get (one's) feet wet

To try or start something. I'm confident that you'll be able to drive a stick shift—you just need to get your feet wet first. Anyone can cook, including you! You just need to get your feet wet and build up your confidence. Plenty of aspiring actors get their feet wet in TV commercials and build up their résumé that way.

get one's feet wet

Embark on a new venture, start into new territory. For example, I've only had a few cello lessons-I've barely gotten my feet wet. This expression alludes to the timid swimmer slowly getting into the water. [Late 1500s]

get one's feet wet, to

To venture into new territory. The allusion here is to the timid swimmer who is wary of getting into the water at all. Although this particular expression dates only from the early twentieth century, a similar idea was expressed more than four hundred years earlier by John Lyly in Euphues and his England (1580): “I resemble those that hauing once wet their feete, care not hoe deepe they wade”; in other words, once having gotten up one’s nerve to try something new, one is more willing to plunge in all the way. In The Glorious Fault (1960) Leonard Mosley combined two metaphors: “In parliamentary life, he [Curzon] was to be one who stayed to get his feet wet before deciding that a ship was sinking.”