Transitions
I’m currently in the process of learning how to type on a new keyboard layout. Having spent last 30+ years typing on a quality keyboard he’s making it much more difficult to transition to the new layout for me than I expected. I find myself wanting to just abandon the whole idea and move back to what I knew before. And yet I keep coming back to the idea that this new keyboard layout is going to be more efficient and have using more of my fingers than what I have been doing in the past.
I never took a class in how to type so I am self taught and are use maybe three fingers at a time at the most on each hand and yet I know that people can get the use of all four primary fingers and then the thumbs on occasion when typing and get much higher words per minute counts than I ever can when typing. So I thought it would be worthwhile to at least learn how to touch type as opposed to the habits I’ve developed over the years.
But it’s painful.
It’s painful seeing how slow I am when I want to get words out quickly.
I remind myself too much of some of those scenes I’ve seen on TV shows and in movies where somebody is hunting and pecking at the keyboard with their fingers. They don’t know how to type and that feels like me.
These feelings are applicable to any skill we learn or any improvement we try to make in many facets of life. We know the old way works and we know that we can do it so much faster using the old ways. In the book, “Managing Transitions”, William Bridges and Susan Bridges call this space where we experience a dip in productivity the “The Neutral Zone.” Its a time of heightened anxiety, feelings of overload and decreased motivation.
It is also a time where we have an opportunity to make significant changes and recognizing that can increase creativity and foster a lot of new ways of working. We also have to recognize that we knew we were going to be less efficient for a while but that the expectation is that we will ultimately have an increased ability. And, hopefully, also an increased accuracy and speed with the new way we are trying to incorporate. We just have to be patient.
And that’s the really hard part.
The images are from my MBA sketch notes for the Change Management class. You can learn more about the MBA Notebook on this page.
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