Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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In the last episode, I talked about how our experience at school can have a lasting impact on our experience. For many of us, it shapes us to do well, to get good grades, to avoid punishment because of mistakes and errors. For many of us, we learn to use excess effort and tension to make things perfect. We are guided to focus on other people's standards.

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instead of our own. On this episode, I'll share some advice I received around recalibrating what is my good enough and to aim for B plus work. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show looks at how we are shaped mentally, emotionally, and physically by our environment and what we can do about that.

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When I started this podcast, I felt a lot of anxiety around doing a good job. I had listened to so many podcasts prior that I had my taste shaped by so many other podcasters. Like I knew what a good podcast had to sound like. I knew what it needed to have. And of course I wanted to do a good job with this project. And at the start wanting to do a really good job.

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was overwhelming for me. Like, how do I do all these things? How do I choose the music? Are my scripts and my ideas good enough? Oh, I have to come up with a podcast image. Oh, I gotta do a website. There's technical questions. And as I'm running through all of this, do you feel the stress and the tension too somewhere in your body? Oh, it was...

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It was really hard to move forward having this attitude that I had to do a really good job on everything. It was burning me out. My need to do good work aka get in a hundred on the assignment created an internal barrier for completion. I was judging everything I did too harshly. It was like my mind was making an obstacle course for someone who was a giant much bigger than me.

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and I had to run this course like them, it's like, no, like I'm making this too difficult on myself. I'm making the obstacles too tall and too intimidating. Was this the first time in my life that I had done this? Nope, of course not. I habitually make things more difficult by aiming for a really good outcome that is beyond my reach and creating too much work and internal tension that leads

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to me burning out. So I brought this up with my coaches who were encouraging me to make this podcast. My coaches Autumn Kessler and Sandy Connery encouraged me to aim for a B+. Yeah, that's right. Of course, do a good job, but just aim for a B+. You don't have to aim for the A+, or anything like that. Huh. That made sense to me. Aim for a B+.

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B plus is respectable, no question about it. But I could only understand it intellectually. It was really hard to embody this advice, to own it and apply it to my situation. It was like my imagination revolted. I had so many excuses, but I need to do X, Y, and Z. Like, I can't make a show if I don't do this. My...

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Habits really wanted to assert themselves. My imagination kept inflating the work that I had to do, kept inflating the standard I had to work by. So how do I take this advice, which I like, and begin to embody it? How do I begin to act it out? After sitting with the question for just a little bit, an idea came to me. I had to think it through.

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I had to make new connections by remapping what I think is a good job. Here is what I did. I took a piece of paper and made five rows and labeled them A, B, C, D, and F. And then for the columns, I wrote out the aspects of making a podcast, from content to sound quality to script to music and so forth.

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and at each of the levels, A, B, C, D, and F, I wrote out what these aspects would be at these qualities.

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What would an A for content be? What would be a C for music and so forth? And what became clear was a number of things. When I had thought I had really need music, no, I didn't really need music. I didn't need that at a B plus level. That was like in the A territory, getting music. And to have a few good ideas to talk about was enough. Something that I...

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That was interesting and valuable to other people. That would put me in a B plus area. To have some sort of intro and an outro, that would be good. Yeah, have a good picture of me for the podcast image. That's good enough. Actually, for the podcast image, I took inspiration from one of my favorite podcasts. I'm like, I like that design. It's a good design. I'll do my version of it. And that hit B plus for me.

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Can you guess whose podcast I took inspiration from? And he has since changed his podcast image.

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How long should a podcast be? Well, for me, I thought B plus would be between 10 minutes and 20 minutes. If I tried to do 30 minutes each week, that felt like I was trying to hit A territory. If I was aiming for five minutes, that didn't feel quite enough.

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Okay, what about technology? I had a dedicated microphone already, and a quiet room. Wasn't hundreds of dollars worth of gear, but it was pretty dang good to start. Okay, let's give that a B+. Oh, and I'll do some work to reduce environmental sounds. Great, B+.

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Alright, so when I had mapped all this out, I felt the clarity that came with it. I had a reason for my B+, for all the aspects. I had some reason because I could see what would be reaching for more and what would be reaching for less. I was cultivating my own standard.

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Now you might say, but Jeffrey, come on, a B plus is still not good enough. Right? It's gotta be an A man. All right. Here's the trick. Your B plus improves over time, especially when you do something every week. Like in my case, I'm publishing a podcast every week. So when you're

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making something and finishing something every week, your skills improve. You come up with ideas for tiny improvements bit by bit that improve the whole show. Every time you go full circle you see every aspect of the process and you can't help but get ideas for making tweaks and little improvements. I found in this way

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I could have a kind standard for myself. That, hey, I'm doing OK. It's going to get better every week. Awesome. This is where I am right now. This is my B+. I can't wait for my B+, in six months, in a year. One of the things that emerged for me is that I wanted to write a script for this. That I could think about it throughout the whole week, contribute to the script.

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and then record it in one session. And that felt like a really good way to get to a B plus. And now after doing it for many months like this, I'm now thinking, Oh, well, it'd be nice to flex my improvisational muscles. All right. Let's go from an outline and, and try to go with the flow that way. And I'll slowly be expanding in that way and, and I'll try other things. And that's part of the fun.

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This sort of ongoing experimentation and developing your own kind standard is essential to the awareness through movement process. Generally speaking, in the awareness through movement process, the teacher is not demonstrating what to do, and this runs counter to our general school system approach to education. In school, it's like, here are the facts, regurgitate the facts.

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Can you get all of the multiple choice correct? Can you show that you understand what they are offering? And the Felincrisis Method says, let's turn the tables and have you develop your own internal feeling for the movement, your own internal sense of what is good and what is helpful for you. Then you begin to let those external standards, those external authorities

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diminished and you become more and more guided by your internal authority of what you believe is good and what you believe is worthwhile. Over time you become your own teacher. What am I curious about and how can I steward my own learning? In conclusion, there are diminishing returns for the work that leads to an A+.

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put in that much effort depending on how we approach it. Instead of aiming for best in class, even after you've graduated and we're outside of school, instead of aiming for best in class, try aiming for a B plus, specifically a B plus by your own standards. What I find important is creating and finishing or publishing your creations.

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and then going through the process time and time again, and your B plus will improve.

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Are you curious about learning how to embody this way of thinking in the practice of awareness through movement? You can learn about opportunities to work with me online in both private sessions and group classes by joining my newsletter to get the latest information. The link is in the show notes. Also in the show notes you'll find my brief free guide, The 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldingkrais Method. Alright, here's my final question to you.

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Where are you habitually putting in A plus effort? And is there a way to dial it back to a B plus? How would you map that out?

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Thank you for your attention.