“Are you are life long learner committed to be the best you can be? You can learn anything you put your mind to, Did you know that? Learning can be fun and easy. It can take you to places you would never have imagined yourself visiting.
Your ability to learn and keep learning can open up incredible new doorways for you. Learn and continue to learn. Evolve. Grow and make the most of your given talents and abilities.
You may not believe it yet, because many people have limiting beliefs about themselves as learners BECAUSE they went to school but you are already an exquisite learner.
You have learned so much in live. You have learned many wonderful and magnificent things. You have also learned many useless things. You have learned to have problems and disappointments too. You can learn how to overcome any of these.
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Statistics tell us that 95% of what we learn in college is forgotten within 6 months of graduation! Only 5% is all that is retained of what you spent more than 4 years studying. 95% is forgotten.
How much did you spend on college… for that piece of paper? And if you went to a prestigious university it means you still forgot 95%, but you spent more money to do it.
Learn As A Child Learns Naturally NOT The Way They Educate In Schools
The most pitiful thing is when people think there is nothing new to learn. There is always something new! Every day is a rare and unprecedented opportunity to learn and to have fun. The key to learning anything really well is to do it the same way as when you were a small child.
You learned a thousand times faster back then – and it was a blast! If you are willing to play, to adventure, to explore like a child does – you can add to your learning in ways that might seem miraculous.
Children learn an incredible amount because they are open and unbiased. A child can play with a stick in total delight and all the while the child is learning – learning to move and to coordinate himself.
He can watch the same movie over and over and still shudder with delight, still shiver with fear, and laugh with abandon – even though he knows what is coming.
Children are learning machines until they are trained to behave like young adults and are confined to desks and told to act appropriately. While adults look for the pay-off, kids simply learn for the sheer pleasure it brings them.
As adults we need to recapture the sense of joy and adventure we had as children, to rekindle a sense of growing and contributing.
When I teach my programs I get everyone from pig farmers to top CEO’s and all types of other occupations because if it’s not about putting a bigger smile on your own face and if it isn’t about putting a bigger smile on the face of people around you, if it isn’t about having a better experience or a more vibrant experience, if it isn’t about enlivening yourself… than what is it for?
One idea can change the entire world. We need a better class of thinkers and innovators – juicier people with explosive curiosity and creativity. Fun loving people who can change the world. Seriousness is truly a disease.
We need giggles and shudders and risk takers. As Oliver Wendall Holmes said “A mind stretched to a new idea can never go back to its original dimension.” Love learning – learn for no reason at all except the sheer joy of it. Love seeking.
When I train, I present something I call the Mastery Loop™. Here it is.
Approach
What happens is that people first approach information. This is what I call the enlightenment stage. This is not the eastern concept of enlightenment and meditation, but this is where you are enlightened to a new idea. This is about approaching material and information.
People come to me and it’s new to them; people come to accounting it’s new to them – whatever it is… in school or the real world… you approach something for the first time. Something you didn’t know.
Bewilderment
After the approach, comes the bewilderment stage. You get a little bit of it and it becomes confusing. That’s because the “7-plus-or minus-two” conscious rational part of your brain is trying to understand the information, but it hasn’t yet assembled it in a way that is useful for you.
It’s trying to grasp it and make sense of it before it is ready to be put in order. However, if you stick with it, stay with it, and you are really learning the material, then shortly thereafter it will become clear.
What happens in college and formal schooling is that right before or right after it becomes clear, they give you a test. And if it hasn’t yet become clear, then you fail or get a low mark.
If you are poor at the mechanics of taking an exam, you can get a low mark that means you didn’t learn the material according to that institution.
Clear
God forbid you should be good at the mechanics of taking an exam because that means that you pass without having an understanding of the material at all. Lots of us got through school that way, didn’t we?
Then you go onto a new subject! “OK that’s done – NEXT.” That’s when you begin to get more of what I call “just information”, without behavioral competence.
When you do one of my programs what I do is skip the clear stage and go right to what I call the “mining for gold” or the drill stage. That means you approach the information, get bewildered and begin to practice or drill what it is you are learning.
You will actually get hands on practice so that it assists you in becoming more clear about what it is you are learning.
Drill
You do exercises to actually wire in the behaviors you are learning, you get to look at eye accessing cues and practice language patterns, and do anchoring with the others in the room so that you have the experience of doing it.
What is valuable about this is that you do the exercises during the workshop time.
After you have drilled and practiced thoroughly, then you enact the material. I have a saying that the workshop begins when the breaks begin. That is your golden opportunity to remember to use what you have been absorbing during class practice time.
When you enact the material, you use it in your daily life, refine it, and use it during real life situations.
Enact
When you take these skills into your daily life, then they begin to fuse – they become a part of your everyday behavior; you integrate them. This is where it becomes habitual.
You develop “unconscious competence” (like riding a bike) and have them as part of your behavioral repertoire for the rest of your life.
This is where it become so much a part of your behavior that you find yourself using the skills without always having to think about it. This is when you have truly integrated it.
Fuse
As it fuses, it becomes a part of your everyday life. This is at the point where you will become creative with the material. This is where you will use it in ways that you or I could never imagine.
It is at this point you begin to discover your personal genius with the material.
You will find applications for it, design new things and make your life really a party. This is when you look at a problem, and instead of going “this is going to be a difficult problem”, you go “this is going to be a real piece of cake”.
Genius
The appropriate behavior is insatiable curiosity. To continue to learn, grow and evolve… not stop at quick fix techniques… but to evolve and become more compassionate and joyful and wondrous.
In other words, to make life a celebration and not just put a Band-Aid on an oweee. Remember exploration is the doorway to adventure!
