The Courage to Learn New Things

In this episode of Measure Twice, Cut Once, I explore the process of learning new skills and capabilities, both in quilting and in business. I share personal stories about taking on challenging projects—from creating a quilt from vintage blocks to building an online course business—and break down the four stages of growth: courage, commitment, capability, and confidence. This episode offers practical insights for anyone looking to expand their creative skills or transform their passion into a profession.

Note: Some links below are affiliate links, which means that if you use them to purchase the product, I'll earn a small commission at no extra charge to you! 

Key Points

• My experience with the "Ava" quilt challenge and how it prepared me for bigger challenges
• The Four C's Formula by Dan Sullivan: Courage, Commitment, Capability, and Confidence
• The importance of giving yourself permission to be a beginner and take time to learn
• Why celebrating small gains and progress is essential for growth

Resources Mentioned

• The Four C's Formula by Dan Sullivan: Link to booklet
• The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Susan's Free Motion Quilting Masterclass, an on-demand comprehensive course for mastering freehand quilting skills and design decisions. Learn more at stitchedbysusaon.com/learn.

Questions for Reflection

• What vision are you holding that's bigger than your current skills?
• What would taking the first step of courage into something new look like for you today?
• How can you better celebrate your small gains and progress?

Want to try free motion quilting but don't know where to start? Here's 3 simple steps to get going.

