Unfortunately, there seems to be major shifts in the minds of our changing generations.  That shift is leaning people to need more things spoon fed to them with continuous distractions and activities while the mind of every individual is becoming more and more unchallenged.  Kids especially show this as young generations are easily bored and they seem to require more and more toys, games, activities, attention and things to keep them happy.  Funny thing is, this is happening mostly in the highly developed nations.

Learning Keeps the Mind Active

An active mind is a healthy mind so its important to keep your mind active throughout your life, not just when you are young.  One method to really keep the mind truly challenged is to always be learning.  Many people get to a point in their lives where they don’t believe they need to and some even think that they are no longer able to learn new things once they reach a certain age.  It’s this kind of believe that prevents them from learning new things, not their age at all.  It takes years to slowly disengage the mind and many people let their work and home lives become so comfortable and repetitive that they have no need to learn new things.  They don’t take on new experiences, they never go out looking to read or learn new things and they do the same job for many years!  This kind of lifestyle will quickly give someone the belief that they can’t learn any longer and its that believe then that prevents them from ever taking on new learning activities.

I recently wrote an article about empowering others to become learners and every step in that article applies to ourselves as well!.  The practice of learning new skills, studying new material, and building new skills and knowledge to apply is a powerful mind enhancer.  It strengthens your neural connections in the brain and exercises the mind’s memory.

Creative People Don’t Get Bored

Creativity is a trait that usually goes hand in hand with learning.  The most creative people in history and even those I know in my life are also the people that are constantly learning new things.  Think of famous inventors, artists and teachers; they are all creative and people who are constantly learning.  Creative thinkers are able to find new activities with very little or even no stimulation.  They can take their surroundings or current activity that might be very boring to one individual, and they can find new things to do, create and to think about.  Its doesn’t seem to matter where they are, who they are with, or what the environment has in it to spark the creativity and learning attitude to expose itself.

Using the signs of boredom is a very powerful tool in life.  Its useful to parents, teachers, and leaders in all areas of life.  Parents and teachers can use it as a sign that they have students or children with untapped potential just looking for more challenging studies and activities.  It’s a sign that the creative side of a person is not yet that developed either so bringing more of creative learning, games, hobbies and activities can improve that creative thinking.  Leaders can use it to easily identify their most creative thinkers and those who can handle more challenging work.  Learning should be an important part of everyone’s lives and at least in these areas, you can make a huge difference to yourself and others by making learning continuous and a bigger part of life!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 17 Comments »

The desire to learn is not an easy trait to pass to others and while I have many of my own approaches to learn new things, there are countless other methods for learning that others use as well. None of those can simply be taught to anyone you cross since everyone learns with their own methods.  Not only that, but the desire to learn is something that has to come from an individual and cannot be expected without that person accepting to learn new things.  I believe that anyone who is a strong learner in life has great advantages in creativity, perspective, knowledge and many other areas.  If you can empower just one other person to become a learner themselves, you have given them a great gift!

This articles covers some of the methods I’ve learned to help empower others to become learners themselves.

Lead By Example

One of the most obvious and important ways to inspire others to learn is to ensure that others know you are learning yourself.  Make your actions speak for themselves when it comes to learning.  Talk about the things you learn and how you learned them.  Ensure that people know when you’ve learned something new by reviewing it with them or by presenting it to them.  Spend time studying and practising new methods and processes that you see.  Volunteer to teach new people in your work area everything about the job and make sure they know some of the resources you use for learning yourself.

Keep books on hand and talk to others about books they read.  Spend some time everyday reading books as it is the best resource for new material that exists still.  The internet is certainly an option as well but if its in the workplace, the internet is still often considered as a time waster, not a learning tool, so you should make other methods of learning more visible in the workplace.  Take some action with these as examples in your life and ensure that you are leading by example.  Doing this automatically attracts others to do some of the same things or use the same resources even without you hinting or asking them to.  People tend to copy others and if they see you learning, they will likely commit some learning themselves.

