Are you secretly a Bad Learner?

let's talk about what makes someone not a good learner like what what are the habits or things that that straight away go that's not good learning skills or what makes that so there are learning skills and then there are attributes and I sometimes call those learning enablers for example you could have someone that's amazing at being able to process information they've got a great memory however if they are terribly procrastinating then they're not enabled to use those processes and so if we divide them in these two different areas a lot of people will think about

the learning skills and they're definitely important for sure however what I found is that the learning skills are often less relevant and less important than the learning enablers these are the things like the mindset and the perspectives the time management the task management the prioritization the growth mindset because without those someone that doesn't have good learning skills would never be able to develop better learning skills this is a problem I have a lot with the current mainstream approach to it is that we're often very status quo we sort of say okay well we've got all

these Learners that don't have some of these skills okay so what are we doing for them but the conclusion is people with better skills perform better and then it's there's not as much focus in terms of well how do we need to develop these skills in the students often it's well how can teachers help to facilitate these skills in the students but teachers already overworked you know so it becomes a sort of you know Catch-22 where these Learners don't have skills and they're not performing and no one is there to really teach them teachers are

then expected to teach it to them but they're already overworked and then we've got these Learners that have some of these skills that are doing well so the actual skills I think are less important than some of the attributes for example just like what I mentioned growth mindset is a really really big one it's not an easy thing to develop deep transformative learning skills it's not one of those things that you can do overnight there are going to be mistakes there is going to be significant trial and error and there has to be a really

reflective process and if the mindset is I'm going to give this a go for 20 minutes and if it doesn't produce results that's it the learner is not going to be able to persist through to create the transformative chains that they need so one of the biggest focuses that I have in my practice is actually teaching that mindset to even give them the chance to develop those skills in the first place it's a it's a it's a tote bag it's thrown around a lot that growth mindset it's one of these it was a bit like

what's your why when Simon Says brought it out everyone you started using it and then now started you know hearing growth mindset can we go a little bit deeper into that so what does that mean how do you teach it and and sort of your views on growth mindset I've been involved in sort of the learning development space I see sort of how Corporate tends to use the word and I really think that the way that's being used now is being bastardized a little bit from the original research which was by Carol dwick and it's

become the sort of buzzword that sort of means more of this nebulous concept but I think it's important to under stand that growth mindset versus fixed mindset these uh in a way almost personality attributes that have been developed since usually at a young age and one of the characteristic differences is the response that someone has to making mistakes and to difficulty so someone with a fixed mindset is seeking validation because they are obsessed about an outcome their primary focus is to have a positive outcome whereas someone with a growth mindset the outcome is a side

effect of the process and their focus on the process making mistakes is something that they are thriving in they're actually looking for those mistakes because they see them as growth opportunities whereas with a fixed mindset the mistake actually starts to create insecurity it challenges their sense of identity and in some cases their sense of self-worth so those with a growth mindset because they aren't having like an existential crisis every single time they make a mistake yeah they're able to throw themselves in the deep end and learn a lot more effectively there's a big issue in

the corporate space I think when people say gross mindset gross minds and have more of it have more of it without recognizing what are the constituents behind it that can actually make things worse because now you have all these people that know what growth mindset is recognize they don't have it but they're not given the skills to realistically develop them so now they feel even worse because now they know that there's this big disparity between what they should be and then where they are and there seems to be no way to bridge that Gap and

I think that's probably doing more harm than good and someone has a fixed mindset he said it obviously starts some of these things started that you learn at an early age is it too late for someone at an older age in the 20s or 30s to switch and what do leaders need to sort of you know a couple little tips to leaders that can actually encourage that going from a fixed to a growth so there's not a wealth of research on this so I'm going to draw a lot from my personal practice I'm working with

the people that I work with in my practice there is resistance but it takes time it's possible but it's not going to happen overnight obviously but in some cases it can take months sometimes even years to create that change I think what leaders can do is to be aware of when they are asking questions or demanding things of people that place the importance or the value of them in their role or even as a person sometimes based on the outcome that's being produced and this can go really really deep for example let's say that you

have a new graduate that you've just employed a new member of your team and you assign them a certain task most of the time the success of that task is based on the outcome of that task there isn't too much thought given in terms of what is the process that they're doing and if there is it's usually retrospective based on the task so if they failed the task then we look at the process and say well where did we go wrong and if they succeeded on the task well we don't need to care about the

process because testoster was completed successfully sounds like our office as a vast overwhelming majority so a better way to do it would be when we're setting a task the first step of the task should be to map out what the process is and then to say okay you're new to this we don't expect you to be perfect but no even moderately decent leader expects someone new to be perfect at their job straight away but it's about what we're doing with that expectation so we don't expect you to be perfect and there are 10 000 ways

you could do this wrong but you you you'll probably only make four or five mistakes so in the first stage what we're going to do is I want you to map out the process and we're going to figure out what are the mistakes that you're most likely to make and every time we discover a possible mistake or a weakness we celebrate that's a win great job you picked up on that I'm really impressed that you were able to pick up on that most people don't pick up on them the first time and once we're happy

with the process then we can say okay we'll just just go and do it and we'll see how it goes and then afterwards if the outcome was successful we would still do the reflection and would say after your experience did you feel that there are any other mistakes that you were going to make that you could reflect on did you get lucky in having a good outcome or if there was a bad outcome then we could reflect on that and obviously differently by saying well you know how did things go wrong but making sure that

the focus is on saying oh so these were the mistakes so we still won oh that's good that's good we figured out where the mistakes were oh that's that was a really good thing oh by the way you know just these errors can you just correct that and just come back to me later yeah yeah that's a really really it's encouraging mistakes right about saying it's not even we want you to make mistakes maybe to even encouragement it's more than that it's more the whole structure the whole framing of the work environment the idea of

performance is that the the primary outcome of Peak Performance is the ability to engage in and thrive in and work with your mistakes at a very fast frequency rather than the outcome it's the understanding that we all have as professionals that the outcome is a symptom of the process if we all know that but there's a sense of insecurity especially from a business's point of view to say okay so therefore we're actually going to use that as the primary metric for Success because you need the outcomes at the end of the day so you need

to have in a way that belief that yes if we just triple down and process you know mistake finding Behavior the outcome will become better over time and it creates a really great culture as well things