I’ve never been good at [ some subject ]

I’ve heard these phrases a plethora of times:

” [some subject] just isn’t my subject…”

“I was never good at [some subject] …”

or if not that there’s always:

” I can’t learn this way. “

” I need images, I can’t read books”

” I can’t listen well, I need it to be written “

These are all pretty equally popular, I’m sure 9/10 people have said it at least once, I recall saying it at least one myself,  but that was before I really started learning about neuropsychology and really starting to grasp at the brain’s potential to learn, expand, adapt, and rebuild. I am not totally blemishing the statements above, they can be relatively true. My problem is the fact that we state  that we aren’t good at [some subject] and we do not do anything about it. So it seems that these phrases are being used as  suppressors of the problems.

Surprisingly I’ve  heard the same statements from people who are overweight. In a recent test drive in a Mini Cooper, a woman told my girlfriend and I that she was fat and could barely fit in the car, I smiled awkwardly for half a second, (not knowing if this was the proper micro-expression to use and if  I should be thinking of making any one at all),  then I just thought to myself, is that how she deals with it? By quickly eliminating the elephant she believed was in the room, (I could care less but of course my brain had already labeled her in terms of weight), it seems that she provided closure and now we could resume the test drive without just thinking it internally and/or  having to feel, unconsciously, more courteous than usual. Yes I am saying people tend to be naturally more polite when the person is disabled, elderly, or in this case overweight.  Even though, we were still more courteous than usual, she seemed to be more comfortable with herself. Ok with exercising  her right to wiggle herself into comfortability with us all explicitly aware that she was in her words, “a fat woman”.

So the conclusion here is the fact that when we start to accept our faults and we stop making plans to progress in those areas we put a cap on our abilities. This is devastating since we could prevent  this anti-progessive act by simply rebuilding. If you aren’t good at math, take it back to step 1.In a recent article about math learning disabilities in teens and adults, I read that the problem almost always occurs early on in the learning development process. So as we are building these foundational blocks of knowledge on the subject, we often don’t get the adequate attention to help in some our problem spots as they are created, this void not only sits empty but it blocks the brain’s understanding of furthering topics.

For example if I showed you 10*10 and you didn’t know how to count, nor did you know what that asterisk meant, then you wouldn’t know how to even go about solving this problem. It doesn’t make you stupid it just means you need to rebuild what is missing before you go on. The problem is that too many students miss parts(axioms, procedures, functions, theory) of math that are links to learning other parts of math and those other parts are almost impossible to teach otherwise. (That is why prerequisites exist.)

So we must find our weak spots in whatever we seem to be weak at and approach it, find the underlying problem. We need to not satisfy our brains with statements that avoid learning and make it ok to be weak in any given subject, but instead we need to not accept that we will always be weak at anything. We have to stop creating mental blocks by saying I can’t do this, this way, only this way and find out each way to do it and build on those foundational problem solving skills. If you struggle with Geometry go back to basic math and find the void and fill it with the knowledge you missed out on. If you are overweight the problems maybe more apparent right? (dieting and exercise) But usually it’s you the person, you need to obtain self control before you can go on a diet. Before self control you may need to rebuild your habits and let go of unnecessary ones. Sometimes we need to go all the way to our Beginner’s Guide to move forward again. The reward absolutely outweighs the sacrifice, it’s more than worth it and if even a 3rd of people thought more like this, we’d have a more progressive world. Stay progressive, my friends.