Becca Faith Yoga

Maybe like me, you’re in the habit of enumerating for the world all the things you suck at (this list is, quite obviously, incomplete):

1. long division & fractions
2. skiing & snowboarding
3. figuring out directions (N, S, E, W business)
4. taking a compliment
5. unplugging myself from my iphone
6. meditating at home
7. wearing high heels
8. driving to new places

But lately I’ve realized that having a go-to list of things I’m not great at is lazy and a bit stupid, and certainly self-deprecating in a not-funny, ego-affirming kind of way.  And I arrived at that discovery by admitting that my list also used to include (among other things):

1. baking from scratch
2. cooking anything
3. reading a map
4. web page-y stuff
5. yoga
6. grammar
7. meditating
8. being a good daughter
9. being a good sister
10. coping with emergent situations
11. being around yucky smells
12. tolerating discomfort
13. keeping plants alive
14. jogging
15. getting shots

Let me be clear: I haven’t mastered every item formerly attributed to the “Can’t Do” list, though I’ve gotten more adept at some things than others.  What I can say for sure is that I’m better than some and worse than most when it comes to items 1-13 above, virtually without exception.

There are plenty of reasons to cement our ideas about what we can and can’t do and sometimes, we might even be right.  But I imagine that, more often than not, we miss out on the opportunity to do something because we fear failure or mediocrity or both.  Maybe we can’t be great at everything, but we’re likely capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. It seems to me that we’re as attached to what we can’t do as we are to what we can and, while that kind of thinking may save us from exposing our ineptitudes to the world, it certainly won’t help us discover the full scope of our awesomeness, either.

What’s on your Can’t-Do List? And more importantly, what’s on your Former “Can’t-Do List” List?