For some people this is an excuse not to start and for others (like me) it’s an excuse to stay in the learning phase without moving on to the doing.  ‘I don’t have any experience’ may be one of the most popular excuses out there – it’s been used for everything from learning to play the piano to travelling to writing a love letter and beyond. Which if you think about it is just a little bit ridiculous because at some point the most famous person in the world had no experience in whatever it is that they are famous for.

Somewhere in our culture it became ingrained in most of us that there’s a time when it’s acceptable to look inexperienced, mostly before 25, and a time when you’re supposed to be past that.  It might have been true when people had only one career and lived in the same town and never went anywhere they hadn’t been going to their entire childhoods, but that’s certainly not reality now.

Technically, the excuse actually is in how you finish the sentence. For example ‘I don’t have any experience therefore I’m not going to do anything’ or ‘I don’t have any experience so I’m going to read another book on the subject.’  Acknowledging your deficiency is one thing, letting it stop you is something else entirely. It would be wonderful if you could arrange apprenticeships for everything under the sun as a means to gain sheltered experience with support and that is certainly an option for some goals.  But others, like traveling alone across Europe, you pretty much just have to prepare yourself in other ways and then do it. Gaining the experience is the experience.

Most things turn out to be made up of smaller components that actually are more familiar.  I don’t have any experience in sales and that has served as an excuse to slow down my progress on some goals as I’ve put some things off until my comfort level adjusted itself through fairy magic or meditation – I didn’t really care which.  But deep down I know that a big part of sales is talking to people and I do have experience in that, lots of it. Another part is knowledge and confidence in what you’re selling, not such a big leap there either.  And the remainder is probably much bigger in my imagination than it is in reality, like so many things.

As I head off to the show this weekend with my brand new credit-card processing machine I’ll be reminding myself that my level of experience on Monday will be about quadruple what it was on Friday, regardless of the money involved.  And at the very least I’ll have done something to stave off Alzheimer’s!

Next week: ‘It has never happened before’

Technorati Tags: common excuses, removing limits