4 min read//
As a neuroplasticity PhD turned leadership and career coach, I often coach clients on how to catch up, keep up, or get ahead of new trends in their field of work. The internet has given us a never ending supply of new things to learn and integrate into our current knowledge and belief systems. Today's new learning materials come in many forms, including blogs, LinkedIn Learning courses, MOOCs, scripts and codes on Github, or open source data sets available from a multitude of sources from all over the world.
You might feel like many of my clients, overwhelmed and unsure about which learning opportunity to take advantage of. Or you might be required to attend learning and development workshops by your employers? The content might feel useful at the time, but as 90% of other learners, you might forget all about the training once you are back in the office, and return to focus on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and looming deadlines.
To help my coaching clients re-frame their learning patterns so they can leverage new information and best practices into enhanced performance outcomes, I came up with the following analogy:
"Learning is to your brain what breathing is to your lungs." - Dr. Mrim Boutla
It feels quite natural to breathe, yet when we are mindful of our breathing, many discover that their natural breathing pattern is shallow and does not lead to peak health and performance. Some spend years to "rewire" their breathing, learning deep breathing techniques that helps them feel less stressed and overall healthier.
In a similar fashion, your brain is constantly making new neuronal connection as a way to learn and inform your decisions by cataloguing and retaining information from your daily interactions with the world. However, what you pay attention to, what you will retain and learn, and how these new pieces of information will be integrated in your memory, and therefore will influence your behavior are build on your learning habits.
These neuronal learning habits are designed to help your brain as it keeps optimizing how you filter the world and makes quick decisions to keep you safe while using the smallest amount of energy possible. Learning, often involves thinking about and behaving in the world from a new perspective that makes our old ways of thinking, speaking, or behaving feel inadequate. These new thoughts and behaviors need to overcome your previous habits, and these processes are energy consumer to your brain. So expensive that our brain continuously builds as many shortcuts, or habits, as possible. So expensive that if something has worked for you for a while, it will be very challenging (but not impossible) to change. For example, if you have gotten away thus far with more traditional learning patterns centered around rote learning, where you cram knowledge to pass the test and promptly forget all about the materials after the test, it might take you a bit more practice to "rewire" your learning.
Forging new learning habits is worth the effort thought as decades of research from neuroscientists such as Mark D'Esposito at UC Berkeley and psychotherapists such as Les Greenberg (Emeritus, York University) have demonstrated that if you combine a few or all of the four factors below, your learning is more likely to reach the integrative depth needed for lasting behavior change:
1) Awareness of relevant and urgent learning need. Your new learning must feel both useful (or relevant) to your current situation and urgent, something you can immediately apply to your work or life. The relevance will help you get started, and the urgency will help you get through the content and integrate your learning into your behavior. For example, learning how to drive on the left side of the road might be an interesting concept that you might be curious about for a time, but might become a real learning goal when you are about to travel and have to rent a car in London. Or learning how to build a pivot table in excel might have been a long term goal of yours, and now that you are taking a graduate course on excel, you have to learn how to build a pivot table to earn a good grade. I believe the combination of relevant and urgent might at least partly explain why only about 5.5% of learners complete the Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOC) they started. They know that knowledge or the new tools they will learn are important, but they might not feel as urgent to learn to keep the learner motivated towards course completion.
2) Access to context-specific material. This takes a deeper dive into the relevant point above. As reviewed by Martin Tessmer and Rita Richey, a number of context-related factors might impede or boost your learning outcomes. One of the key elements is perception of direct applicability of the learning to your current goals and responsibilities. If you do not feel you can relate to the examples or concepts used in the training materials, you will find it more difficult to get through the learning and apply it to your own situation. For example, if you are a marketing person who wants to use new functions in excel, but take a course where all the exercises using these functions are focused on generating financial statements that has nothing to do with your goals. In this case, no matter how engaging the instructor is, you will find yourself finding it difficult to move forward with the course and apply these new functions in the context of your work. Another example would be if you are learning about Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and the course if focused on global health when you are interested in global education. Unless you can draw direct parallels between the global health M&E principles you are learning and the global education M&E methods you want to apply them to, you will find it very difficult to stay motivated in learning these new M&E approaches. However, note that transfer from one learned area to another is different. For instance, if you had learned and applied your M&E skills in global health, transferring them to global education projects later in your journey would become easier.
3) Practice within the safety of a trusted community. As the saying goes, there is no learning in your comfort zone, and no comfort in the learning zone. Learning carries inherent risk, as it requires you to do something new, something that feels more risky than what you are currently doing. And that risk of doing something new stops many people from even trying. Let's say you want to practice speaking up more. You might not want to take the risk of doing so at a junior attendee at the next Board of Directors meeting where your whole reputation might be on the line. Instead, choose "practice opportunities." Maybe you can speak up more first through your participation in affinity groups at work, or by leading a new project at your local community center you volunteer at. Maybe you will also rely on an accountability buddy to help you take the first, and next steps as you practice your new behavior in a safe, trusted community. The gain in competence in these "safer" will enable you to build your effectiveness and scaffold your confidence to riskier environments, all the way to maybe speaking up at the Board of Directors six months to a year from now.
4) Get specific and timely feedforward throughout the process. While feedback might be useful, I like the FeedForward Tool (developed by Marshall Goldsmith) best to help my clients to reach the lasting behavioral change required to achieve peak performance. The Feedforward process leverages your meta-cognitive abilities (i.e. your ability to observe and influence your own learning and growth) to help you prime your brain to suppress your current habits and instead respond to patterns in situations with the new behavior you want to adopt as your new habit. For example, let's say that when you feel you want to bring up a great idea, you have a tendency to interrupt people to share your idea. Your goal is to stop interrupting people as you know it aggravates your colleagues. During a coaching session, you might leverage your meta-cognitive abilities to bring yourself back to the situation, and start revisiting how you felt in that situation. You might identify that it is very difficult for you to stop talking when you feel that distinct tingling of your spine at the base of your neck, or when the energy sparks from your chest and push up to your throat when you have a good point or a idea you want to share. In that situation, you might want to train yourself to redirect this energy from speaking up to writing the idea down. Now commit to that behavior of writing it down every time you feel that impulse of speaking up. Giving yourself more awareness around your triggers, and associating these triggers with new behaviors will help you gain momentum and make progress towards your behavioral change goals.
In sum, identifying relevant and urgent learning goals, leveraging quality and context-relevant learning materials, practicing within a trusted community to gain confidence, and training yourself for feedforward alternatives will increase your ability to gain confidence in integrating the continuous learning mindset required to succeed in 21st Century global workplaces. Happy learning!
Ren Ecosystem