Credit: leoleobobeo on Pixabay
Being successful at work and in your career is dependent on a number of factors. One of those is your ability and willingness to learn and grow. Taking a proactive approach to learning is a sure fire way to give yourself a better chance of success.
Learning is not just about attending training courses though. Learning requires making the most of opportunities that present themselves (or that you can engineer for yourself) during your day to day work, as well as learning from others. It also requires the discipline to reflect on your behaviours and results so that you have a better understanding of why things worked out as they did. What did you do that supported positive results? What might you do differently next time?
One learning habit that will benefit you is to hone the ability to be both a participant and an observer when taking part in work activities. For example, if you are keen to influence a group of people within a meeting through your interactions with them, the ability to both take part in the discussion and to observe what is happening can be extremely helpful. You need to be able to keep a wider awareness of individual and group dynamics, for example, participant reactions, who seems to be aligned with whom, who is involved and who is sitting back, as well as being aware of any emotional reactions in other participants and in yourself. While this can take practice, it enables you to adapt your approach in the moment and learn as you go.
A second learning habit that I have only grown to more fully embrace in my later career has been to look for the opportunities to make mistakes. Ok, well technically I am looking to embrace opportunities that present themselves for things that I have not done before. As a result, not being an expert or having experience increases the chance that I will make mistakes. Instead of seeing this as failure, I now see this as a learning opportunity. It’s not that I can’t do whatever it is but simply that I can’t do it YET (see Carol Dweck’s work on Growth Mindset and Power of Yet for more). Taking this approach and remembering that life is an experience, not a performance, opens up so many opportunities and chances to learn.
Credit: Jess_the_VA on Pixabay
A third learning habit which I would highly recommend is to become familiar with the practice of Thinking Partnerships. As defined by Nancy Kline of Time to Think, Thinking Partnerships enable two people to support each other in as little as 20 minutes, to think for themselves in a way which can unblock, clarify, and enable forward movement. By providing attention, ease and a number of other ‘thinking components’ one person provides a sounding board, without interruption, for the other. When their agreed time is complete, the partners swap roles. To learn more, Nancy’s book Time to Think is a great source. The learning you can achieve about yourself through this simple practice is highly relevant because you are the source of your own solutions.
A fourth learning habit that I have grown to adopt over the years is to make a trade-off between strengths and development areas. This is a fine art requiring openness and humility balanced with confidence. It is important to recognise when feedback from another is revealing a genuine blind spot that you would do well to be aware of but equally important is the ability to know what your strengths are and to use them to good effect. Spending too long considering only the things you are not so good at and working on them can be at the detriment of using what you are already good at and becoming even better. It is not a question of ignoring revealed blind spots but perhaps, instead, considering how strengths that you have can help you to minimise any problems they contribute to.
In summary, if you want to get ahead, fine tune your learning habits by:
- Being a participant-observer – why not practice in your next safe, social situation?
- Embrace new opportunities and give yourself the chance to make a mistake – and learn from it
- Being a Thinking Partner on a weekly basis – let your mind think for itself and make learning breakthroughs through the attention of another
- Developing the art of balancing the focus on strengths and development areas
These are my tips for developing good learning habits – what would you add from your experience?
Leave a Reply