Demonstrate the Value of Learning

Sharing your success stories and failures is a great way to demonstrate the value of learning.  Take away from all your major activities something learned and share that with others.  Whether it is some life experience or project you have been on, look at what the things are that you learned from that and share that with others.  Look at how the mistakes you’ve learned from have improved you or helped you avoid such mistakes again or look at how you’ve repeated successes and learned to excel in those areas.  Demonstrating these type of results as a value of learning will help to inspire and motivate others to take learning more seriously themselves.  People value what impacts them and those they love so if you can demonstrate how learning something will improve their lives or those they love, you are much more likely to influence them into becoming a learning in that area.

Motivate with Rewards and Measures

If you are working to empower a friend, child, colleague or direct report, you should closely examine what kind of rewards and measures you use to encourage them to learn on their own.  Noticing new things learned is the easiest but often overlooked.  People want to be recognized so simply telling them what you noticed they were doing to learn more impressed you, or say thanks to them to encourage this type of behavior.  You may want to look at offering something for those who learn something new, or solve a problem by studying it or perhaps simply reading a book or fixed number of books.  Simple rewards can be very effective here especially for children.

The best kind of reward to give is one that is given without any prior promise or intent.  Do not tell someone you will give them a reward if they go learn something.  Instead, challenge them in different ways and then when they do learn something on their own, reward them for that spontaneously.  You don’t want someone to only learn if there is a reward at stake so its important that the rewards be random and spontaneous.

Measuring progress towards a goal of learning or self learning is also very helpful, especially if you have someone who you know is already working on becoming a more active learner.  Put some metric into place like the number of hours spent or the number of books read or the number of new things completed each week.  These types of measures can be highly motivating if you are a friend, parent or colleague with the intent to improve and help that person.  Don’t make it a person favor or competition, simply encourage them to become a more active learner.

Make resources Available and Easy to Access

Some people don’t know where to start when having to learn something new and this is where resources come in.  You can help provide the tools, people, training, courses, material or whatever else is needed to encourage someone to learn and empower them by eliminating any roadblocks.  You want to get as many things out of their way as possible so that the learning is easy.  Once there is a habit of learning and a desire, you can help them to get obstacles out of their way themselves.  These obstacles are things like having access to the learning materials, money to attend seminars and courses, lists of books and online sources for information, public library access, a network of people and friends who you can discuss and learn from and any other resources that would help someone learn.  Share any resources you’ve used for learning and lend out books and trade content.  Join a club that does this or look for used material or items to trade.  Introduce people to others with similar interests and learning habits so that as many resources that a person might need to learn from are readily available.

Let People Learn With Your Own Style

With all those resources listed above, not everyone is going to use them all or even like the idea of them all.  Find out how a person likes to learn and let them have their own style for content and practice.  It doesn’t matter how someone learns or even what they learn if you can empower them to become a life long learner.  Someone who learns today will continue to learn tomorrow and they will stimulate themselves to explore new areas and branch their learning experiences into new and different topics with various methods.  You should allow others to learn by their own tools and methods.  If you look at all the other headings from this article, they can each be accomplished while still letting a person learn with their own style so don’t push them into your style of learning and let them discover what works best for them.  There is certainly no problem with giving them suggestions or explaining what has worked well for you to help empower them, just make sure it is their own choice as a learner needs to have their own style of learning if it is to last.

Start Small

Empowering someone is a difficult task to accomplish so you should always start small.  You don’t want to make any massive changes or expectations on someone that overwhelms them and discourages them from being engaged in new learning activities.  Begin with simple straightforward things that you already know they can handle and build upon that to have consistency and repeatability in learning actions.  Ramp those activities up over time and make sure that you don’t accelerate too fast.  Keep in mind that you likely have a much higher ability to sustain a learning mindset and workload than someone you are looking to empower with that attitude so you need to ensure you allow them to grow and learn at their pace.  Make sure you recognize any and all progress since you want to encourage more learning and any increases in learning focus is valuable.

