Learners keep their brains active through the process of seeking knowledge. They seek to understand what they don’t know and improve at what doesn’t come easily.
Nonlearners are often why business profits deteriorate over time because they are stuck doing what they have always done in a rapidly changing world on every front.
Overview
The life skill associated with the Always Be Learning discipline isn’t about investing a significant amount of time, effort, and energy in the classroom or online. Those who are the best at what they do approach learning as a lifelong exercise, not something that stops when they graduate. They are always looking to learn something new and do something they aren’t skilled at doing like they want to.
People who learn continually upgrade their knowledge and skills so they develop greater wisdom. Remember, knowledge is to know tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom understands that tomatoes don’t belong in a fruit salad.
Below are a few things you can do to be a proactive learner that doesn’t require a lot of time or a training and development department to facilitate:
- Be curious to stimulate learning. Think about why something matters and how it works, and see how you can apply what you learn to your goals.
- Read about areas you are interested in and where you are struggling. Exploring subjects to increase your knowledge and understanding can help you discover solutions to previously unresolved problems.
- Look up unknown words and acronyms. Knowing the definition of a word or acronym is how new concepts get converted into new actions and better results.
- Ask more questions. Don’t pretend to understand what someone just said if you don’t know what they mean. You will have unnecessary difficulty trying to capitalize on what people say if you don’t ask clarifying questions about what you don’t understand.
- Learn by doing. People learn best when performing a task they are trying to learn. Applying what’s been learned by trial and error is how new knowledge gets transferred into wisdom and, ultimately, better results in your life and business by learning what works and what doesn’t.
- Break free of unproductive routines. Switching things up puts your brain into a different gear that leads you to think differently about the actions you take to realize your desired results.
- Stay with the things you find difficult. Practicing what comes easy doesn’t help. You build skills by pushing yourself to stay with something you find difficult until you become good at it.
- Teaching what you learn is better than being tested on what you learn. Teaching what we learn helps us break down the subject we are trying to master into simple words and concepts and helps both the teacher deepen the learning, and the recipient learn something new.
Learning is an ongoing process that shows up all around us if we are open to expanding our understanding of the world and everything in it.
Learning is blocked when a fixed mindset keeps new ideas and learnings from taking root. People like how things are or aren’t interested in expanding their understanding of how things work. They either think they know all there is on a given subject or are afraid of letting others see them struggle in an area they don’t know or are skilled at doing.