What I am asking you – and this is a request – is how much fun can you have, how much curiosity can you have, how much wanton desire and passion can you bring to having a good time?
Because if you can do it here and now, regardless of challenges thrown your way, you can do it anywhere.
Exercises For Making Learning Fun And Having Novel Experiences
Take a walk somewhere you always go except this time walk as though it is totally new. Pretend you are an anthropologist doing an ethnographic study, making it elusive and bewildering.
See what you notice that you didn’t before.
Ask yourself questions you might never ask about obvious things. Then just be silent while you walk and look without internal dialogue.
Slow down your gait or speed it up to notice what you have missed before. Smell the smells you may not have noticed.
Do the same thing with driving home or riding a bus. See if you can open your powers of observation to take in more than you ever realized was there before. Venture into new realms. Take a different route to work.
Open Your Powers Of Observation
Do something now, do anything now that’s different. It may seem uncomfortable at first, but realize you are interrupting patterns and causing your mind to be stretched in delightful ways.
Go back and enjoy a children’s book you once read. Go back and review.
Listen to the same CD over and over – only each time pay attention to a different instrument – how do they intermingle, compliment each other, support each other, what are they accomplishing together?
Try tasting your food in new ways. Tiny bits, savor each morsel, really chew it thirty-two times. Discover how you can delight your senses.
Pay Attention To Your Senses
Take a luxurious bath, uses different scents, candles. Anything that enlivens you and makes you feel better.
Read a novel you normally wouldn’t read. Get a biography of someone you never felt interested in. Talk to someone repulsive and take their point of view temporarily.
Step inside them and see if you can imagine how it would be that they would hold views contrary to your own. You don’t have to keep them! Just try them on to get a different perspective from your own.
Try Things You Have Never Done Before
Do something you would absolutely never do (keep it legal and safe!). Go beyond your own limits. Push yourself, but do so with a sense of adventure, joy, fun, harmony, health and well being.
Watch the same movie a dozen times. Each time approach it fresh and new. You will learn something. When I was younger in California working in the motion picture business, I would go to the same movie 4,5, 10 times.
First, I would just watch it. If I got hooked into it emotionally, I considered it a good picture. Then I would go back and watch for the way the director constructed it all.
Then I would see it again to concentrate only on the writing, then the acting, then the cinematography and production values. Each time, I came away with something I hadn’t noticed before.
With new intent, I noticed new things. By asking myself different questions, or causing my mind to look in a new direction I noticed more and more nuances than I could have ever imagined.
Repetition Is The Way You Learn And Create Habits
Think about it – two people go to the same movie and one loves it another hates it. Are they really talking about the movie? No. They are sharing with you what they paid attention to.
They are letting you know how their mind works.
No movie is universally good or bad, there are things about it one likes while another may not. Of course the more sophisticated knowledge someone has about what they are discussing, or the more nuances, perhaps the better to make assessment, but it is still only an opinion.
This is why recapturing the joy of learning, reading, listening to tapes, attending seminars, going for walks, playing with children, is so vital because it enriches an individual and enables one to pay attention to nuances.
Immerse yourself. If you learn just one new concept or idea – it can be monumental. You can become more creative… you can begin to open doors that you didn’t even know existed.
Capture The Joy Of Learning As A Child Does
Discover if – by trying some of these things – you can’t enliven yourself to all the opportunities around you you could be missing out on. Find out if you can do better in business.
Make change more dynamic for yourself and clients. Spice up your relationships with more passion and ecstasy, have more intimate times with your children.
Fun-loving, exciting people can change the world. With so much in the news that could discourage us, we need to become beacons, lights that glow in the night that show the rest of the world that we can be more alive, more in love, have greater well being and riches, use our brain power more efficiently and most importantly – live joyously.
Perhaps if we were all just a little more joyous even in the face of adversity, we will make the world a better more wondrous place.
Because the truth is, the world is already a wondrous place. The sad part is that too many people miss it. Recapture the awe struck wonder of a child in whatever you do. Bring this spirit to all of your learning and all of your endeavors and you will soar as never before.
You will reach untold heights when you break old patterns and habits that have prevented you from being open to new experience.
Every Moment Is New Every Moment Is An Opportunity
Too often we have belittled a learning or an experience with ‘Well that’s just X’ or we say ‘There is nothing new in that.’ Yet every moment is new, even an old hand me down cloth is new to someone.
Often times rare and priceless antiques were discovered by people who knew what to look for when others had considered it only junk.
Sometimes subtly and layers hides the core of its value and only to the eye of a trained observer will one begin to notice what is really going on, or what the real value is. To the child, it doesn’t matter. It is all wonderful even if it seems old to us.
My nephew Michael, when he was three, had completed watching Beauty and the Beast once a day, sometimes twice, since it came out on video. That was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 – 70 times! He would watch it and delight every time he did.
Love Exploring Love Adventuring Love Seeking New Ways To Enjoy
Go out and live life and expect to have fun, expect to learn, and find out what you discover. Find out how you can have a ton of fun. See if you can put the pedal to the metal and really play.
Learn, incorporate and integrate the skills that you already have.
A very wise person once said, “you can light a million candles off just one”… but your candle has to be lit first. If you light up, if we light up all of our candles while we’re together here, then we can spread a conspiracy of ecstasy.
Commit to learning. It will keep you younger and healthier. Commit to learning. Learn to be happy. Learn to be positive. Learn to direct your mind. Learn to take control.
Life becomes so much more wonderful when you commit to learning how to use your mind to make your dreams come true.” Rex Sikes
Enjoy today in new ways!
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Horizons photo used with permission of Phil Koch
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