Nobody Learns to Swim Beside the Pool

You can study swimming for years. Breathing, body position, stroke mechanics, buoyancy, technique. You can watch Olympic swimmers and become impressively knowledgeable about what good swimming is supposed to look like.
But eventually, you have to get in the pool.

It's a question I get asked constantly, and after many years of teaching hypnosis I've noticed something about the people who ask it. Some people take a course and start doing hypnosis. Other people take a course and then take another course. And then another. Before long, they’ve accumulated certifications, techniques, books, videos, seminars, online training, and more information than they could possibly put into practice.

But somehow, they still haven’t really started.

That’s where things get interesting, because learning can become one of the most sophisticated forms of procrastination. It feels productive, and often it genuinely is productive. But it can also provide a wonderfully respectable way of avoiding the moment when you actually have to do something.

Nobody questions you when you say you’re studying, preparing, researching or improving your skills. All of that sounds completely sensible. The problem begins when preparation quietly becomes a permanent state and you find yourself endlessly standing beside the pool.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a lifelong learner and always have been. I’ve spent my entire adult life studying hypnosis, communication, psychology, martial arts, personal development and all sorts of wonderfully strange things. I love learning, and I have no intention of stopping.

There are still books I want to read, people I want to learn from and ideas I want to explore. Learning keeps life interesting. It opens doors and prevents us from becoming stale or overconfident. But learning is supposed to lead somewhere.

There’s a huge difference between learning because you’re curious and growing, and learning because you’re afraid to begin.

I’ve met people who know an astonishing amount about hypnosis but hardly ever hypnotize anyone. They can discuss inductions, suggestibility tests, deepeners, phenomena, language patterns and therapeutic approaches in great detail. They know the terminology, the methods and perhaps even the history.

Yet when it comes to actually sitting down with another person and doing hypnosis, they hesitate. That’s because despite all their learning, they aren’t hypnotists. They’re fact collectors.

They need one more technique, one more certification, one more training that will finally make them feel ready. Then perhaps another one after that, just to be sure.

The trouble is, they may never feel ready.

Readiness isn’t always something that arrives before action. Very often, it develops because of action. You start doing the thing, discover that you can survive your own mistakes, learn what works, and gradually become more confident because you now have evidence that you can actually do it.

At some point, competence stops coming primarily from learning more and starts coming from experience.

You have to work with real people. You have to try things, notice what happens, make mistakes, adjust and try again. You need those wonderful sessions when something works far better than you expected, because they teach you what you’re capable of. You also need the occasional session where absolutely nothing seems to happen and you’re left thinking, “Well, that was interesting.”

Those sessions teach you something too.

Real practice gives you things that no course can completely provide. People don’t always respond the way the textbook says they should. They surprise you, misunderstand you, react in unusual ways or suddenly produce something you weren’t expecting. Sometimes they respond brilliantly to something you thought was rather ordinary. At other times, your favourite technique goes absolutely nowhere.

That’s when you stop merely repeating what you’ve learned and begin developing judgment.

You start noticing the person in front of you rather than mentally leafing through your training manuals. You become more flexible. You improvise. You trust yourself a little more. That kind of skill only develops when you’re actually doing hypnosis, just as balance and confidence in the water only develop when you’re actually swimming.

There comes a point when another ten hours of training may teach you less than one hour spent actually doing the thing.

This certainly isn’t confined to hypnosis. People do exactly the same thing with coaching, therapy, writing, public speaking, business, fitness and almost everything else. They’ll start when they know a little more, when they’re more confident, when circumstances are better or when they’ve got another qualification.

Then one day they look around and realize five years have gone by and they’re still standing beside the pool.

Maybe we’ve got the relationship between confidence and action backwards. We tend to imagine confidence as something we must possess before we start, as though it’s an admission ticket we need before we’re allowed to participate. But perhaps confidence is more often the result of starting, struggling a little, learning from what happens and slowly discovering that we can actually handle it.

You don’t need to feel like an expert before you begin.

In fact, you probably won’t.

Think about almost anything you’re genuinely good at. You probably weren’t very good when you started. If you were anything like the rest of us, you may have been fairly terrible. You did it badly, then a little less badly, then reasonably well. Eventually your movements became smoother, your decisions became faster and you stopped having to consciously think about every little piece of the process. Somewhere along the way, almost without noticing, you became competent.

Then one day you realized you were actually pretty damn good at it.

That progression is easy to forget once you’ve developed a skill. We look at competent people and see the finished product, but we don’t usually see the awkward first attempts, the mistakes, the uncertainty or the countless little corrections that produced the ability.

A good swimmer looks completely at home in the water. The movements seem natural and almost effortless. But that ease came from countless hours in the pool, not from standing on the deck thinking about freestyle.

Nobody learns to swim by standing beside the pool, no matter how many books on swimming they’ve read. You can understand buoyancy, breathing, stroke mechanics and hydrodynamics perfectly, but eventually the theory has to meet the water.

Nobody becomes a writer simply by studying writing, and nobody becomes a hypnotist simply by studying hypnosis.

Knowledge matters enormously. Good training can save you years of confusion and bad habits, and a great teacher can completely change the way you understand a subject. I’m certainly not suggesting that people stop learning.

So keep learning. Read the books. Take good courses. Find excellent teachers and spend time with people who are better than you are. Stay curious for the rest of your life, because curiosity keeps the mind alive and prevents competence from turning into complacency.

But watch carefully for that subtle point where learning stops being preparation and starts becoming protection. Ask yourself whether you really need another course right now, or whether “one more training” has become a wonderfully convincing excuse for not getting started.

Ask yourself what would happen if, instead of buying another program, you took the knowledge you already have and actually used it for the next thirty days. Work with people. Practice. Pay attention. Make corrections. Learn from what actually happens rather than from what you imagine might happen.

You may discover that you’re much more prepared than you thought.

And perhaps the question isn’t always, “Who should I train with next?” Sometimes the better question is, “When am I going to start using what I already know?”

Because sooner or later, you have to stop standing beside the pool.

Sometimes you just have to get in and swim.