Thoughts on Learning
Despite the power of experiential learning, there is still a necessary deliberate learning practice that must accompany our processes.
A Life-Long Process
It never ends. From the second we are born to the moment we die, we have the ability to learn. In the beginning, it’s easy. We don’t really have a choice. Life comes at us fast and the first 25 or so years are spent frantically trying to figure it all out. After that, we’re still frantic, but for different reasons. Those reasons, aka the stresses and challenges that make up the adult experience, have the capability of distracting us from the once natural process of learning.
Once we hit adulthood, the difference maker when it comes to learning, is how much of it happens from the osmosis of experience versus from a deep intentional, aware, and reflective to that experience.
For the sake of tying these thoughts into my current attempt at adulthood, I’ll use the example of selling my apartment. Clearly, there is a lot to learn in this process (likely why there feels like 10 different people involved at all times). Yet if I look back at the 7 years of life since buying the home, it’s actually quite difficult to stomach how much learning I’ve missed out on, when it comes to buying, owning, and selling a home.
Quick aside: We won’t get into how much learning I missed out on in general so as to avoid my own temporary depression.
Looking back, I have experienced plenty in regard to buying, owning, and selling a home. Some immediate things that come to mind include a negotiation process, a closing, a couple of failed refinances, challenges with the building, insurance claims, and now the early stages of selling. I have seen the market go up. I have seen it go down. Naturally, through these experiences, I have a better understanding of what buying and owning a home is like, much like I would think anyone should. Having this experience and going through this events taught me, sure. But did I really learn?
How much more could I have taken from these experiences with a deeper sense of curiosity? As a buyer, did I learn enough about the market? Did I delay gratification of having a new home long enough to ensure I knew about the building I was moving into or the future plans for my new neighborhood? You could argue that these things are typically the job of my realtor but how much did the strength of that learning suffer from leaning on that crutch?
Now as a seller, I look back and see how little I knew of what the person on the other side of the contract was going through. Never once did I question why they were selling. Never once did I feel it necessary to learn about their experience and seek to understand their perspective. And here I am, a beginner. Forced to start from scratch. Not the worst thing in the world, but how much energy could I have saved with a bit more deliberate effort to learn from the first go-round?
An Important Choice
As I go through the process of selling a home and eventually buying a new one, the thoughts coming to my mind most prominently surround this notion that we can choose to learn or we can learn from the sidelines of experience. What will I decide to learn this time? What will I skip over in pursuit of more immediate gratification?
Zooming out, I recognize how important learning is to my growth and maturation process as an adult. I can’t help but to try and sort through how my own approach to learning and what I could be doing to absorb more from my experiences.
Life Lesson Alert!
Learning is a choice.
We can choose to sit back and learn ancillary to experience or we can choose to deliberately partake in experiential learning. There is a huge difference.
One way is, without a better word, lazy. Sitting back and letting life come at us, hoping to simply grow along the way is the immature and lazy approach to being an adult. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Anyone claiming that they don’t have time to learn is bullshit.
The other way is a bit more intentional. We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, some irony.
We often hear the term, “Learn the hard way.” This cliché is typically used to justify the benefits of making a mistake or having an undesirable experience. As the experience ends up being the thing that teaches us. In fact, without any reflection, accountability, or critical analysis of the consequences, learning from a shitty experience can be the easy way.
We must choose learning the hard way and actually take the time and energy to understand ourselves and our environment as a result of the experiences we encounter.
Experiential Learning vs. Learning From Experience
Pulling from the concept of Experiential Learning of students, the way adults can choose to learn is quite similar. In thinking about my own way of learning, I am constantly trying to bring awareness to when I choose to sit back and allow life to teach me (less effective) and when I make a deliberate effort to better understand myself, through my experiences (more effective). This effort, as I am thinking about it today, seems to take on four core components: Initiative, Activity, Awareness, and Reflection.
Initiative
While life will inevitably toss experiences at us, the initiative we have in how we pursue those experiences is core to the learning process. Do we experience automatically? Do we let the system guide us and allow for things to happen by default? Or are we conscious about our experiences? Are we leveraging past knowledge and current situations to pursue experience mindfully?
The deliberate approach to learning involves conscious experiences where we are making decisions, knowing that we willingly take accountability for the results. Blame yourself or blame no one, right?
Let’s go back to the example of selling my home. The best way to understand how we will ultimately learn is by asking questions about the drivers of our initiative and continuing to do so as initiatives compound.
What is driving the decision to sell? Emotion? Logic? A ridiculous cash offer (I wish). Once the decision is made to sell, what role will we play in the process? Will we choose to consciously make the home feel livable for those coming to see it? Will we take the time to understand the market and know what price and time makes sense for when we are selling? Will we do the work to know what the outcome will be in different scenarios and what expectations to set?
