A few years ago I was in London
and I did some outdoor training at a park. After a time, a group of kids came over to try to do handstands and flips and what not.
I ended up briefly working with a couple of them, so I wanted to share this story talking about two kids in particular, and the parallels and lessons we can draw from it.
Let's call the two kids Samantha and Bart. They were both around 8-9 years old.
Samantha looked like she had a couple years of dance or gymnastics classes under her belt, most likely recreational and not competitive. Bart was a bit less athletic and less coordinated in comparison.
So in this short impromptu "coaching session", Samantha was working her aerial cartwheel while Bart was working on a more basic kick up to handstand. I gave them both demonstrations of stuff to work on. She was getting quite close to not putting her hands down while he was struggling with landing on his feet.
Heres the difference between the two of them: Samantha was self motivated while Bart needed external motivation/validation.
Samantha failed often and was not concerned about her failures. I gave her something to do, and she would continue doing it.
Bart would try one or two times, fail, then call me over to have me look at it.
Samantha didn't continuously need my feedback to keep training, while Bart absolutely required it despite not actually following my advice.
Samantha was failing and learning 10 times in the time that it took Bart to try once. I think Bart was more interested in my attention than he was ini actually improving his handstand. At the same time, I think he may have been discouraged by his own failures and Samanth'a higher skill level(not realizing she already put in a couple years of effort).
Anyway, I don't know what happened to these kids as I just ramdomly worked with them for 15 minutes or so as they were walking by in the park with their parents.
Obviously Samantha was more interesting to work with, but it's not because she was working a more advanced trick but because she showed genuiine interest in wanting to improve.
There are a few lesons we can learn from this.
-Self-Motivation. Who/what are you doing it for? If you could only do the thing completely isolated without receiving any attention from others,would you still do it?
-Failure. Does it motivate you to try again or discourage you? Are you able to apply lesson from those failures? Can you "meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same?"
-Comparison. Can you work on your own shit wiithout comparing yourself to others? I often deal with people who are self-conscious because they are beginners. I have a lot of respect for beginners, because the easiest thing to do is what you can already do. Doing something new that you are not good at? That takes some minerals.
-Supervision versus exporation. When you learn something, do you need to be supervised or prefer to explore and develop the concept on your own? If you have followed me for a while you should know I prefer exploration.
-Gymnastics. If you have kids, I recommend they do a couple years of recreational gymanstics between the ages of 5-12. Doesn't matter what skill level they reach. The coordination and body awareness they develop here will stay with them the rest of their lives and offers tons of carryover into other activities.
Ultimately the point of this is not about handstands or gymnastics, but about not being resistant towards learning something new.