Swimming Lessons: It's OK to Doggie Paddle

I recently started taking swimming lessons and my instructor is amazing. She is a mom of 5 kids and she glides through that water like she is on vacation at a resort. So I am going to listen to her when she tells me to take my swimming effort down a notch. She needs to remind me I am not going to the Olympics a shocking amount of times given the fact that I still need to use a paddle board to practice my kicking.

I decided to get swimming lessons because I absolutely love to be in the water and one of the best ways to be in the water, if you don’t own your own pool, is to do laps. And to do laps, you kind of need to know how to swim correctly. One of the hardest parts of swimming for me is figuring out how to breathe. I get flummoxed when I am doing the crawl. Stroke, Stroke, Stroke, breathe. Stroke, Stroke, Stroke, breathe. Sometimes I swallow water or I don’t get enough air or I just panic for no particular reason. When this happens, my instructor has taught me how to calm down. Her suggestions include that I doggie paddle for a bit or do the breaststroke (which is my favorite), or just move. Just get to the other side. And do it slowly and calmly. The pool feels like a sanctuary for me. I don’t need to turn it into a race track.

I love it when people, like my swim instructor, point out the obvious to me and they help me see things I hadn’t considered. Of course I can move into an easier stroke part way through a lap – what rule was I following that made me think otherwise? I also love when I am able to offer this to my clients. It is a reminder for all of us that we sometimes need to get out of our own heads.

And this is where my LinkedIn training Beyond the Profile comes in. When I developed this training, I was reacting to my clients who were doing the equivalent of swallowing water or panicking or not getting enough air. They were making LinkedIn harder than it has to be. There is an easier way.

Here are some of my LinkedIn tenets:

-Your LinkedIn does not have to be perfect to be useful

-Comparison to others is a distraction. Stay in your own lane (see what I did here??)

-Meet yourself where you are at as you gain confidence engaging on LinkedIn

Just like I can treat the pool like a race track or a resort, you can interact with LinkedIn like it is a competition or a community. The answer is not always speed, force or pain. We can move forward with grace and calm and intention. We don’t need to make things harder. It’s ok to doggie paddle to get to the other side.