I Don't Understand This... Yet: How I've Shifted my Perspective While Working with Technical Complexity

Rejecting limiting beliefs about myself put me in the right mindset to truly be open to learning and growth.

One of the most intimidating feelings I've experienced while working in corporate IT happened while sitting in a meeting room and slowly getting the sinking feeling that I was losing comprehension of the conversation and genuinely had no idea what the team was talking about. Sometimes, when developers get together, conversation can become very technical very fast. Acronyms start flying, buzz words start buzzing, and it sometimes can feel like they are speaking in another language. Adding urgency to the conversation can make things even more incomprehensible, because no one has time to back up a few (or twenty) steps to explain a more complete high-level picture of what we are talking about. 

Attending just a few meetings like this was enough to foundationally shake my confidence in my career path early on. "I can't keep up with this." "I'm so dumb." "I don't get it." "I'm not a technical person." These are a few of the thoughts that would circle through my head.

The latter thought is one that I'd like to unpack a bit here. "I'm not a technical person." This exact same statement came up again not long after, not from my own brain, but from the mouth of a classmate I was working with on a project for my master's degree. We were working on a project in Python, and this person said they could help with the writing and the presentation, but not the coding, because they were not a "technical person."

Only when it came from outside of myself could I recognize how absurd of a statement that was. We were all learning the material, we were all students. No one is born a "technical person" or "not a technical person." No one just has innate knowledge of how to integrate two systems together. Technical knowledge comes from repeated exposure, learning, practicing, diving headfirst into complexity and working to understand it piece by piece. 

I think being successful in a technical pursuit begins first with recognizing that there is going to be a learning curve. Now, when I am faced with a new challenge of understanding a complex technical situation, I don't psych myself out by thinking unproductive thoughts like "I'm not technical enough to understand this." I recognize that yes, I do not fully understand the full landscape of the problem, but that does not mean that I can't. Taking the challenge on step at a time, understanding the bigger picture before getting into the technical weeds, and asking questions helps me prevent the unknown from intimidating me.