I’m sure you’ve heard all the old cliches about not putting off those things that you really want to do.  Well, I’m as guilty as anyone else of this.

I’ve always wanted to be more of a do-it-yourselfer.  I’ve dabbled in it with mixed results over the years, but but I allowed my lack of skills, patience, and time to interfere.  My most hideous lab experiment was when I decided I could certainly re-tile my kitchen floor on my own.  After I pulled up the cheap vinyl flooring some previous owner had laid, I was confronted with a globby mess of tar-like black stuff that needed to be removed from the floor.  I found I could remove it with a putty knife and sandpaper, but it took forever to do even just a square foot.

(This was before YouTube and other sites where I could have learned about technique, tools, and the magical mixture from a bottle that removes that crud.)

Anyway, I gave up, called a local flooring business, and they had the floor cleaned up and tiled in a few hours.

A few decades have passed, and I’ve been building up my courage.  What I know this time is that I need to invest in equipment and in time.  I also need to invest in learning some skills.

It’s funny – usually when you think of someone who is a DIY-er, you think of someone who has had the knack his or her entire life.  It’s not something you typically consider that can be “picked up” later in life.

We see this in all types of learning.  Young people learn to play musical instruments much more easily, while older people, finally realizing their dream to learn to play their instrument of choice, struggle with it.  They know they’ll never have the years of practice they could have racked up if they would have started sooner.  We see young immigrants pick up their new country’s language quickly, while their parents and grandparents struggle, sometimes never becoming comfortably fluent in their adopted language.

So I was curious.  Is it true that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”?  I decided to look into this, and what I found was reassuring.

Dr. Margaret Rutherford over at HuffPost says that sometimes we have to heal our past wounds and forgive ourselves.  Of course, she’s referring to changes people are trying to make while in therapy.  But she has found that older people are more motivated because they have a deeper appreciation for the value of time.  She wrote a little article about it here:  HuffPost50-Rutherford

Another article at Psychology Today indicates that getting the brain interested in doing something new is the key.  E. Paul Zehr cites research involving older participants learning to dance and learning martial arts.  While it’s true that some functions decrease with age, participants not only gained new physical skills, but they also realized some side benefits, such as increased health and improved moods.  You can read that article here:  Teaching An Old Brain New Tricks (And Kicks)

So, to answer the question “Can you teach an old dog new tricks?” the answer is YES!  However, we need to be motivated, committed, and above all, patient with ourselves.