Understand Past Struggles and Successes

You learned to ride a bike and to play basketball, but you never did master swimming.  Now you believe it’s time.  So, where do you begin and how do you proceed?

First, think about your history.  Implicitly or explicitly, you learned biking and basketball by preparing, acting, observing, understanding, and adjusting.  Preparation could have involved rigorous study or superficial assembling of necessary equipment; acting could have consisted of brief, infrequent efforts or extended, intensive ones; observing might have been meticulous or undisciplined; understanding, insightful or superficial, and adjusting, minimal or radical changes to what you had tried previously.  Regardless of the precise details, you did prepare, act, observe, understand, and adjust to some extent; if not, you never would have learned to ride a bike or to play basketball.

To master swimming, apply insights that you acquired from earlier mastery experiences.  That means you need to think about the aspects that were easiest and those that were most difficult.  Next, consider which aspects from skills learned in the past apply most directly to the new skill that you wish to acquire.  With regard to biking, a past concern could have been about possibly breaking your leg or of having onlookers giggle as you wobbled erratically passed them. For basketball, perhaps you were afraid of shooting an “air ball” and being booed.  Swimming is not biking or basketball, but maybe you now have a fear of drowning or are embarrassed at the thought of needing to be rescued by the lifeguard.  

Second, reflect on your temperament.  Many dimensions of temperament could be involved, so let’s just consider one: persistence.  Again look to your past.  You had to maintain adequate persistence in order to acquire bicycling and basketball skills, especially if you have been a person who readily withdraws from challenging situations.  Let the lesson from your previous persistence prepare you for your current endeavor.

Third, review your personality characteristics.  For instance, if you are high in the neuroticism trait—trait anxiety—you need to get that under as much control as possible.  If not, you will be too nervous to concentrate and too pessimistic to persevere through the inevitable frustrations and uncertainties that are a part of learning to swim. You overcame your biking and basketball apprehensions, you can overcome your swimming ones.

Fourth and finally, do your best to structure an environment that maximally supports skill acquisition.  Find the place and the people who will make learning as easy as possible.  That means an environment that not only enables you to learn the mechanics of swimming, but that also enables you to apply insights that you have acquired from reflecting on specific features of your history, temperament, and personality.  For instance, if you are particularly fearful of the water and especially self-conscious about learning to swim, you require a place and people that provide extra support to you in those specific need areas.