The Secret to Supercharging Your Learning – Part I

This article gives the details on what specifically about the process of learning makes the difference between what we personally can do and what we cannot do and how you can use this knowledge to supercharge your learning so that you massively increase your rate of personal growth, development, learning and competence.

All of us have many competencies and anything that we can do we can label as ‘personally possible’. Everything that we cannot do lies in the realm of personal impossibility. Fortunately, we can expand the realm of things that we can do for many things. We can learn, we can change our thinking and change our responses, we can adopt new behaviours and then things that we found formerly impossible to do become possible to do. A threshold exists between these two realms. When we grow we absorb the formerly impossible things into our realm of possibility. When we regress the formerly possible things pass back into the realm of impossibility.

We imagine ourselves doing things that we currently do not have the ability to do because we perceive them as pleasurable and beneficial. When we imagine how to make the impossible possible we often find it daunting because at this time we don’t have the competency and we don’t know how to do it in reality. Doing the impossible always feels hard until we bring it into the realm of the personally possible. Anything that we can do to understand and ease the transition between making the impossible possible will bring us great relief and improve our competence and hence our productivity.

The Process of Learning

In order to learning anything we must understand it, we must remember it and we must practice it so that we refine our ability to reproduce the result upon demand. Eventually we transfer this new learning to the core of our competencies so that we can do it consistently and repeatedly and depend upon it. If we do not do this then we have only intermittent success and whether we do something well or correctly or not depends as much upon guesswork and chance as it does upon any innate ability that we might possess related to that thing.

In order to understand something we often have to consciously break down the information, or process, so that we can know and correctly carry out every part of it. In order to do a whole process correctly we have to carry out every part of it correctly. The sum of these small parts creates the whole process. If we fail to do one part of the process correctly then often the whole process fails and we do not succeed in creating the full and successful result that we desire. In order to memorise something we need to move it from the beginning stages of consciously going through every step to an unconscious and conditioned response. This occurs through repetition of the process until the brain and the body work on ‘autopilot’.

The point of learning, when the impossible becomes possible, occurs at the junction of consciously changing our actions and responses so that we get the new result. Learning new processes occurs relatively easily if we already have the background skills to apply new information or new instructions in order to respond differently. Developing skills usually proves much more difficult and so we need to go through the necessary skill development process very, very slowly so that we can consciously control our thoughts and actions to create the new responses and achieve the formerly, personally impossible result. Once we can do something slowly and correctly then we can repeat it a little bit faster. If we can do something a little bit faster and still do it correctly then we can repeat it again only even faster. Eventually we get to the stage where we can do the formerly impossible thing at the desired speed and consistency of result. The skill learning process has not yet finished as we then need to repeat the newly learned processes for as many times as it takes until we no longer have to consciously think about the process. At that point we have thoroughly learnt something and it has become a part of us. Further practice then refines the performance of the skill.

Most People Learn Very Inefficiently

As we grow up we generally don’t learn through a consciously aware process. Instead we learn by trial and error with many failures occurring before we find success. We tend to guide ourselves through the process of learning more by knowing what doesn’t work than by knowing how something actually does work. Eventually we know what actions produce the result that we want and we repeat them but we generally do not have a high awareness of the cause and effect mechanisms that create the success. Because of this, and at a fairly young age, many of us end up not knowing how to learn to do what we want to do. We quickly learn to feel embarrassed and ashamed if we show incompetence or are humiliated. We then tend to interpret that some people are ‘naturals’ or ‘gifted’ as they can seemingly easily do what we cannot do.

From time to time we attempt new things but we tend to quickly give up when we reach our early limits; in part because we then start to feel inadequate, which always feels terrible, and in part because we still don’t know how to consciously learn new things. As we get older we generally don’t have the luxury of the seemingly endless rote learning and trial and error learning that we had as children. Consequently we need a conscious awareness of the process of learning and effective methods. This is especially true for skill development. This is distinct from process learning. For example, once a person has learned the skills of reading and writing, such a person can continue to learn new processes based upon those basic skills. They generally do not have to learn new reading or writing skills.

The great problem of most people when they learn new skills is that they spend most of their time repeating the easy stuff. Most people spend far too much time focused on the easy stuff but they cannot progress overall because they do not tackle the things that remain impossible for them. These impossible things naturally feel very difficult to do but through following a sensible method they become possible. To supercharge our learning we must put most of our focus upon these difficult to do things.

Frustration – a key indicator of improvement

This process of stepping into the formerly impossible lies at the heart of learning. As a young man, I took on learning many new skills and got involved in various projects because I wanted to grow and improve as a person. In doing all of this I seemed to feel frustration almost all of the time. Fortunately, I came to understand that if we spend most of our time attempting to improve ourselves then we find ourselves at the boundary of the possible and impossible almost all of the time and so frustration naturally occurs because we cannot quite do what we want to do. When I realised this I came to view frustration as a good sign – a sign of growth and persistence and dedication. As a result, I then became detached from the anguish of that feeling because I understood the message.

