Chapter Six
What’s Next? Deliberate Learning for Life
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
Martha Graham
How do you put the essentials of the learning way into practice? This chapter covers three strategies to help you to build learning flexibility and ultimately transform your life: deep experiencing, deliberate learning, and starting small with one big thing. By intentionally integrating your quest for learning flexibility into your daily life, you will continue to follow a path of self-discovery. This path reveals itself in the moment, presenting new challenges and opportunities to unleash the hidden parts of yourself as you travel down it step by step.
Practice Deep Experiencing
We have described experiencing as the gateway to learning. It is not experience, but experiencing that is the source of learning. Because of our habits and stereotypes, we live through many experiences without actually experiencing them. John Dewey believed that to initiate reflection and learning our habitual experience must be interrupted by deep experiencing, such as when we are stuck with a problem or difficulty or struck by the strangeness of something outside of our usual experience.1 But we can also strip our biases from our experiences in more deliberate ways.
Mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness aims to overcome habitual thinking and to reach direct, pure experience through mindful awareness and attention. Mindfulness is the core of Buddhist meditation, the discipline of anchoring the mind in the present moment. This is often accompanied with a practice of awareness and acceptance through breathing. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way—on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.”2 Nonjudgment, in mindfulness theory, is accepting the current state as part of a constant flow of changing experiences. This theory suggests that letting go of judgment strengthens the mind, and it challenges the illusion that we can control our experiences by overthinking them. We often find ourselves responding to situations automatically, without questioning our habits, as if we are only half awake. Mindfulness helps us wake up to the present moment, experience it more vividly, and react to it in more intentional ways.
To practice mindfulness, you can start by drawing your attention to your five senses. This helps anchor you in the present moment. Then you can begin to focus on your breathing, gradually slowing it down. With practice, mindfulness can help quiet the mind and reduce automatic, habitual patterns of thinking and responding. This presence enhances direct concrete experience and allows the learning cycle to begin. In a sense, we cannot learn from experience if we do not first have an experience; often, automatic routines distract us from experiencing the moment.
Intentional attention. Being aware of what we pay attention to can help us consciously create our experience. Mindfulness practice can help us consider how we choose to process and learn from the events in our lives. By intentionally guiding the learning process and paying attention to how we are going through the phases of the learning cycle, we create ourselves through learning. We are what we learn. How and what we learn determines the way we process the possibilities of each new emerging experience, which in turn determines the range of choices and decisions we see. The choices and decisions we make, to some extent, determine the events we live through, and these events influence our future choices. Thus, we create ourselves by choosing what we pay attention to and how we process and respond to that experience. For many, this learning choice is relatively unconscious, an autopilot program for learning. Mindfulness can pave the way for us to control our learning and our life through intentional attention.
To practice intentional attention, begin by becoming aware of your body sensation. How are you feeling in any moment? What do you notice about your own reactions?
Focusing. Research in the field of psychotherapy has shown that the more patients are able to experience deeply, the better the outcome of their therapy. Carl Rogers proposed that when patients learn to appreciate different aspects of themselves, become aware of their changing feelings, and trust in their process of experiencing, they realize that they can change their way of thinking or choose to approach problems in a new way.3 The philosopher Eugene Gendlin, who worked with Rogers, called this deep experiencing ability “focusing,” and he believed that the physical sensations of our bodies play a role in our ability to experience the present moment.4 When we become aware of shifts in our bodily sensations, we can analyze these shifts and interpret them.
Like mindfulness and intentional attention, focusing emphasizes awareness in the present moment. Some Buddhist practitioners use the focusing technique to complement their meditative practices. Unlike mindfulness and intentional attention, which are primarily solitary practices, focusing benefits from someone guiding us through the steps of the focusing process. However, we can also learn to guide ourselves through the process.
In his book Focusing, Gendlin developed a basic six-step technique for learning how to engage in this kind of direct body experiencing. The first step involves making time for the activity in a safe and quiet space and then focusing your attention inward on your body sensations. Next, think about a problem or challenge you are currently facing and pay attention to the sensation that arises when you focus on that problem. This sensation is felt sense. Pay attention until you sense what the unclear problem feels like. Then find a word or phrase that describes the felt sense, going back and forth between the felt sense and various words and phrases until one resonates. Next, ask yourself, “What is the whole problem that makes this felt sense?” Does the problem you are facing have several aspects? Is the root of the problem related to a deeper issue? Asking yourself about a specific conflict you are having with a coworker, for example, might reveal a deeper problem about your overall satisfaction with your professional role.