Set Goals and Plans

Goals and specific plans should help you to empower someone to become a learner as well.  Work with to set a specific goal that they can accept about their level of learning and ability to learn.  Something that is measurable and demonstrates an ability to learn and willingness to learn instead of a specific learning task.   Don’t teach or look for facts, content, or knowledge in these goals,  instead, teach them HOW to learn, how to think, how to approach things.  Give them space to become an individual with their own creative mind and an ability to find solutions to problems and a desire to hunt down that solution themselves.  Set the goals to help focus them and use them as a guide to review progress and help them get to a level of ability they are happy in achieving.  Continue to expand those goals over time as they are accomplished and look for new ways to complete each goal to help expand their learning capacity and ability.

Final Thoughts

Keep them away from the systemic teaching systems (like classic schooling and courses) that do nothing but spoon feed information, training memorization instead of thinking and ensure that every distraction and control is bound around a very rigid and non-flexible teaching style.  These methods are failing now to build students with individual minds and are producing less and less people with the ability and willingness to learn throughout their life!  Make sure to encourage "out of the box" thinking since thinking has become so conditioned in today’s schooling that few people ever come to realize the dangers of that system.

If you empower a person to learn, they become a learner and teacher for life with an immense ability to take on and excell with any new challenge!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 4 Comments »

In my last article I explored the five Ws about training someone.  This article expands on that by closely exploring the HOW to train someone.

Start with the Right Mindset

If you offer to train someone, don’t pretend or imply that you know everything about that subject.  Even if you know a lot, there is always more to learn and you should offer to help in a way that you are suggesting ideas and wanting to help them learn instead of telling them what to do.  Being humble with training is important to avoid you coming across as a "know it all".  This can be especially true if you are teaching someone older than you or with more experience.

The attitude and mindset of wanting to help and teach someone else is what you want to portray, not the fact that you are smarter than them or know more than them.  That only leads to disrespect and makes the learning for less likely.

Prepare An Outline

To train someone something an outline can be a life saver for stepping them through a process and to guide you to stay on track.  You should create this BEFORE the training starts if you can and have it ready once you proceed.  Its helpful especially if you are not a natural learner since you may find it hard to stay on track or approach things in the right order.  Here are some things you might need to include in a typical training outline:

• Answer the question of what is the area you are training and why?
• Put some steps to learn this new thing onto paper (somewhere from 3-8 steps works best)
• Ask yourself what questions might someone have and prepare answers ahead of time to present them.
• If there is expected doubt or resistance to new training, explore ways to overcome that.
• List sections or titles for each stage in your training to help guide you and categorize your sessions.

Consider What Your Audience Wants to Learn

Don’t assume that what you plan to train will be everything that your audience wants.  You don’t need to change your topics or main areas, but sometimes looking to tailor your training just a little bit to cover the important areas for your audience will make a HUGE difference.  This doesn’t matter whether you are providing one on one training or a huge seminar.  Ask people what they want to get out of it and look to cover some of those areas specifically.  If you consider the audience, they will be far more receptive and attentive since they will actually be looking for the area that they a re most interested in.

Involve Your Audience

It helps to keep your audience alert and involved with the training as much as possible.  This ensures that they are more attentive and keeps their mind active in the learning process.  Have them answer questions, repeat things aloud, do short tasks on paper, work in groups, answer simple quizzes or anything else that has them directly involved with the new material.  Involving them directly and making things more hands-on is far more effective since so many people learn best that way.

Follow Up and Reinforce the Learning

Once you finish with your training, make sure to follow up on it.  This doesn’t matter if you had providing a one time session or continual training, following up on the areas you covered from previous training is important to refresh it for yourself and your audience, and it allows you to see how much has actually been learned.  The point of training is not that you taught it, the point is that who you taught it to has actually learned it.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 4 Comments »

My Own Realizations

I’ve written articles on being humble before and I strive to stay humble when talking and sharing about my own knowledge and skills with others.  I used to have a much more competitive and egocentric attitude which I learned to change.  The problem is that I’ve taken that so far, I often now reserve myself while trying to be humble but it’s at the expense of sharing with others.  If there is an area I could help I often hold myself back to avoid being overbearing or pushy with my ideas.

