How do we learn?

How do we learn?

Can anything really useful be taught?

We’re constantly invited to consume ‘new’ knowledge, information or insights – often at a price, often with the threat that, if we don’t, we’ll get ‘left behind’.

Is this real learning though? Most of what can be taught is information: surface-level knowledge. Information is useful: new ways of doing things, more detailed understanding, recognition of connections between things.

But acquiring more information does not necessarily lead to change. It’s easy to absorb endless ‘stuff’ online, but find all that’s happened is that our brain is full, and we’re increasingly baffled by the world. Information overload is real.

Information without understanding changes nothing.

Deep learning means new understanding.

There’s an approach to training performers called ‘via negativa’: ‘not the acquiring of skills, but the eradication of blockage’. It involved helping someone get rid of whatever they were putting in their own way, the blockages stopping them doing what they could otherwise, easefully, do.

What are those blockages? Usually fear, shame, self-doubt, laziness. Seldom are people blocked by lack of information.

Deep learning comes when a new experience or new information enables you to change how you see yourself and how you connect with the world around you.

Joanna Macy writes: ‘Real learning is not something added: it is a reorganisation of the system.’ (‘The World as Self, The World as Lover’)

So much of the growth that comes in coaching is not about ‘learning new things’. It’s about recognising, reinterpreting and reformulating what you already know. My job is to provide enough new ‘information’ to stimulate change, asking the right questions and providing a safe space for that change to happen.

The change is, fundamentally, a reorganisation. It’s the moment of insight: ‘Ah NOW I understand!’. It’s seeing what’s always been there, in a fresh light.

It’s the ‘a-ha’ moment.

Too often we focus so much on trying to learn ‘more’, and we forget to learn deeper.

My happiest moments as a coach are when – however uncomfortable it sometimes is – I help someone see themself and the world through fresh eyes.