Try out answers until one fits and creates a sense of release. Finally receive the release by reflecting on it for a few moments.5
Make Learning Deliberate
While the practices in the book will help you to improve your performance or learn new content, the goal is to pay attention to your own learning process and to become more flexible in managing it. This process is what allows you to transform your life. Deliberate learning requires that you understand your unique way of learning from experience and use it to intentionally direct and control your behavior. Instead of being locked into an unconscious force that operates in the background and guides you automatically, you can use the learning cycle as a guide to help you learn deliberately. The learning way literally changes your mind, allowing you to process and respond to your experiences differently.
To learn deliberately, you first need to become a witness of your own process. Zoom out from your automatic response—the learning style that you prefer—and question whether that style might be limiting what you see as possible. Where could you shift on the learning cycle to increase your effectiveness? Next, choose the learning style that is the best match for your situation and zoom in to use it. This will create a new experience, and the cycle continues again.
Lynne’s favored style of Deciding meant that her go-to response for any situation allowed her to critically evaluate a situation and commit to a solution. Because she had easy access to the Acting and Initiating styles too, she was quick to implement a practical fix to a problem. This command-and-control approach had made her successful as a director in a health-care organization and carried over to the way she ran her home and raised her kids. As Lynne developed her learning flexibility and the ability to evaluate her process of learning, she recognized that this approach was not the best match with her twenty-year-old daughter Danielle.
One night, when Danielle arrived home from college upset from something that had happened, Lynne stopped herself from leading with her automatic Deciding style. She zoomed out to witness where she was on the learning cycle versus where the best match for the situation might be. Lynne actually used the quick processing of her Deciding style to choose the opposite styles of learning in the moment: Experiencing, Imagining, and Reflecting. In uncharacteristic fashion, Lynne did not try to diagnose or fix a problem. She simply sat down, connected with her daughter through her presence, and listened. Instead of tapping her problem-solving prowess, she tapped into her empathy. Danielle said that she had never felt more heard or understood. When Lynne shifted her approach to learning in the moment by zooming out to see what was needed, she increased her effectiveness with her daughter and learned about herself in the process. The intentional process is key.
Learning how to learn is a lifelong process. The 10,000 hours that some say is required to master a skill may be a mythical number, but the number of learning cycles we go through in our lifetime is countless. Being deliberate about the learning process can improve our effectiveness as we go through these cycles.
Deliberate learning is a skill that is developed through practice. The learning way is not a 24/7 life of learning. When we are immersed in a task, we may not be thinking about the model of how we should be going about the task. Thinking about the learning cycle may be most useful before we engage in learning and after we engage in action. We can use the cycle to plan strategies for engaging and mastering our immediate learning task or life situation. The concept of flow, where we become totally immersed in our work, is the opposite of deliberate learning, which emphasizes consciously evaluating feedback and making corrections in our actions. As we practice deliberate learning and build flexibility, our greater range of learning styles can allow us to respond to situations without breaking the flow of our work.
Start Small with One Big Thing
At the end of chapter four, you challenged yourself to identify a capability you want to acquire or a weakness you want to overcome. As you approach your flexibility goal, focus on small incremental steps using daily practice—be the tortoise instead of the hare: slow and steady wins the race. The key is not to try for big, sweeping changes all at once. Instead, create a series of new experiences on which you can reflect, think, and act that will move you in the general direction of your goal. In the same way that New Year’s resolutions are rarely effective, setting a dramatic goal may be so overwhelming that it actually forces you back into your comfort zone.
Marion learned this when her new HR position required her to make presentations to employees. She resolved to overcome the paralysis she felt when she tried to speak publicly. This involved expanding her capabilities with the Initiating style. When she threw herself in front of a group of skeptics without adequate preparation, she set herself back; she could witness herself using a fixed mindset that told her she was not capable. Marion regrouped to apply what she had learned about learning. She began to plan small experiments that would allow her to practice little bits of the complex capabilities that are involved in making presentations.
