You're listening to LifeKid from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's MaryL.

There are some life skills that were told were supposed to learn as kids.

But then you get to adulthood and you realize you never did learn how to ride a bike

or to light a match without burning your fingers or to swim.

That's true for me in swimming.

I took lessons as a kid, but I somehow never got the hang of it.

I always felt like water was going up my nose and there was moving through quick sand.

And now if I try to swim, I feel like I get nowhere.

That is hard and a little embarrassing.

And that shame can make us put up walls.

Like, I'm not good at this.

Why am I mother?

Colin Jones told me he gets it.

Like once you start to build that thought process that you're not good at something,

it tends to become real.

Jones nearly drowned when he was five.

And then he went on to swim in two Olympics, win four medals and become the first African

American to hold a swimming world record.

And one of the things that I think we need to do as a society,

when especially around water, is stop feeding into that thought process.

If you're an adult and you don't know how to swim or don't know how to swim well,

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