Interestingly, I recently met David Zinger from Slacker Manager while he was in Calgary and he reinforced something I’ve been told not only by him, but also friends and colleagues recently.  He saw right away at how I shrug off some of my skills and he questioned me about that.  I’ve had this impression of myself that I can be too ‘pushy’ with my ideas.  David recommending getting past that by simply offering your help by invitation.  If you give the invitation to someone else, you leave it up to them if they want to take advantage of it or not.  They don’t have to accept and you certainly are not pushy by offering help by invitation.

So, I guess, having this told to me several times now, and especially when someone I first meet can see me doing it, I realized I need to be more careful of that perception I’ve created and not to limit myself with what I have to offer.  I’ve taken the step to share these findings and my skills by writing here at Learn This and I truly love knowing I can impact people’s thinking, their knowledge and lives.  Now, I need to extend that out by invitation to more people I interact with in person, not just behind this screen.  I hope this site will continue to find me friends and people to meet in person as that is where I hope to extend more invitations of help.  All of this led me to look at ways to offer what you know by invitation and these are some of the ways I feel a person can do that!

Realize What You Have to Offer

You need to recognize your own strengths and know what you are capable of before you can offer help to others. Obviously, there is help you can offer in almost any area even if you don’t have skills for that.  I’m meaning to look more at what your unique skills, talents and strengths are so that you can offer the best you have.  Take time and surveys to think about and outline your strengths so you can find ways to make them available.  There are great resources online in surveys, articles and of course in books (such as Discover Your Strengths, The Strength Finder) to help uncover your strengths.  Ask others you know what they see are your strengths and accept what strengths you have.  Sometimes we ignore our strengths we have because we want to have choose our strengths or give the impression that we have strengths that are not real.  While strengths can certainly be changed, it takes time and practice to learn them and its far more valuable to realize what you already have and take advantage off it.

Don’t Miss An Opportunity to Help

Once you realize the strengths you have, look for opportunities to use them.  Use them for yourself, use them to help others and look for ways to offer to others, the benefits of your strengths.  This might be some expertise, special skills, knowledge, personal trait or characteristic.  Any of these can be helpful in different situations, so pay attention to where you have a chance to use them.

One way to do this is to watch others who you know have a strength in common with you and see if you can see how they use it.  Ask them how they use it and observe their actions.  Seeing it demonstrated is a great step is seeing how you can do the same thing.  Look for ways they take advantage of their strengths and replicate their actions.  As you learn their techniques you can begin to apply the same steps and take advantage of every opportunity you can to share your skills and abilities with others.

Once you know your strengths, practice them and are comfortable with it as well, its helpful to offer that strength to others.  Sharing your experiences and especially your strengths with people will continue to reinforce them and it will give you the confidence to share it at every opportunity.  Make yourself and your strengths available to others.  Offer your services, your skill set, your help.  Putting out what you have to offer to others can take many forms.  Consider all the ways you could do this:

• Face to face communication to others with an offer of your strength
• Invite others to ask you about your strengths.
• Share your story of how you’ve developed your strengths
• Ask others about their strengths to bring attention to the topic
• Advertise your services
• Start a blog, write articles or white papers about your strengths
• Reveal your strengths to others and encourage them to ask for your help

Growing the opportunities you have to help can also expand if you put attention to it.  This tends to cascade where you can develop those areas even further.  Continue to develop that and learn about it by practicing it, learning about it from others, and reading about those strength areas.

Keep The Invitation Open

This relates to not missing an opportunity but I think applies more when you have already helped someone or have been turned down for help.  If you respond to those people and inform that the invitation is always open and that you are willing to offer help, it is far more likely to reoccur.  People unfortunately feel an obligation to pay back what they have gained from someone and so they are often reluctant to ask someone again for help or to continue asking.  You can help to diffuse those feelings by offering your help and extending that invitation again even immediately after helping.  If they know you are still willing and not avoid them to get out of helping, that extra invitation can bring a lot of comfort in having to ask again for the other person.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

Learning is obviously an important topic on this site and while there are many methods to learn, one that is often thought of only in business is delegation. I think delegation has a lot of negative associations in the workplace because people see it not as a learning tool, but as a way to pass the buck. A way for a boss to unload their work on you. I hope to change that impression and look at why delegation is an amazing learning tool!