First, she engaged in conversations with new acquaintances, which allowed her to practice thinking in the moment. Next, she tried giving short improvisational speeches to friends who offered feedback. Later, she focused on developing language and phrases that would resonate with her audiences. Marion also worked on her physical presence by breathing and grounding. With each new experience, she built her courage and began to think of herself as capable of thinking on her feet and connecting with her audience. After practicing over the course of months and years, one day Marion realized that she no longer felt nervous in front of large groups. Although it had happened slowly over time, she had transformed her ability to manage something that had once been out of her range. Using one brushstroke at a time, Marion completed an entire masterpiece. No longer did she avoid situations that called on the Initiating style. Marion could also use this situation to generalize her ability to build flexibility. When she realized that she did not possess capabilities in other learning styles, she thought, “I simply don’t know how to do this yet.”
What about the time involved to make big changes? We all know that learning involves repeated practice, but the amount of time spent practicing is not necessarily a good predictor of performance. Going to the golf practice range and hitting bucket after bucket of balls doesn’t necessarily improve your game and in fact may make it worse by ingraining bad habits.
Expert performance research initiated in the early 1990s by K. Anders Ericsson teaches us a great deal about learning from practice. The good news from this work is that greatness, for the most part, is not a function of innate talent; it is learned from experience. The not-so-good news is that greatness involves long-term commitment and hard work. To become a highly skilled expert can take an estimated 10,000 hours of deliberate practice or 20 hours a week for 50 weeks a year for ten years.6 The basic techniques of deliberate practice are useful for improving our ability to deliberately learn from experience. Deliberate practice is like mindful experiencing with the addition of focused reflection on our concrete performance. When we reflect on our performance, we compare it against an ideal model to improve our future action in a recurring cycle of learning.
A key to successful learning is establishing the appropriate time frame expectation for achieving our learning goals. The most common error is the expectation created when setting goals of a “quick fix” and instant mastery. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is how, when we don’t achieve immediate success with a diet, we abandon our dieting. To embark on a “lose ten pounds in ten days” diet is to limit ourselves to one turn through the learning cycle, while weight control is a long-term process with spirals of learning around many issues like calorie intake and exercise. Old habits are stubborn, and setbacks and failures are inevitable. The same is true about acquiring the capabilities of a new learning style. By framing the learning process correctly as one that will happen with slow progress over time, we can set ourselves up to stick with the process of building flexibility, not quit or view ourselves as having a fixed identity.
In Mastery, George Leonard describes the master’s journey as a path that follows a recurring cycle of brief spurts of progress followed by dips of performance and a plateau of performance that is slightly higher than before where nothing seems to be happening until the next spurt. Many find this path, particularly the long plateaus, frustrating and abandon their efforts to learn and develop. Leonard writes, “You practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it as much as you do the upward surges.”7
Leonard is confirming the importance of paying attention to the process rather than the outcome. Although it may seem paradoxical, when we focus on process rather than outcome, we open ourselves up to be more creative and relaxed, allowing us to actually perform better and enjoy the activity more. Therefore, if you stick with the process of learning all nine styles of learning, you will eventually experience flexibility in your learning style repertoire, although it may just happen in fits and starts.
When you trust the learning process, you avoid an excessive focus on the outcomes of immediate performance. You can focus instead on tracking your performance progress over time and from a distance. Rarely is a single performance test a matter of life and death, and to treat it as such only reinforces a fixed identity. Every performance is an occasion for learning and improvement in future performances.
Redefine Failure
One common roadblock to trying new behaviors and attitudes—even tiny ones—is the fear of failure. No one likes to fail, but failure is an inevitable part of doing something new. Thomas Edison, a role model for the learning way, said, “Failure is the most important ingredient for success.”8 In her commencement address to the 2008 graduates of Harvard University, J. K. Rowling described the low period in her life after graduation, which was marked by failure on every front, and talked about its benefits:
... failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.9
When you control your emotional responses to learn from failure, you empower yourself in an important way. When failures, losses, and mistakes provoke destructive emotional responses, they can block learning and feed into a fixed identity. The need for perfect performance and winning at any expense will block learning and keep you locked into familiar habits. Golfers who slam their club and curse themselves and the game after a bad shot lose the opportunity to coolly analyze their mistake and plan for corrections on the next round. In order to expand your learning flexibility, you will need to break out of your comfort zone and take some risks. Do this by focusing on the process instead of the outcome. Go in the general direction of your goal instead of having an all-or-nothing mentality. Is your learning flexibility high? Maybe not yet, but it is only because you have not practiced enough. It’s only a matter of time and practice. Risk failure in the short term to maximize this opportunity.