Transcript

Susan: 0:48

Welcome to season five of Measure Twice. Cut Once. This whole season is an exploration into behind the scenes of not just quilting, but building a creative business that truly lights you up. As someone who's navigated the exciting and sometimes bumpy world of turning a passion into a profession, I'm excited to pull back the curtain and share my own experiences. So some episodes will be just me delving into my own personal journey. While others will feature guests who are also navigating the world of creative entrepreneurship. We'll explore the nitty gritty of building a creative business, the lessons learned and the unexpected challenges that come with transforming your craft into a thriving enterprise. And don't worry, I'm not leaving storytelling behind. Instead, I'll be weaving them into the conversations about what it takes to grow a business while staying true to your creative spirit. So whether you're dreaming of starting your own business, or you just love hearing about creative entrepreneurship, this season is for you. This episode is sponsored by my free motion quilting masterclass. This online on-demand course is a comprehensive training for mastering freehand quilting skills and navigating design decisions. It not only teaches over 25 specific quilt designs demonstrated both at the long arm and at a domestic sewing machine. But also it teaches the practice methods that advance your skill level and thought processes that enable you to create your own original designs with confidence. For more information, I provided a link in the show notes, or you can head to my website stitched by susan.com. And from there, click on the learn tab. Registration for a group of quilters opens twice per year. But you're welcome to join the wait list at any time, and you'll be the first to know when the doors open. So once again, the link is in the show notes or the learn tab on my website. I've been looking back a little, reflecting a little lately and thinking back over. Learning new things, and I'm thinking about this from several angles. One of them is thinking I'm 55 and it's really good for me to be learning new things and I need to keep on challenging myself to learn new things. And another is looking back at some of the fairly large new things that I've done in the last four or five years and thinking. How did I do that process? How can I replicate that process again and again? So here are my thoughts on learning new stuff. I bet you've had a moment as I have where you've been enthusiastic about something and you decided, I'm gonna go for it. When you kind of look uncertainty or maybe self-doubt or maybe lack of know-how in the face and say, but I'm gonna move forward anyway, that's what I call in biblical terms, taking the land. To me, that's claiming territory that feels and looks and seems at this moment beyond my reach, but I decide. I'm gonna take that land. few years ago, I've spoken to you before about, our local machine quilting guild having an annual challenge that we call a treasure challenge. And many times it has involved each, contestant, each challenger receiving an unfinished vintage quilt top. But this particular year, each of us received. A little box of vintage quilt blocks that had never been finished into a quilt. And here's the key thing though, you don't get to know what your blocks are till after you've committed. So in other words, you join the challenge, you sign your name up, and then you're given this box in a blind draw, and then you find out what your actual challenge is, which is kind of fun. Anyway, the way that this works is. Each of us were to take those blocks, we could add to them any fabrics that we wanted. We needed to create an original quilt from them, and of course, do the machine quilting. This is after all a machine quilting guild. So that's kind of what it's about. And then. Create a storyboard that has some photographs and some, um, pictures and writeups about the process, right? So shows the transformation and bring finished quilt and storyboard and enter it in our local quilt show. So it's, it's key. there's this deadline that pushes you to get finished and this concrete, okay, here's what I have to work with. Here's where I am today. And here's where I wanna be in nine months. That's how much time, um, I had to put into this. So I'm a little bit sentimental about vintage sewing in general. I always love to imagine the person, usually a woman who had first pieced these quilts that I'm handling. You know, they've been made with little scraps left over from aprons or maybe the good parts that are left of a worn out apron and little boy shorts and little girls' play dresses. And all of that means so much to me. So this isn't just a challenge, but it's also a responsibility to honor her work. So it felt weighty when I first began and I spread out these blocks, I had 26 of them. They were quite small, and I'm sitting crosslegged on my sewing room floor, arranging and rearranging these blocks, and it feels weighty. But I persisted in that moment. Lay them out this way, lay them out that way. Try this, try that. And gradually an idea emerged. I could visualize these blocks arranged in a kind of diagonal sweep on a gorgeous, I pictured an iris colored background. There were snippets of that, mid purple, that gorgeous iris color throughout these blocks. And they caught my eye and I thought, oh, that would be gorgeous, with a sweep of the blocks across that. And I could also visualize diagonal quilting too. And I thought, oh, all that negative space. It could be intricate and gorgeous. But I could also see a real gap between this wonderful picture that I was envisioning and my quilting skills at that moment. So what to do? The one thing I did have on my side was time. I had nine months to level up and I had a deadline of the quilt show date. So that concrete target really nudged me to get serious about bridging the skills gap. I've told a lot of this story in other episodes, so I won't go into it at length here, but summed up. I finished that quilt. I named her Ava, and she hung in the quilt show and even won a ribbon. That whole experience changed me. It was such a clear progression from I don't know what the heck I'm doing to, I did it, and my faith in my ability to do that again grew. Let me give you another example. Five years ago. I knew nothing and I mean nothing about producing a digital on demand course. I didn't know what an opt-in was or a CRM or a lead magnet, and you might not know what those things are either, and that's okay. That's not really what the story's about. But what I did know was that I was passionate about quilting stuff entirely freehand. We call this free motion quilting, and I was pretty sure I could teach others to do it and love it too. But how I was just starting to explore the idea of perhaps traveling and teaching maybe at quilt shows, maybe in stores and quilt shops when bam, spring 2020 and the pandemic arrived, travel was no longer an option. And at the same time, my husband's job disappeared in about a minute. A little like with the AVA Quilt, I could see a possibility recording the classes so they'd be available to all quilters, even at home in the pandemic, and maybe I could even make a living at it. But also like Ava, there was a huge gap between where I stood and having a profitable online business. So there I was with a big idea. But I could see the things I needed to do. One, write the course. Two, film it at a long arm. No easy task, right? Three, edit it. That's a whole nother skill set, which happily my husband, Mr. Producer, took on. Four. Find a platform on which to host it and have students be able to