Of course, like any initiative, we could lean on the crutch that is the expert. We can put our learning (or lack of learning) path in someone else’s hands.
Will we be surprised when things don’t go our way? Will we screw ourselves out of the strength that knowledge builds to make the next sale even easier?
The purpose of these questions is to ensure that our initiative is setting us up to learn from the activity.
Activity
This is a quick one as you actually have to do SOMETHING to both attain and apply knowledge. The activity or experience itself is clearly a centerpiece of the learning cycle. I am adding it here simply to not skip a step. The key component of the activity, however, is of course…
Awareness
As an experience or activity unfolds, how aware of it are we? How aware of ourselves as the participant are we?
Of course, we’re living and going through it, but to what level of depth? Our awareness in the learning process is our ability to understand potential natural consequences, mistakes, and successes. It allows for the concepts and facts to be absorbed while the irrelevant content to be left by the wayside. In the ever exchange of energy that life is, how aware of our energy are we while we’re doing something?
Another major benefit of awareness is that it allows for cumulative learning to happen.
Awareness is filling our learning capacity with information acquired from a new event, in combination with stored information from past experience. It is required before, during, and after for optimal learning. Will we miss? Most certainly. Can we get better? Only if we work to become more deliberately aware of those misses, over time.
Bringing awareness to my feelings at any given moment in time allows me to understand myself and my environment better, both in the moment and after the moment has passed. As an aware party to the buying and selling process of my home, I am able to draw on my past experience by making real-time connections to feelings I am having now.
Of course, awareness is also predicated on our capacity for self-inquiry.
What is making me want to move that is similar to what I had felt the last time? As a seller, what emotions am I experiencing about the process of showing and ultimately leaving my home? What about the negotiation process and the information available to me from market forces, interested buyer reactions, and the back and forth of coming to terms on a price?
My awareness today will not only allow for cumulative learning of the experiences past and present, but also enable a future where additional, exponential learning is possible.
Reflection
The last and probably most important piece of the learning process is reflection. Reflection is the critical analysis and synthesis of initiative, activity, and awareness to create new knowledge. Even the most well-intentioned and self-aware person makes mistakes. There is no way around mistakes. Reflection takes the mistakes and successes and demands the energy to better understand both. It is most important because it is most often skipped.
For any number of reasons, both mistakes and successes are often forgotten as we immediately look to the next initiative.
For success, it’s easy to forget to reflect. We won! We did it! We’re awesome! What does it matter what we did or how we got here? We don’t have the time nor want to spend the energy to reflect on our success when the next one is so alluringly around the corner. If I sell my apartment at the highest possible price, am I going to sit and reflect on that win? Understand why it happened in that way and despite the win, search for ways to have improved it?
Mistakes are even worse. Personally, I hate thinking about the mistakes I have made. The shame, guilt, and remorse that comes from fucking up makes me hate myself. If I do something to sabotage the sale of my apartment or even worse, sell at a price lower than someone else would have paid, will I reflect? Will I sit down and actually put energy into feeling the pain, allowing it to teach me?
Clearly, I am a fan of self-inquiry as a necessary element of the learning process. It must happen at each stage and it must never end. Reflective inquiry, in our critical analysis of an experience, should always lead to some level of pain. Reflection opens the door for feeling gratitude and success, sure, but its most valuable path is that which has pain as a teacher.
How We Learn
Pain is the reason we don’t commit fully to the necessary understanding of an initiative. Pain is the reason we avoid awareness. Pain is the reason we skip reflection, whether it is after success or mistake. When we succeed, we are avoiding pain and want to keep that going. Why slow down and even allow pain a chance to creep in and ruin it? Mistakes are pain fireballs that crash into your memory and burn your heart. Those suck. Pass.
Avoiding pain means avoiding strength.
It is through pain that adults learn. It is by deliberately looking pain in the face and recognizing it as a source of learning that we develop as conscious, mature humans. This is our emotional strength, built over a lifetime of actually caring enough to push through.
True learning requires that we initiate, bring awareness to, and reflect on our experiences, regardless of the suffering they may cause. In that process, we must face the inevitable pain that comes from our heightened understanding of those experiences, however much or little.
We can let life happen to us and pick up some tidbits of knowledge along the way. Or we can approach learning deliberately, recognizing that it is hard as fuck to grow up and mature over time, but worth every bit of energy and time put forth in the effort.
Choose wisely.
Self-awareness can be a painful but rewarding process. If you feel a connection and want to learn more about coaching and self exploration with me, please visit www.deliberateself.com
