Do You Have a Learning Mind?

• How creative are your solutions?

You probably hear it all the time too; comments like ‘everyday is a school day’, ‘I am always learning’. I used to say the same thing. And I believed it, until one day I booked myself on a course to learn something new and it was as if the lights had suddenly come on.

I realised that what I had thought of as learning was really all just variations on a theme; slight differences but no real stretch.

Like so many things for learning to be really effective, it needs to be deliberate, purposeful and guided. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the need for 10,000 hours of deliberate practice needed to reach mastery in anything and pointed out that many of us will have driven for 10,000 hours in our lives but that doesn’t make us all Lewis Hamiltons. Why? Because the 10,000 hours weren’t spent in deliberate practice, where our number 1 intention, our purpose, was to get better. The time we spend driving, generally isnt with the purpose to get better. We don’t have a guide in the passenger seat constantly helping us to improve our performance. We don’t test and measure our times.

As humans we default to our human default position of deleting, distorting and generalising. We adopt shortcuts, heuristics to reinforce old, well worn patterns. In other words we convince ourselves we are learning but all we are really doing is sawing the same old sawdust over and over again.

Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and author said “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” It takes practice and learning to be able to leverage the pause.

To do:

1. Analyse how much time you spend in deliberate learning every week. Write the number down.
2. Rate the effectiveness of your learning on a scale of 0-innefective to 10 absolutely focussed and followed up on. Clue- do you have notes? Write the number down.
3. Come up with a written plan to move the answer to Q1 by +10%
4. Come up with a written plan to move the answer to Q2 by 2 points.

Many successful business owners eventually hit a wall on growth and struggle to climb it alone. When you work with me you get a fresh perspective, a solid plan, and customised coaching so you can grow and scale your business safely and at speed.

To check whether I can help you on that journey https://calendly.com/iankinnery/canweworktogether