Where’s the best place for learning? School? Or … here and now!

I am eternally curious. Think of the 4 year old child who drives everyone mad with endless WHYs - whywhywhy, but Mummy WHY? And somehow I never grew out of that! Whywhywhy is a constant cry of mine.

I used to devour encyclopaedias - now Google is my friend. What an astonishing resource we have there! 

I have spent many, many thousands of pounds on courses - both face-to-face and online - many, many thousands of pounds. When I want to learn something, I want to learn it good!

And I have hugely enjoyed my zigzagging process through life - like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, but always collecting something from each bloom.

I never feel I’ve “arrived” - rather I’m on a continuous journey of discovery and self-discovery.

Life is a continuous path of learning.

As Albert Einstein put it, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.”

The day I don’t learn something new is a lost day!

Learning is essential for our survival

Whenever you learn something, new neural connections are created in your brain. These pathways in the brain are what we use to work things out. 

And without continually building new neural pathways, the connections are not made and things start to die off.

There was a baby who had one eye covered for a while because of an operation. He never developed sight in that eye! At all! And grew up half-blind. Because those vital neural connections were not made at the right time.

Henry Ford said, “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

Think on that! It’s not our physical age that determines our progress in life, but how much we use that mighty brain of ours!

It’s actually essential for our survival into a fruitful and alert old age that we continue learning constantly. 

Place learning high in importance

Now. Parroting an answer you found on Google is NOT learning! 🙄

The old-fashioned learning by rote - while it has definite advantages - is not any use here either, as it largely bypasses your thinking processes. 

You need to tussle with a concept, get into it, understand it - enough to be able to explain it to someone else. That is true learning! Only when you’re able to teach it to someone else will you know you’ve actually absorbed the learning and made it your own.

Making your brain hurt is a good way of measuring whether you are learning or just reading, scanning - not absorbing the material.

This is why it’s such fun being a Transition Coach - watching my clients get to grips with new concepts and seeing just how they go on to change their life is wonderfully exciting!

So what are you going to learn?

I’m sure you don’t want to be one of those statistics, where the brain atrophies, causing memory loss and brain fog! Who’d want that?

So how can you inject learning into your day?

• You can READ. Fire up your e-reader or wrap yourself round a book in your armchair!

• You can LISTEN - to audiobooks, podcasts, even good ole steam radio.

• You can WATCH - but be selective about what you watch on tv! Skip the news, it’s a really bad idea to become a news junkie. The producers of these programmes know just how short to make clips so that they engage our flitting brain - a constant bombardment of images and words that confuse and befuddle us. There are some excellent discussion programmes and documentaries that will open your eyes! Go find those.

• Enrol in your local Community College, the Open University, or pick from one of the millions of excellent online programs.

And of course, once you’re learning something new - you’re going to want to put it into practice! How better than to make it part of your life’s work, the way you spend your time and earn your money?

Learning daily is one of those things that can get elbowed out of your life if you’re not careful. Even cooking the same dinner every day is removing a source of learning! 

We need to be on the alert to stay alert!

Establishing your purpose and your reason for being here is essential to keep that learning flame burning. What are you learning for if you have no idea where you’re going? Once we know what we’re headed for, we can select just what we need to help us get there.

Need some help discovering your purpose? Talk to me here