If you are reading this post
I already know that you love learning, coaching and development.
Both for yourself and to help others,
Which means I also know this.
You have at some point, spent time frustrated at your growth.
You have at some point, spent time frustrated at yourself for not implementing what you have learned.
You have at some point, questioned why you have invested time, money and energy into learning and development.
But what I don’t know is this,
What expectations you have on yourself, when it comes to learning and what stratagies your using to achieve them.
When I started investing in my own development, I expected to:
•Take in and retain all the information.
•Be able to share what I learnt easily.
•That my life would automatically reflect the principles that were taught.
•That knowledge would manifest my dream life.
The problems with this was:
• I measured the value of what was taught by these expectations, which meant that I didn’t get the value that was delivered, not because it wasn’t there but because I had unrealistic expectations on myself and the mentor.
•I would beat myself up, compare myself to the coach/educator/teacher and think I wasn’t smart enough as I measured my retention of information against their ability to teach, what they had spent a lifetime learning.
•I would negate everything that I did pick up, because of the focus on what I didn’t. I took away my own opportunity of exploring why the piece of information, strategy or questions that stuck with me, were important enough to do so.
•They were all unrealistic expectations, which meant my learning was a constant cycle of feeling dis-empowered, rather than empowering myself through it.
•I ended up hating learning for around 8 weeks…. Yep…
I remember sitting in my office, looking at my bookshelves, feeling this deep inner sense of frustration with myself. When I was reading or on an online course i would feel this build up inside of me and I would just stop…
The thing I loved most was starting to create huge amounts of pain, as I felt as useful as a bookshelf. All knowledge and no action.
I needed to go from bookshelf to builder.
This triggered me to explore the gaps in how I was thinking about learning, what I was doing with my learning and how I actually approached my learning.
This is what I changed.
1My expectations from learning it all, to learning and applying the one thing.
I looked for the one (idea/question/strategy/tactic) that would make the greatest impact for me, taking the time to invest in this, apply it and implement it into my life.
With this I was able to create an outcome in my life, an embodiment of what I learned and develop my own depth of knowledge and ideas about the lessons.
2I started to measure the value of what I learned, not on what was delivered by the mentor, but from what I could deliver, from what I learned, for myself.
3I stopped comparing my level 1 to my mentor’s level 1000.
When I did the other 2, this one naturally happened as I became focused on my yesterday to today, rather than my mentors yesterday to my today.
If you’re not getting the value or growth out of your learning, either at all or to the level that you are expecting.
Take the time, ask the questions and explore what your expectations are for learning and your strategy for using it.
If you’re not getting what you want, it’s because one, or both of these are not aligned to the outcomes you want, or they are unrealistic.
Until next week,
Keep smashing growth ceilings,
Justin Wiseman
Entrepreneur and Business Owner
Mindset Business Mindset Coach
Demartini Method Facilitator
