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?