[Neurons] 2015 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #26

Sun Jun 14 21:15:34 EDT 2015

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #26

June 15, 2015

Learning #2

THE ADVENTURE OF

LEARNING AND META-LEARNING

Do You Know How to Learn?

The questions which I'm about to ask you will seem, on the surface, to be
non-sense and even obvious.  Yet I assure you, they are not.   Not really.
I write them here because, surprisingly, because most people do not know how
to learn.  What?!  Oh sure, they learn stuff.  And they learn lots of stuff.
And they also learn lots of stuff that's wrong and even harmful.  Learning
stuff is inevitable given that a person is a human being.  Given that we
humans do not have information-instincts, we have to learn.  So learn we do.
But learning things and knowing how to learn are two entirely different
things.  So if you are ready, here is the question I'm inviting you to
ponder:

           Do you know how to learn?

           Do you have a well-developed strategy for your learning?

           What are you best states and how skilled are you for accessing
those states when you want to learn something efficiently and thoroughly?

           Do you know how to meta-learn- to learn about your learning?

           To what extent do you identify yourself as a lifelong learner?

           Are you still in school or is school out for you?

The amazing fact is that most people are stunned and stopped by these
learning questions.  They do not even think of themselves as learners, let
along life-long learners.  Consequently, they have no  learning goals or
plans.  They do not intentionally set out to learn new things each year.

One of my conversations recently at Starbucks was with a man who was
unemployed.  I turned around the question and asked him what he was
studying?  His immediately response was, "What?" as if the question didn't
compute; as if I had asked him when he was planning a vacation trip to Mars.
"Well, you said you were unemployed didn't you? ["Yeah."] So now you have a
great opportunity to be studying to add new knowledge and new skills that
will give you greater employability, right?"

"Well .... I never thought of that. [Pause]   Anyway I don't know what I
would study.   And ... anyway, I don't like to study."

"You don't like to study?!" I said raising the volume and tempo of my voice.
"Well I'm really sorry to hear that.  Do you want some help in designing a
learning program for yourself so that you can fall in love with learning and
then add new skills so you can make a lot more money than you have ever
before?"

I added the last line to provide an intentional motivation to the
conversation and to see how he would respond.  He didn't take the bait.  I
felt sad for him as he left, and when he walked out some twenty minutes
later, a sense of pity rose up in me that here was a person with all of the
time and opportunity to increase his internal wealth of knowledge,
understanding, and skill to add more value in the marketplace and to improve
the quality of his life and even though I had tried to shaken his
comfortable world and challenge him to wake up to the possibilities- he
continued his sleep as he socialized with some friends and then left to go
watch daytime TV.   I know that because he told me that when I asked him
what he's doing with all the time on his hand. 

If you think that I don't know what I'm speaking about, then a quick story.
In 1975 I was fired for the fifth time from my first career and lost my
first profession.   That's when I finally concluded, "The problem is me, not
the ministry; I do not have a good fit with this job."  Now for most people,
"three strikes and you're out" would have been enough to convince them to
move on and find something more compatible.  But either I was a slow
learner, or very stubborn, or persistent to a fault, or a combination of all
three!  Anyway, it was 1975 and I was unemployed so while I spend two hours
every morning making the rounds, putting in applications and checking on
applications, I spend the rest of the day in the public library.  Doing
what?   I was reading everything I could find on therapy.  Well, I needed
it!  So I read everything Sigmund Freud wrote, then everything by Alfred
Alder, then Otto Rank.  The next year, 1976, I found TA (Transactional
Analysis) and read every book in the public library on the subject.  When I
did get employed in some in-between jobs, I continued the same using all my
spare time reading in the field of Rational Emotive Therapy (1977).

In that way I began a new career.  As I progressed I started picking up
diplomas in TA and RET and others, then later I did a degree program in
clinical counseling, and later Cognitive Psychology and in that process I
found NLP.  Being unemployed (and without any unemployment benefits!) was a
gift-it gave me the gift of time and motivation and so with it I learned
another profession.

Learning and learning-about-learning is the premier career development
competency.  Whether you are unemployed today or in a career who's growth
potential is lessening, or ready for a new challenge in life-the secret to
wealth creation, to vitality in your life, to living with a sense of
adventure and inspiration-is to keep learning.  Pity those people who have
let School and Schooling destroy the pleasure of learning.  Pity those
people who went to school and never learned how to learn.  They are at such
a disadvantage in today's world of rapid change! 

It's funny how School prevents so many people from getting an education.
Perhaps the person confuses the two, thinking that if he went to school,
he's educated.  What a big delusion!  Others think that what happens in most
schools is "education."  Wrong again.  In fact, a great many kids in urban
city schools are not being "educated" there, they are being warehoused until
their 16th or 18th birthday.  Calling it "education" doesn't make it so.

If "necessity is the mother of invention" being without money and a job
enabled me to discover how to learn, to improve my learning-competencies and
to use what was available (the public library) to invent a new career.  That
career lasted 20 years.  My third career (modeling human experiences of
excellence) began after I learned NLP and its now been another 20 years.
And yes, over that time I got some degrees to validate the learnings, but
getting a degree is not the same as getting an education.  But more about
that - next time.

NEURO-SEMANTIC NEWS

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L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

                    Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net

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