access it and five, market it. So quilters knew it, and I existed and saw its value. That's a lot of new stuff that I didn't know and what I didn't know at the time was that whole experience with Ava was the first small exercise for me in and think capital letters here, how to learn new capabilities. And that success set me up for this new and much larger challenge. Not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to come to some of these realizations about the process of learning new things. Business Coach Dan Sullivan wrote a booklet called The Four Cs Formula. Which I highly recommend, and I've dropped a link in the show notes for you in case you'd like a copy for yourself. And he talks about the four stages of growth, which I had felt, but Dan puts into words so very well. Those four stages are. Courage, commitment, capability, and confidence. When I look back at my Ava quilt journey, I can see this cycle so clearly. First came the courage, the decision to say yes and enter my name in the challenge, despite feeling completely unqualified. Courage isn't the absence of course, of the unknown. It's taking action. Even though next was the commitment showing up at my sewing machine or sitting cross-legged on my studio floor. Even when I was making mistakes, even when I felt discouraged, even when I felt overwhelmed with the quilting, I just kept going because commitment means continuing even when it gets hard. Through that commitment, through the repetition, through the pushing, through the boundaries. That produced increased capability, and I actually learned those skills that I needed. My hands got steadier at the long arm quilting machine. My eye for design grew. As I pursued that, my knowledge got deeper. And finally, after completing the project, I found that I had gained real confidence. Not the fake it till you make it kind, but the earned kind that comes from actual achievement. And that confidence of knowing that I had pressed through, learned the things I wanted to learn, felt so good that produced confidence. And the beautiful thing about this cycle is that it begins to feed itself. The confidence from one challenge gives you the courage to take on the next one. And the cycle starts again. Much like the confidence from Ava set me up for the much greater challenge of establishing a business with online courses. May I suggest that for you too? Knowing these four steps can really keep you steady through the process of learning. You're sewers and quilters, right? You know that feeling of perhaps a new and unfamiliar machine, it feels overwhelming. Like where is that thing in the menu? Why is the thread shredding? Why can't I get good tension? But think through those four steps. You've already demonstrated the courage to start now you need a little commitment to stay with it, keep using it, keep adding to your knowledge, and gradually you find yourself not feeling so overwhelmed. Your capability is growing as you persist in learning those menus, getting the threading path correct, knowing how to get great bobbin tension, et cetera. And this becomes confidence. There's something else that I've found to be pretty essential. In the process of learning a new thing, let's call them permission slips, not the kind your parents sign for your field trips, but really the ones that you need to write for yourself first. You need to give yourself some permission for time. Those nine months that I had with Ava were crucial. Learning does take time. Sometimes it takes sleeping on it. Sometimes it takes conversations with a friend or looking up new ideas on Pinterest, but it does take time. It's not immediate. We often, it feels like we live in an overnight success culture, but real skill development does happen more slowly. It's layer by layer built upon what came before. When was the last time you gave yourself permission to be a beginner? To take the full time, needed to learn something new, a new language, a new craft. A new sport, whatever it may be. It can be difficult as adults to give ourselves permission to be a beginner, to feel like a beginner, to perhaps produce the results. Of a beginner, but that's okay. That's all part of the learning process. And one last thing I want to leave with you, and believe me, I'm preaching to myself here too, but that is to celebrate the gains. Not only the wins, not only the big goals accomplished, but literally the gains, the steps, the progress that we make. I find myself. And I think many self-starters are like this, but I find myself, as soon as I'm finishing one thing, immediately my head has gone into the next thing that I need to be doing. And what happens is I start to live in that feeling of there's more to do. I've got to do the next thing. I've got to move on. I'm never finished. Right? And I have to take myself in hand and say. Take a minute to celebrate, to acknowledge to pat myself on the back, to write down, to tell a friend about the thing that I have done, that I have accomplished, that I have learned the barrier that I did break through today, the video editing that I did figure out, whatever the case may be. I think for the growth of our confidence, it's essential that we take a moment to acknowledge the progress that we've made. The difference between measuring, looking forward at where you want to be, that end result, or looking back over your shoulder at what you've accomplished today, this week, this month, this year is remarkable. If you've never read the book, the Gap and the Gain, also by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, um, I strongly recommend, strongly recommend that book. It is a life changer just in how you view. Your progress and learning new things is all about progress and it's challenging progress, but it's so, so good and the rewards are so great. So this really does all tie back again to the capability and the confidence pieces that we talked about in Dan Sullivan's book about the four C's, and it's so interesting. I love that he calls it the four C's formula. Because the word formula says to me, if you do this and add that, followed by this, you'll get this result. Right? And I think that's true. If you start with the courage, you make the commitment and stay committed, you grow gradually, the capabilities. The confidence comes from that. Those things are always true. They always happen, and that really does hold us steady in the difficult parts of learning new things. So I'm curious, what's your next challenge? What vision are you holding that's bigger than your current skills? Maybe in your craft studio, you're thinking of, um, fully using that fancy embroidery machine that's under a dust cover or indeed, the long arm that currently is kind of a clothing rack, or maybe you're thinking about venturing into free motion quilting on your domestic machine. These are all big learning curves, but very doable and so rewarding. Maybe you are a little like me and you're thinking about creating a digital course or starting a podcast like this one. Maybe you're thinking about publishing patterns or going out and teaching in-person workshops. These may be well outside of your current skillset, but how can you set about. Taking that first step of courage into the new thing, what would that first step look like today? Thanks so much for joining me today. If this episode resonated, I'd love if you would leave a review on any app that you're listening on. Share this with a friend that you think needs to hear it. I'd love to hear too about your new adventure. If you share on social media, tag me at Stitched by Susan. I'd love to rejoice with you. Well my friend, until next time, may your sorrows be patched and your joys be quilted.