Month: April 2023

Learning, re-learning, unlearning

/ binarybea / Leave a comment

Do you enjoy learning new things? And do you prefer learning by yourself, or signing up for courses where someone teaches you?

I don't consider myself a professional trainee, one of those people who sign up for course after course in an infinite loop, but it is true that I love learning, and I love taking part in training courses and workshops on a variety of topics, especially those related to personal development.

Luckily, there are many companies (including mine) that invest quite a lot in employee training and development, not only in direct relation to their job role, but also in a more holistic way, on topics like emotional intelligence, mental health or financial education, to name a few examples.

Also, one of the good things that came out of the pandemic was the opening up of possibilities for online training that simply didn't exist a few years ago, or that only existed in an in-person format. Thanks to this transformation, the amount and variety of interesting choices for learning,, both formally and informally, has grown in an exponential way. And slowly but surely, the in-person option is starting to become available again, like in the seminar I've attended this weekend in Dublin (which by the way was amazing, thanks Owen!)

But that begs the question: in reality, to what extent are we making the most of all those training courses we sign up for? All those webinars, those masterclasses, those workshops? How much of what we're learning are we practicing in real life, and how much ends up forgotten? Because getting to know theory X, technique Y or spiritual philosophy Z is all well and good, but unless we apply them to our life, unless we bring them down to Earth and practice them, we're not going to notice any difference, beyond having had fun for a little while (and probably, having spent a certain amount of time and money).

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we shouldn't focus on learning new things; I'm proposing that we truly learn them, integrating them into our life. Knowing that sometimes along the way, we will need to re-learn things that we had already forgotten, or we will come across other things that we used to believe were the absolute truth, and then turned out not to be, forcing us to unlearn them so that we can learn again later. It's an infinite process, it never ends, but it can be tremendously enriching.

So this is what I encourage you to do each time you take part in a training course, workshop, masterclass or whatever: find at least one specific action you can practice in order to integrate what you learned, make the commitment to do that action, and enjoy the results.

And for reflection right now, here are three questions:

  • What's the most useful/valuable/important thing you've learned lately?
  • What had you forgotten already, that you had to re-learn?
  • What turned out not to be true, and you had to unlearn?

Round numbers

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This is BinaryWords´s 100th post! 🙂

Hand holding a 100 euro note

It looks cool, doesn´t it? One hundred. A round number. We´ve reached three digits.

Although, well, technically, the very first post could be considered post zero, a simple hello world (no better way to start a blog inspired by computer science) that I wrote back in 2013 to inaugurate my brand new Wordpress site, after the previous incarnation of BinaryWords had fallen into oblivion.

It was also in 2013, ten years ago (another round number), when I took my first Neuro Linguistic Programming course, having signed up for it sort of by coincidence (or so I would think if I believed in coincidences), and completely unaware that I was about to dive right into the world of personal development.

Unfortunately, after that year and that post zero, life somehow got in the way, and my passion for writing was forgotten once more... Until 2021, when it came back again, stronger than ever, and then I finally did it: I took up writing with renewed excitement, this time in a bilingual format, and I chose to share topics that went a bit deeper, helping with self-reflection and personal transformation. That was the origin of my first real post: this is your life, and everything that followed after.

So, technically, if we don´t count hello world, this is blog post number 99, which is not a round number after all... But at the end of the day, does it matter? Sometimes we get too carried away with numbers, especially in these times when we have metrics for everything. Let´s focus on content for once.

And speaking of content, what is your favourite post to date? You can see them all in the archive; I would love to hear which one you enjoyed the most and why, as well as other topics you would like me to write about. And once again, thanks for reading me!

Time to reflect

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Happy Easter to all of those celebrating 🙂

A text message from a good friend the other day (thanks Ara!) brought me back to the way I used to spend Easter weekend as a teen and young adult: in a retreat at a convent called El Palancar.

"El Palancar" convent (Extremadura, Spain) seen from a group of rocks high on a hillside

La Pascua del Palancar was a retreat for young people organized by Franciscan brothers from the Betica province, from Holy Thursday until Easter Sunday. The main theme was obviously religious, as it happened with most spiritual events back then, but there was more to it: it was a wonderful opportunity to switch off from the noise and haste of daily life (even if mobile phones didn´t exist yet!) and get more deeply connected to Life, Nature, our travel companions, and ultimately ourselves.

Now that I think of it, these were probably my first steps along the path of self-discovery and personal development.

