The Last Thing You Learned
Posted by
These blogs are designed to provide you with thought-provoking ideas, knowledge, and suggestions. That said, I know there are times when I’m stuck in my own journey and what I need is not a tip but a kick up the bottom to move things forward. So today I’m hoping that this blog will serve as a reminder to push something forward!
I recently had a conversation on the subject of curiosity, and it got me thinking about how curious people tend to be up on the latest thinking and ideas. So I challenged myself to think about the question I raised at the top of today’s blog – what was the last thing I learned?
Fortunately, or maybe a little bit smugly, I had an answer – in that I’ve been pitched into lots of new situations recently that have sharpened my self-awareness. I’ve been learning more and more about myself, my conditions for best performance, and what holds me back.
One of the things often said in talent circles is that it’s a quest for learning that distinguishes high flyers – an almost unquenchable need to absorb lots of new information.
When you ask yourself the question ‘What was the last thing I learned?’ – did floods of learning hit you? Or did you have to think for a while before you could identify a significant shift forward?
How can you adopt a more curious mindset?
When we were kids, we learned exceptionally fast every day. Year by year we changed and grew. Learning is vital to our progress, and we constantly need to challenge ourselves to learn and row. Maybe this week it’s time to reflect on what you’ve recently learned and, if it’s not enough, to reprioritise learning in your daily life.
I recently had a conversation on the subject of curiosity, and it got me thinking about how curious people tend to be up on the latest thinking and ideas. So I challenged myself to think about the question I raised at the top of today’s blog – what was the last thing I learned?
Fortunately, or maybe a little bit smugly, I had an answer – in that I’ve been pitched into lots of new situations recently that have sharpened my self-awareness. I’ve been learning more and more about myself, my conditions for best performance, and what holds me back.
One of the things often said in talent circles is that it’s a quest for learning that distinguishes high flyers – an almost unquenchable need to absorb lots of new information.
When you ask yourself the question ‘What was the last thing I learned?’ – did floods of learning hit you? Or did you have to think for a while before you could identify a significant shift forward?
How can you adopt a more curious mindset?
- How well do you know yourself? Like me, taking the time to understand yourself better is time well spent. There are formal ways of doing this (through gaining feedback about how others see you for example). But increasingly (and this may amount to a little bit of navel gazing), I have learned a lot from taking time to reflect and deliberately notice how I behave in certain situations, how I react, how that made me feel, and how I cope with these emotions. Always this raises questions and experiments – what if I did something else instead? Stop what you’re doing and ask yourself these difficult questions. Then try different approaches. After all, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”
- What have you learned professionally? This is a great place to start – so ask yourself, how in touch with your professional world are you? Have you recently taken the time to read your newsfeed on LinkedIn? Have you got some Google Alerts set up on your profession? When did you last read a professional body circular rather than just delete it? What was the last event or conference you went to?
- What was the last bit of knowledge you picked up? Adding to our font of knowledge is always useful and helps drive our work forward. Sometimes I will search through all of my current projects and ask myself “what else could I learn that would make this project more interesting or innovative?” or I think through my list of friends (particularly ones who change my thinking) and ask myself “is it time to meet them again?”
When we were kids, we learned exceptionally fast every day. Year by year we changed and grew. Learning is vital to our progress, and we constantly need to challenge ourselves to learn and row. Maybe this week it’s time to reflect on what you’ve recently learned and, if it’s not enough, to reprioritise learning in your daily life.