Experimenting with how YOU learn

When we speak about teaching, it is simply someone else's experience. Your teacher has walked the path ahead of you, and you look at their tracks in the dust. They might provide you with some hints about where to go next. But these 'tracks' are somebody else's past, they are not your future. All the books and courses are simply maps other people's pasts. Absorb and use them, but always remember that your path will be different, and it is this personal path you must travel. Don't try to exactly copy another person's path; use their knowledge, but remain aware that the particular 'landscape' of your own path is unique.

~ Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall The Invisible Actor

Everyone learns differently:

• some people like to rush ahead to be able to do things however poorly and then refine their skills 
• other people prefer to master one stage before moving on to the next 
• for one person, a single focused session a day works 
• for another short sessions throughout the day spread over time work better 
• for some people mornings are best but for others evenings work better 

And similarly with sleep patterns, what and when you eat, patterns of activity, exercise etc. All of these things may impact to some degree on how effectively you learn.

Get to know what kinds of things make it easier for you to learn and what kinds of things block or hinder learning. Then play to the conditions that are optimal for you. However you also need to know yourself as well. It may feel like you are learning something when you read a book while watching TV, but you need to test how much you actually learn in this way.

You also need to test whether your habitual way of learning is working for you. You may be comfortable with it, but it doesn’t mean that it is the most effective or efficient method you could use and other methods may work better if you try them. And it is important that you give them a chance before concluding that they aren’t for you. Any new behaviour may feel odd or uncomfortable at first. The ways you learned to learn as a child or adolescent may no longer work for you (if they ever did.). So experiment to see what is true for you:

Be aware of the process of experimentation and experiment with your approaches. As part of your adaptive experimentation experiment with experimentation itself. Be careful not to become too set in your ways of experimenting. Continue to challenge both your understanding and the approach you use to gain it

~ Yoram Wind et al. The Power of Impossible Thinking

In Counter-Clockwise, Ellen Langer makes the point that research in any area whether medical, psychology or whatever can only ever deal in generalities, and that individuals may experience results different from what research would predict. And she suggests that we be attentive to when things work well for us, so that we can encourage the conditions that will permit things to go well for us more often. This applies especially to learning. Each of us brings to any learning situation the accumulated experiences and knowledge of our lifetime so far. So it would be naive to expect that all of us would learn in the same way.

In Uncommon Genius, here’s how Denise Shekerjian describes Lester Brown’s process for discovering what works for him:

Biography and India set him to wondering about his own limits. And so, as a young boy, he started to pay attention and stopped letting things slide…. As he met challenges, he examined all the angles. He asked himself how he felt about this or that, and why he was afraid in certain situations, and how much risk he thought he could handle, and how he felt about competition, and how much could be accomplished in the space of an hour, and how a decision about this would affect something else…He was interested in seeing what he was made of. He started testing and probing and he never stopped. The result is he knows himself very well and that inner knowledge is what he relies on in trying to avoid mistakes and in managing defeats.

And in doing this he was following a practice that goes back more than 2000 years:

Can a man be said, do you think, to know himself who knows his own name and nothing more? or must he not rather set to work precisely like the would-be purchaser of a horse, who certainly does not think that he has got the knowledge he requires until he has discovered whether the beast is tractable or stubborn, strong or weak, quick or slow, and how it stands with the other points, serviceable or the reverse, in reference to the use and purpose of a horse? So, I say, must a man in like manner interrogate his own nature in reference to a man's requirements, and learn to know his own capacities, must he not?
~ Socrates

The point is that by becoming aware of our strengths, weaknesses and propensities we become better able to tailor our strategies both for learning and for life in general to accommodate this knowledge and achieve success. And in doing so, we enlarge those very capacities.