Three weeks ago. Empty car park. Me on a scooter, my partner watching.
We’d been at this for a while — straight lines, right turns, tighter turns, left turns for the first time. I didn’t fall. I was even starting to feel something close to confident.
And yet I almost quit this week.
The scooter, my Spanish, the strength I’m rebuilding for a muscle up — all stuck in the same stage right now. Past beginner. Nowhere near natural. The least rewarding stage, because the gap between where you are and where you want to be is most visible.
You can see the shape of competence from where you’re standing. You just can’t reach it yet.
Today in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ A small reframe that makes the awkward middle stage less painful
✔️ One question to ask yourself when progress feels invisible
✔️ Why your brain dismisses the wins the moment they happen — and what to do about it
Doable ideas 💭
Keep a one-line note on your phone of what you couldn’t do three months ago.
Not a journal. Not a habit tracker. One line. The version of you from twelve weeks back, and the thing that used to be hard.
Mine right now: “couldn’t do a kick-up handstand.”
I read it before my workout. Warmed up, set up the camera, kicked. Checked the footage. Celebrated.
Your brain will tell you nothing’s changing. The line — and the video — tells the truth.
Reflections 🪞
Where in your life are you currently in the awkward middle — past beginner, nowhere near natural — and what would change if you decided that stage was the whole point, not something to get through?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Before every scooter session, a small part of me wants it to be done. Not just done with practice that day. Done with the whole thing.
“You’re 30-something. You should be better at this by now. Your partner learnt it at 15. What are you even doing.”
Classic comparison thief. Quietly doing its work.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since.
The awkward middle stage isn’t a stage you pass through on your way to being good. It IS being good. It’s where the actual learning happens. The beginner stage is mostly novelty and adrenaline. The natural stage is mostly maintenance. The middle is where the brain is doing the hard, unsexy work of building the pathways.
It feels terrible because it’s supposed to.
A client I worked with last week had a stroke three months ago. He’s relearning how to coordinate his right hand. We do rhythmic patterns together — me on the keyboard, him on a drum. Simple stuff. Two beats, pause, two beats. He got frustrated halfway through. Said something I haven’t been able to shake.
“I used to type 80 words a minute. Now I can’t hit a drum twice in a row.”
And I said — without really thinking — “yeh, but two months ago you couldn’t hit it once.”
He stopped. Sat with it. Then nodded.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about the awkward middle. Your brain is wired to scan for the gap — the distance between where you are and where you want to be. It’s not wired to scan for the distance you’ve already covered.
Which means progress, by default, is invisible to you. Unless you deliberately make it visible.
This is why I’m so suspicious of “trust the process” as advice. It’s true. It’s also not enough. The process is asking you to trust something your brain is actively hiding from you. You need a structure that makes the change legible.
My Spanish is the same. I can hold a 15-minute conversation now. Clunky, slow, full of mistakes — but a real conversation. Six months ago I couldn’t order burritos without rehearsing the sentence three times in my head. And yet most days I stare at my partner blank-faced because he uses a subjunctive form I haven’t met yet.
The gap is always going to be visible. That’s not a bug. That’s what learning looks like from the inside.
The scooter, the Spanish, the strength rebuild — all teaching me the same thing in different languages. You don’t get to skip the middle. You don’t get to be good without being mediocre first, for longer than feels reasonable.
What you can do is stop measuring against the natural-stage version of yourself who doesn’t exist yet, and start measuring against the beginner version who actually did. That’s not motivation. It’s just honest accounting.
Anyway. Back to the car park this weekend. Tight turns again.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
A real choice costs something. It costs discomfort, which is why most of us avoid it. It requires trade-offs that feel like small deaths. It builds or destroys momentum in ways you won’t fully understand until years later when you’re trying to explain to someone how you ended up here. It either honors or betrays your self-respect, and you can feel the difference in your body even when you can’t articulate it in words.
– Stepfanie Tyle, Bad Girl Media
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