As easy as riding a bike....

This past weekend, I had the most rewarding experience of teaching my youngest child to ride a bike without training wheels.  Rewarding for the fact that I was in my element of teaching and she was open to me providing her with instruction.  

A few lessons that I was able to appreciate about this successful experience included:

1)      Having patience – I knew that if I pushed her too hard or if I became frustrated, I would simply have scared her away for possibly another year from really giving it a go.  Having patience in this process was instrumental to creating the structure for our achievement and focusing on small marginal improvements along the journey.  Me being patient also allowed her to be patient with herself.

2)      Marginal improvements- accompanied by the willingness of my daughter to learn, we started from the foundation up…keeping her balance with feet off the ground for 3 seconds, 5 seconds etc….all the way to pedalling for 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 20 seconds…you get the idea.  We broke it down to manageable and achievable steps and built from there (partly inspired by this Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQMbvJNRpLE&feature=youtu.be_ )

3)      Positive reinforcment – even for the setbacks.  Our hour (yes, it only took an hour), was filled with high fives, and dances after falls (we like Taylor Swift's ‘Shake it off’) to embrace this ongoing journey of learning.  With every fall, there were acknowledgements of what went well and what we could do different next time.

With this recent experience, I have started thinking about all my interactions, professionally or personally, that I can apply the same principals to.  Patience comes with self-acknowledgement that we all started from somewhere.  From standing to walking to running…we too made marginal improvements as we grew.  And the last part…not always one that is available externally, but positively reinforcing our beliefs that we are continuing to grow AND objectively looking at what we can improve on.

This moment of getting my daughter to become an independent bicyle rider, has already resulted in us planning biking trips around the province of Ontario.  There will be falls and some of them, like this weekend will be hilarious….but as her coach, I will have to stifle that laugh and let her ‘Shake it off’ and jump back on.  Now to apply this to other aspects of my life that I am not so patient with…..as easy as riding  bike.