Giving Potential to a Second Chance

During my freshman year of college, I enrolled in a communications course that was taught by a professor who was known throughout campus as the one to avoid. Rumors circulated that it was nearly impossible for anyone to earn an A in her classes with most students just barely passing with a C. Previous victims warned, “Don’t sign up for anything she teaches! Over half of our class dropped out by the end of the semester!”

As someone who had not given his full potential during high school, when I became more focused in college, I became more willing to take on new challenges. In fact, sometimes I even welcomed such opportunities. So even though I was warned before signing up, I enrolled anyway. I know there are many of us who probably dread the idea of giving presentations or speaking aloud in a classroom with everyone’s eyes fixed like radars on you. I was no exception. Throughout the years I’ve improved my public speaking skills, but at the time, I would easily become diaphoretic, stutter with periods of freezing mid-sentence, and feel my heart palpitating to the point that I could hardly catch my breath. It was a miserable experience.

During one of our formal presentations for the course, I barely got through it with a passing grade. After that, my anxiety over the thought of having to do more got the best of me, so I added to the professor’s track record and became one of her many fallen students.

As the semester went by, I still reflected on my performance and thought about why that presentation had pushed me into a fearful corner. As I carefully thought about it, I realized that my stumbling blocks had been two things: fully being prepared and lack of faith (or confidence) in self. It’s important to emphasize here that both stumbling blocks were things I had control over. My professor had given us the correct tools, everything from developing a solid speech to lots of practice with the delivery. I’ll admit, I barely had a sufficient outline and certainly had not practiced enough. Aside from that, I was certainly lacking confidence, largely due to hating the sound of my own voice. This developed from having a speech impediment when I was very young. I know I had improved with how I spoke, but sometimes I’d slip up, mispronounce something, or stutter, and that would always make me overly self-conscious and not very confident. As it turns out, I learned that one needs to be quite attentive to how he or she speaks when it comes to delivering a message to an audience, so since I was already prone to focus on that, it was an internalized strength (I just needed to learn how to use it properly). The past wasn’t something I could go back and change but striving to improve and become more confident with my skills was something I did have control over.

The next semester, I enrolled in another course taught by this same professor. During our first scheduled class together, she approached me with a cordial smile and said, “It’s nice to see that some people are actually brave enough to come back.” I had returned not because I was brave or trying to make a point. I was coming back because I knew I could learn a lot from this brilliant teacher. And I certainly did. There were days after class when I would go to her office to work through a speech or analyze a piece of writing I was working on, and she would ask me to read certain lines again, revise sentences, mark off blocks of text, and sometimes start all over. She’d wait patiently for me to rewrite directly on the page, re-read again, and then revise again. It was rigorous, but honestly, she opened my mind to a whole new way of understanding and feeling language. If I was willing to show up during her office hours, she was more than willing to provide some extra guidance and knowledge. My previous teachers had neither spent the time nor provided the necessary push, oftentimes to the point of frustration and feeling like the work was never going to be finished. Looking back, I probably didn’t appreciate it then as much as I do now, but I knew something positive was happening in those moments. Allowing this second chance to take place allowed me to invest in my full potential.  

Sometimes our first experience is met with unprecedented challenges, and if we are only focused on that, the experience can be perceived as negative. Despite there still being value, we might fail to see that value because our initial interactions make us feel uncomfortable, even scared to the point that our limbic system overrides all logic, and we quickly remove ourselves from the source that caused it. There are traces of our past that are sometimes frontloaded in our consciousness, while others are perhaps more subconscious. They might be traumatic experiences or just very uncomfortable ones, such as my childhood struggle with speech. For instance, there were numerous instances when my peers would point out that I sounded funny whenever I spoke in class. Maybe this stuck with me as I got older and the idea of speaking aloud in front of others triggered the emotional centers of my brain such as the amygdala, further ramping up my sympathetic response to flee from the provocative factor.

Regardless of the case, when an attempt at something the first time goes wrong, it can be intimidating to jump back into the game. But if one doesn’t try, the result is an overall bad experience. Choosing not to give something at least a second chance is accepting failure or wrongfully assuming that it wasn’t meant to be. It’s true, some things aren’t meant to be. Some things we can’t be as successful on as others. But when you’re willing to give something a second chance that you know has enrichening value, you’re much better going for it versus settling for, that one time I tried this but got nowhere or nothing in return. Call me ridiculously optimistic, but I believe we can all gain something from even the messiest of experiences if we are just willing to see it through.  

As another example, last September I had the honor to take part in my first ever pilgrimage to Scotland. Our group hiked along the Scottish borders into Northumberland, following the path of St. Cuthbert’s Way. I could expand in detail about this incredible journey, but I’ll save that for another entry. For now, I’ll simply state that our group of ten bonded quite nicely. We kept the mindset of enjoying this spiritual journey as a whole and would periodically look out for each other along the way. We were all there for different reasons, but the journey itself was not individualistic.

Leading our hiking group through most of the trip were our pastor and her husband. During an evening conversation about one of our days, the two of them shared how much they were enjoying this particular trip. It wasn’t the first time they had hiked St. Cuthbert’s Way. Quite some years before our journey, they had traveled along this same route with a different group. On that trip, they shared with us several challenges that had occurred: a group member badly injured one of her ankles and had to be transferred off the trail; there were multiple long hiking days of torrential rain where everyone ended up soaked and shivering; most days were overall cloudy, windy, and cold; and at one point half of the group got separated and lost. As can be imagined, it wasn’t as enjoyable as they had hoped. Years after that, when the time came for our pastor to facilitate a pilgrimage through our church, she and her husband discussed the idea of returning to Scotland and Northumberland to hike St. Cuthbert’s Way again. If I recall correctly, she specifically told us that they both talked about this notion of a second opportunity. As it turned out, we were blessed with nearly perfect weather throughout most of the seven-day hike, no one was injured, and no one got separated. Having been faced with more challenging circumstances the first time could’ve led to their decision to pick another destination for a spiritual journey. I think we are all glad that wasn’t the case. Instead, giving room for a second chance resulted in positive memories and associations with details that might have been overshadowed the first time around.

If something isn’t seen or felt for its full potential the first time around, don’t always assume that it’s not worth a second chance. There is always a possibility that some things aren’t, but then there is the likelihood that you’ll capture things from a different perspective, walk away with a new appreciation, and gain a useful source of knowledge the second time around.

So, cheers to bringing on a second opportunity.