Learning with Delegation

Delegation is when you engage others to take on responsibility or actions that you would have done otherwise. Those actions are often things others could easily do. Sometimes they need a little guidance or perhaps a lot more than that before being comfortable with doing it themselves. Whatever the circumstance is, there is room for someone to learn some new skills and for the person delegating to learn from teaching. That process may take minutes, it might take months, it just depends on what and who is involved, but there is always some room to learn for both parties.

I’m not going to go into details with each step on how to delegate (at least not today) but the process looks basically like this:

1. Identify something that someone else could do that you currently do yourself
2. Pick someone who is able to take on that new delegation
3. Discuss and make clear that you need that persons help and give them the reasons you picked them
4. Describe what you would like them to do and what the benefits are (personally, for the organization, etc)
5. Have them paraphrase and repeat in there own words to ensure they understand
6. Brainstorm any resources or training needed and who can provide that
7. Plan some actions to get started
8. Agree on how to report back on the delegation

This whole process can be simple and open the door to teach something you are already competent at, and to have someone else learn from you. If you are not in a position to delegate you can definitely ask your boss or even other colleagues if there is something they could delegate to you to help take it off their plate. There is almost ALWAYS something they would love you to do and its a great learning opportunity. Swamped with work already? Ask your boss if there is something they can delegate to you and discuss what YOU can delegate to someone else to free some time.

Delegation is useful as a learning tool between peers as well and if you find someone interested in learning the same way, you can often swap delegation with each other to each practice and to learn something new.

Get Out of Your Own Way!

How many times have you said or heard that people don’t delegate because they don’t have time! This is ridiculous as delegation is the ultimate time saver. Its also the ultimate tool to learning new things in a couple of ways. Most of the time, you are doing what you already know how to do. Those are the tasks you learn the least from and while you may be good at them, if that’s all you do, you can’t spend much time learning. To keep learning and have time for learning, you need to stop doing the things you are already good at and make time for learning new things. Delegation is perfect for this to free up your own time to help you master your skills by teaching them to someone else. I relate this highly to getting out of your comfort zone and taking on new things, all of which are learning opportunities. Look for these chances to delegate, stop doing ONLY the things you are already good at, and quit getting in your own way from learning!

Others Want You to Delegate to Them

I’ve written before about not being afraid to ask others for help and that is the best way to delegate something, by asking. People are afraid to delegate because they think it means telling someone else what to do. That is not delegation at all. The other persons needs to understand why you are asking them and have their own motivation to helping you. Perhaps they will learn something new, perhaps because they are better at doing it than you, perhaps they might advance in the company by taking on more responsibility, whatever the reasons, they need to be motivated and willing to take it on. If you ask, instead of tell you can get around that. You need to be willing to assist if its needed for anything you delegate as well.

Delegation Outside of Business

Delegation is really about accountability and so it’s useful outside of an authoritative position or business position as well. If you always look at asking for help and explaining why you’re asking and ensuring that person is motivated to help, delegation is just as effective outside of business. This might be with your friends, family or colleagues in a volunteer or non-profit organization, they all work the same way. The human component of delegation is the teaching, the responsibility and the accountability to each other. There needs to be a clear line of responsibility so that both parties know what each other will do and help with and that there is joint accountability to each do their own part in the process. The opportunity to learn from each other is just as likely whether its in business or not.

I’ll be expanding on this delegation process in a few days to help you put this into practice. If you haven’t yet subscribed to new content here on LearnThis.ca you can do so here in RSS and here by email .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 8 Comments »

I’ve had plenty of comments about my book reviews I write and one of my readers and good friend, Khalid, asked how I go about actually writing one. Its a great question and I never really thought about it much until asked so I’ll let you know what I’ve learned from book reviews and how I go about writing them.

Keep in Mind the Review

This is something I think a lot of people neglect when reading a book and I think it is very important. To me, it helps me look at the book from a high level and watch specifically for overall themes and concepts that the author is getting trying to make a point of. If you don’t look for these, sometimes you can get through a book and while you may pick up on little bits of useful information, you may not be left with an overall single theme or concept that the author was making. This doesn’t always work since it obviously depends on the author, however, I find that more often than not, if you are thinking about this, it will be more obvious as well.

