. Hope you enjoyed this. Please leave comments, suggestions. If any of this rang a bell with you, we'd love to hear about it and thank you very much for listening.