What are You Not Learning, Afraid to be Seen Learning it?
I watched someone practice guitar in a living room last weekend, windows wide open to the street. They'd been playing for three months and sounded exactly like someone who'd been playing for three months — which is to say, terrible. The neighbors could hear every missed chord, every fumbled transition, every moment where the music stopped and started again like a car that wouldn't turn over. The guitarist didn't care. They were too busy learning.
Here's what stopped me cold — this person had solved a problem I didn't even know I had. Years ago, I used to record voice memos in my closet like some kind of audio vampire, terrified my half-formed thoughts might escape into daylight. They'd simply opened the windows and gotten on with the business of being bad at something.
This is the thing about embarrassment — we think it's protecting us from something real, but mostly it's protecting us from something we made up. We've constructed this elaborate theater where other people are the audience and we are forever auditioning for a role we don't even want. The part of flawless "Mr. Perfect", who struts out of the womb fully competent, ready to deliver a TED Talk on life mastery, never had to learn anything, never struggles, never fumbles, never has to start over, never looked stupid while figuring it out.
Someone once told me that the biggest barrier to growth isn't lack of talent or opportunity — it's the fear of being witnessed in our incompetence. They weren't talking about a character flaw. They were naming the fundamental choice between performance and transformation. You can spend your whole life perfecting what you already know, or you can step into the territory where you don't know anything yet. The territory where you look exactly like what you are: a novice.
Most of us choose performance. We write our novels in secret. We start businesses we never tell anyone about until they're already successful. We practice our skills in private until we're good enough to not look foolish. We think this is maturity, but it's actually a sophisticated form of hiding.
The problem isn't just that we miss out on feedback, though we do. The problem is that we never develop the capacity to exist in the space between stories — between where we are and where we're going. We never learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable while other people watch. We stay small not because we lack ambition, but because we lack the tolerance for being seen in our unfinished state.
I think about the writers whose novels live forever in drawers, waiting to be "good enough". The entrepreneurs whose brilliant ideas die in the safety of never being tested. The people who suffer alone rather than ask for help, because asking means admitting they don't have it figured out. They're all protecting the same precious, impossible thing — the illusion that competence comes before action, that we transform in private and then unveil ourselves, fully formed.
But that's not how anything works. Not change, not learning, not belonging. We become ourselves in relationship to other people's eyes, other people's feedback, other people's witness to our stumbling. The embarrassment isn't the enemy of the process — it's the system working exactly as designed.
When we're embarrassed, we're in the exact place where growth lives. We're pushing against the edges of who we think we are. We're discovering that our self-image is smaller than our actual capacity. The discomfort isn't telling us we're doing something wrong; it's telling us we're doing something new.
This requires a different relationship with failure, with looking foolish, with being seen before we're ready. It requires understanding that the person who has it all together is also the person who has stopped growing. That polished competence and active learning are actually incompatible states.
The fear of embarrassment masquerades as concern about other people's judgment, but it's really about our own attachment to being someone who doesn't need help, doesn't make mistakes, doesn't have to start over. It's about the violence we do to ourselves when we insist on being experts and refuse to be beginners.
When you stop protecting that image, you start to discover what you're actually capable of. Not the safe, manageable version of your capabilities, but the true ones — the kind that emerge when you're willing to be awkward, to ask stupid questions, to try things you might fail at.
The people who grow fastest aren't the most talented. They're the ones who can tolerate being witnessed in their incompetence — the ones who can stumble publicly and somehow make it look intentional. They've made peace with the gap between their vision and their current skill level. They've learned that embarrassment isn't just the price you pay for growth — it's the cover charge for entering any room worth being in.
So the question isn't how to avoid embarrassment. The question is — what becomes possible when you stop letting the fear of looking foolish keep you from the very thing that would make you less foolish? — What are you not learning because you're afraid to be seen learning it?