During the three and a half days of the event, most of the activities were done in company, either in one big group or divided into smaller groups. But there was one, on the Saturday afternoon, which was different: they called it the desertand it was a time slot of about two hours for which they encouraged us to find a quiet place for contemplation and personal reflection. You can imagine how challenging that could be for some of the teenagers: two hours on their own, without talking to anybody!

I remember I always climbed up the rocks on the side of the hill, up to a place very similar to the one in the photo: from there I could see the convent down in the distance, surrounded by the characteristic landscape of Extremadura in the springtime. I was carrying a notebook, a pen, and a piece of paper with a few questions as a guide. But apart from that, nothing.

Silence. Nature. Time and space to allow everything I had inside to come out.

I loved that feeling.

And up there, in that little corner of the world, the two hours would go by, breathing, thinking, writing... Then at some point I would start hearing voices down in the distance, maybe also the strings of a guitar, and I would realize it was almost time to return to the world. I felt like Saint Peter in that passage from the Bible about the transfiguration, when he says to Jesus: Lord, it is good for us to be here, let´s put up a shelter, and Jesus explains that they can´t stay in contemplation at the top of the mountain, they need to go down again and continue with their mission on the ground.

Sometimes we get so sucked into this world we live in, that we lose contact with what matters most to us. But if every now and then we take a break to go up the mountain, then we will listen to our inner voice again, and it will guide us to get back on track. It´s been many years since I last went to El Palancar, and my "mountain" these days sometimes takes the shape of a beach, but the idea is the same: a little bit of time, solitude and silence, and the answer appears.

What about you? When was the last time you listened to your inner voice? And what would it say to you today, if you stopped to listen?

Sharpening the saw

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If you´re into topics like productivity, time management or personal development, I´m sure that more than once you will have read or heard the idea that one must pause to sharpen the saw.

Manual saw making its way through a wooden block

This is how Stephen Covey explains it in his book, Seven habits of highly effective people:

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

– What are you doing? – you ask.

– Can´t you see? – comes the impatient reply. – I´m sawing down this tree.

– You look exhausted! – you exclaim. – How long have you been at it?

– Over five hours – he returns – and I´m beat! This is hard work.

– Well, why don´t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw? – you inquire – I´m sure it would go a lot faster.

– I don´t have time to sharpen the saw! – the man says emphatically – I´m too busy sawing!

This metaphor illustrates really well how we often get too deep into the weeds of our day to day tasks and forget to stop every once in a while, first of all to rest, but beyond that, to be able to take a step back, gain some perspective and find more efficient (and more enjoyable) ways to achieve our goals.

Another great example along the same lines is one of those quotes that appear printed on geeky T-shirts, especially dedicated to IT people: Six hours of debugging can save you five minutes of reading documentation.

It´s that well known adage, work smarter, not harder, which we know so well in theory, and we find soooo difficult to put into practice... Maybe it´s partly because our society values super busy people; we associate being busy with being productive, so consciously or unconsciously, we keep looking for ways to stay busy (and then we love complaining about how busy we are, it makes us feel important), Or maybe it´s because it´s easier to stay in the momentum we have created for ourselves (which deep down is nothing more than a comfort zone) than to question the way we´ve always done things, even if there is a benefit hiding behind that.

This habit of sharpen the saw can be adopted at multiple levels and in different formats. For example, this past week at work, I had the opportunity to get together with my team (in person, bonus points!) to take a moment, celebrate what we´ve achieved in the last quarter, and plan the work for the next quarter. This is usual practice in Agile methodologies, and it´s been proven to work really well.

And at a more individual level, we can schedule time every week or month to sharpen our very own saw, and that time will be well invested for sure, I remember that one of my very first managers here in Ireland suggested this to me (thanks David!), and for years I kept a time slot booked for myself every Friday afternoon, when the work of the week was already done, and I would sit down in the canteen/cafeteria with my notebook, look at the trees outside the window, and do lots of reflection and planning, getting my ideas in order... I have to say that I used to get a lot of benefit from that little habit, and now I´m in the process of restarting it again, be it on Friday afternoons or at a different time during the week.

And, given that it´s actually impossible to separate our work self from the rest of our being, this principle goes beyond the concepts of work and personal life, because at the end of the day, each person is a whole self. Stephen Covey proposes four areas where we must sharpen our saw: physical, mental, social/emotional and spiritual.

What about you? How do you sharpen your saw? And now that I think of it, wouldn´t it be easier to explain the metaphor with an axe, instead of a saw? Because I´m not sure how a toothed saw like the one in the photo can be sharpened...