Look through the chapter headers, reread any summaries that may be given and look for commonalities between different concepts and chapters. There is often a single underlying theme and that is important to capture whenever possible. Put what you discover on paper and describe it in your own words. This is important for your own learning from the book since once you’ve thought about it and paraphrased it, you will remember much longer than if you simple copy or re-write something the author said in the first place.

Take Notes, Underline or Highlight Important Content

Marking important points in a book is very valuable. I use a technique of simply drawing a line down the page beside any content I thought was very important or useful. Just a simple mark in the margins and nothing more. That way, I can easily flip through a book and quickly see the pages that have points of interest on them and I can reread those parts and refresh my memory. This is particularly useful if you reread a book a year or more later and have forgotten a lot fo the content. Rereading just those important areas will quickly let you remind yourself of all the important points in the book and it just takes a few minutes to have a great refresher!

Some people (and I’ve done this too) will write notes, underline or even yellow highlight important text right in there book. Not everyone will be willing to do this and I’ve had discussions with some friends that would NEVER write in a book since they want to preserve the authors writing without adding your own thoughts for the next reader. You can always make notes in a notepad while you read or just jot down page numbers to come back to that you felt were particularly useful. Tear that page out and leave it in the book so you can easily come back to it at a later date.

Always Include Your Own Opinion

People are social beings and love the opinion of others. They like to make their own opinions as well, but for something new, they will latch on to yours until they form there own, so your opinion is particularly useful for a book review. Think of these two examples, which are you more likely to read?

1. This book was a superbly written and one of the best books in its genre, but I really didn’t enjoy reading it personally, I couldn’t relate to it.
2. This book got bad ratings and some people said they didn’t like it, but I absolutely loved it! It is now one of my favorite books of all time and I’ll definitely be reading it again sometime!

Did you pick #1, or #2. Most people pick #2, especially if that is from someone they know, since we all value a personal opinion more than ratings or a critic.

A book review should always include your personal opinion of the book and how you felt about it. Did you like it, was it enjoyable, useful or easy to relate to? How did it make you feel? Was it easy to read? Exciting? Boring? Whatever you felt while reading it, capture that in your review. It’s often great to make comparisons to other similar books as the reader may have read that book so will easily connect your references to your new review.

Apply Something From the Book and Your Review

The best part of any book is remembering it and whenever possible using that in your life somehow. A great way for this is to look for at minimum, one thing, you will definitely apply from the book. I usually have a few items that I look to apply and if you always plan to apply something from a book, its much easier to find things that are practical and easy to apply, no matter how subtle they are presented in the book. Mark them down, remind yourself of them after the book and schedule yourself a follow up to check if you’ve done it in a week and then a month later. No matter what it is, applying something from a book will help you remember other content from the book as well, as actions are always more tightly associated in your mind so those actions help strengthen your memory recall with others portions of the book as well.

Tell Someone Else About the Book

One more things that makes your review even more useful and easier to remember is to tell someone else about it. Whether this is written or just spoken with a friend or colleague, its great to share something you’ve learned from a book. Its even better to share with them what you plan to apply and your opinions on the book if they are curious or interested in reading it as well. Even though I put up a review of many of the books I read here on LearnThis.ca , I always make a habit of telling someone in person about my latest book I’ve read as well. Don’t always tell the same person about every book you read unless you know they are interested. If you own it the book, always offer to lend it to them if they are interested in reading it themselves after your recommendation or review.

I hope this was useful to see not only how to write a review about a book, but how to take something from reading any book. I started reading reviews on books as a tool to remember them and that eventually spun off into a desire to write other topics which is why I started this blog in the first place. I’ve certainly refined my reviews in the last couple of years and I’d love to hear from others any way I could improve them further and if you have any suggestions on writing great book reviews. If you are just interested in reading and learning them well, here is a great article at The Practice of Leadership called, How to read a Business Book . Enjoy!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 3 Comments »