It has been a few sessions since I got back to training tennis after 6-month pause. I feel a bit behind and the process is slow. So I ask my coach if we should push it more. But each session goes by, I keep learning all the tiny detail of the basic forehand and backhand. Coach understands me quite well, not just my tennis, but also my personality, I’m a very impatient person. When I start with this new coach, the skills I learned from the last coach were mostly wrong.
The first 10 sessions with him are almost about how to break those habits and to feel what’s right again. When the ball comes, my mind almost instantly activates the old mode, a very clumsy combination of bad gestures put together without any intention behind, of a wrist that flicks too early, of the elbow that flies out. Almost everything needs to revert.
There were times that I held on to something too tightly that it became a problem. How I wanted it to be a certain way, instead of welcoming all possibilities. What I realize is there are different periods of my life in which require a different way of handling it. And to keep moving forward, I had to let go of the old method, and pick up a different approach, which I have yet to know will work. In sport, there is this funny viral saying, “sport is constantly giving up”. And I start to understand it now.
The last 8 years in business is like a tough coach to me. I was carrying a lot of unnecessary luggage that made it impossible to move fast. It is not easy to drop what I’ve already learnt, to let go of the experience and the need to control what I am facing ahead using what I acquired before. The more I let go of what I have collected, of what is wrong, what used to work but not any more from the journey before this, only then I start to feel ready to pick up new things, new thoughts, and move fast.
When I first started a studio I did everything by myself, then I had to unlearn my way as a photographer and hired people. Similar to building my agency, I had to unlearn my way as a creative and hired people. But the most important part of this journey was, I learned to unlearn my idea of how to run a business as I have seen it, like renting a shiny office, going to networking, wearing a nice suit, investing a lot of money in growing a big team … and started to work my way out of a box of wrong ideas about business, to become a true entrepreneur.
During this journey in creative business, I unlearned about the traditional model, traditional way of seeing things, ways that people are doing or even building global empire to figure out my own way. For the last year, I started to shake off all of that and go out as a pure heart without any attachment of the old version.
Last year, I decided to go as one person company, not under the hat of business owner, but just a person with a solution. What I unlearn mostly is an image of myself, sometimes it could be like a boundary itself. It is the fear of how others look at me, I don’t do things half-hearted. And that built up an image about myself that I cannot live up to. I was scared of doing something I am not proud of sharing. But gradually, in the past year, I’ve dropped it totally.
I stopped using social media and attaching myself to any image. It could be very tough, I realized there are a lot of things I once thought were important, turned out to be unnecessary. And one of them was other people’s view towards me, and once I dropped that, I found out what actually mattered.
I was once tied to a rope, even when that rope could be very long. Blindly, I did feel I had all the freedom, but at the end, that rope was still something that controlled me in a way I wasn’t aware of. What I found out on the other side, after releasing the rope, was so beautiful, and once I found how to let go of the rope, I never wanted to go back.