Implementing the Learning Way
The learning way is an approach to living. It is a lifelong process that requires deep trust in your experiences along with a healthy skepticism about longstanding beliefs you might have about yourself and the world around you. You must embrace both quiet reflection and a passionate commitment to action in the face of uncertainty. You must remind yourself that growth involves risk and failure, but failure does not reflect on your ability to learn and grow.
Once you commit to learning and developing from your life experiences, you can begin to use the learning cycle to examine your learning style, your habits, your comfort zone, your relationships, your career, and your greater purpose. You can begin to see the benefits and drawbacks of each learning style, embrace different styles in different situations, and appreciate the diversity of preferred learning styles within your relationships at work and at home. Eventually you will be able to move through the learning cycle with ease, using each style in your own way to acquire new skills, make confident decisions, and gracefully adapt to changing situations.
How to Learn Anything Checklist for Action
As you tackle new challenges, make sure to return to the learning cycle, your learning style, and your learning flexibility profile to assess how you may have changed and how you might be able to take a different approach to continue developing new capabilities. You can use the Checklist for How to Learn Anything as a quick reference to guide you through the lifelong process of learning. Use this checklist to remember to use all the learning styles for deliberate learning:
Experiencing: Use mindfulness, intentional attention, and focusing to tune into your feelings and physical sensations and empathize with others. What problem are you facing? What is happening now?
Imagining: Brainstorm different responses to your experiences. What are the possibilities concerning your feeling and sensations? What can you learn from the experiences of others? What are some possibilities for an ideal outcome?
Reflecting: Connect your sensations with general ideas to make sense of them. Seek the perspectives of other people you trust and admire. Have your experiences revealed new aspects of your situation? Do you have any new questions you need to ask before moving forward?
Analyzing: Compile all of the information that you will need to make a decision and organize it. Use this information to create a plan. Do you have all the information needed to make a decision?
Thinking: Connect the information you analyzed to broader information you have. How does your experience fit in with your previous experiences or the experiences of people you know? Should you take any of that information into account? Are there any related subjects you could investigate to help you make a decision?
Deciding: Set a goal—start small—and figure out the first step you can take toward reaching that goal. Determine how you will measure your progress as you move toward your goal. Do you need to build in reminders to check in with yourself or with other people to keep you accountable?
Acting: Begin executing your plan, starting with the first step you decided on. Are you able to implement your plan with existing resources?
Initiating: Seek out new opportunities for implementing your plan, building new capabilities, refining your approach, and engaging others. What new experiences could you seek out to help you continue to grow? What do you need to alter as you try again?
Balancing: Ask yourself whether your approach is working as well as it could be. Should you consider shifting to a new learning style to accomplish your task? As you work toward accomplishing your goals, make sure to make time to practice mindfulness and return to your experience. With that, the cycle begins again in a lifelong process of learning and growth.
Practice Learning Anything
Develop a long-term plan. Look for improvements and payoffs over months and years, rather than right away.
Look for safe ways to practice new skills. Find situations that test them, and don’t punish yourself if you fail. Take time to consciously learn from your mistakes.
Return to your learning flexibility profile regularly. Each time you face a new learning situation or take on a new project, use the full learning cycle to anticipate different approaches you can take that will help you develop new learning skills.
Reward yourself—becoming a flexible learner is hard work.
Align learning with your core values. When your efforts satisfy meaningful values, you are optimally motivated to keep learning, growing, gaining wisdom, and building competence.
Reflect on Learning Anything
You may find it helpful to journal about your use of learning flexibility in your current life situation. Below you will find prompts for your reflections.
We develop and grow as human beings through learning, and this process continues long after we finish our formal education. Think of a time after you were out of school when you learned something about yourself or the world. How did you integrate that new knowledge into your life? Did it change how you think of yourself?
Think of a major life transition that you went through. How did you decide to deal with that challenge? Now that you are aware of the learning cycle, can you think of a different way that you could have made your transition?
What potential challenges or transitions can you foresee on the horizon? Apply the learning cycle to reflect on how you might respond to future challenges as opportunities for personal growth.
Think about how you felt when reading about the learning way approach to life. Did you start thinking of how you could address a current challenge in your life or learn a new skill? Make a list of goals that you would like to work toward using the learning cycle. As you work toward these goals and build your capacity to learn deliberately, monitor your progress and pay attention to your learning process in real time. This will help you live by the process of learning and transform your life.