The solution to quell that feeling became making the impossible possible for me. Because I have long had a great focus on how to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of any action taken or resource used (in this case time) I became more and more focused on the idea of “How does the impossible become possible and what can I do to make it happen faster and more reliably?” The answer to this question is that we must have a conscious awareness of the personally impossible and we must think our way into doing the impossible by determining the true sticking point and what we have to do to move beyond that point. We then adopt a method that strongly supports the development of our abilities to go beyond what we can currently do, slowly and gently.

Methodology

For starters, forget the expression “Practice makes perfect” because it doesn’t. Precise learning makes perfect and practice keeps that perfect level of performance. I make this point because a poorly conceived, and hence misleading, concept can have a devastating impact on what we expect as results from the things that we do. If we practice, practice, practice but do no actual learning to get that desired result then we will more likely hold ourselves to blame as useless and incapable rather than questioning if the concept that we labour under has true merit or not. When you enter into spending focused time on an activity it is necessary to organise yourself to have time for learning and then time for practice. Focus intently on the learning involved to make the impossible possible and then practice those new things. Finally, enjoy performing that activity.

I recommend that you organise your learning along these lines:

• Think about the next step to make in your learning process. If this requires more knowledge then gain the knowledge before seeking to apply it. If this requires developing a physical or mental skill then consider warming up with exercises to get in the right condition for further development.
• Prepare the knowledge, materials, resources and conditions for what you want to do. This preparation proves very helpful in removing barriers to progress. The effort and focus required to do new things is already difficult and anything that stops progress through a lack of resource or out of distraction simply makes that process harder. A lack of preparation lies at the heart of procrastination.
• Prepare your mind for new learning. This means accepting that a lot of errors, frustrations, dead-ends, and the like are now about to occur as you attempt to bring the currently impossible into the realm of the possible. This doesn’t mean that you are inept per se, only that at this point in time that you don’t have the ability to do a few small things. Create and keep an accurate perspective on what is about to happen and feel good that you have the courage to get on with learning something that challenges you.
• Go through the new process.
• Note what you can do well and practice those easy sections so that you become comfortable with performing them and then totally stop working on those parts.
• The parts that remain are the difficult parts of the process.
• Break down those parts to whatever level necessary that allows you to do each part consciously, slowly and perfectly. Do this so that you can understand the individual parts involved and thus easily build up the whole. This step most precisely identifies your understanding of the parts personally impossible for you and brings it, step by step, into your domain of possibility. If you do not understand a part of the process then you have to rely upon luck, intuition, natural ability and other vague, imprecise and inconsistent methods to get your results. Focus on understanding the next small step that will turn another part of the process from impossible to possible for you.
• Once you understand the parts and can perform them slowly and perfectly then practice repetitions of them slowly and perfectly.
• Build up speed with carrying out the process and its constituent parts until you can perform perfectly at the desired speed. If you falter then slow down again to the level where you can do it perfectly and then speed up again.
• Important! If you cannot carry it out slowly and perfectly then you will never consistently do it fast and perfectly because you have not built up the conditioning of your mind, senses and body to do so. You might get the odd lucky result but we don’t want that. We want mastery of the process so that we gain full understanding and full competency and hence confident reliance upon our abilities.
• Continue with the repetitions and speed building until the process becomes ingrained into your mind, senses and body so that you no longer consciously think about the process. At this point you have achieved mastery of that item.
• Focus on that intently and repeatedly until mastered or you accept that you do not have the physical or intellectual abilities needed and either develop those abilities and return to the stumbling block or accept defeat.
• Next integrate this part into the whole of what you want to do. You might initially stumble again at the transition points between what you can do easily and the difficult part that you have now mastered but with a few repetitions you can easily condition this part – you are now on the downhill stretch!
• Finally practice the whole and enjoy doing the whole thing perfectly
• Finish off by enjoying performing, either of what you have just completed or something that you can already do well. I think it important to finish by doing things that you already have the great competence to do in order to remind yourself and reassure yourself that you already have great skills and abilities in many things.

With this method we home in on the difficulty of that transition point between the impossible and the possible so that we supercharge our growth and learning. I recommend spending about 80% of your time devoted to learning activities focused on this transition point as you then take advantage of the 80/20 Principle by spending most of your time on the vital few things that make the biggest difference. If we ever learn anything properly then this process of making the impossible possible occurs. By having awareness of the vital transition point and how to get through it faster we stop improving haphazardly and instead design it into our learning efforts. This method of breaking down the sticking points at the edge of the impossible and slowly, but perfectly, carrying them out and then building up speed and capability until we no longer have to consciously think about what we do, lies at the heart of all skill development. Adopting this as a conscious process and applying it to every sticking point will make the impossible possible for you and in the fastest and most reliable way possible.

Additional Points

Something to bear in mind when developing a skill is that we can consider it as a series of refinements. In the beginning we have rough and coarse abilities (Remember how as a child you used to hold crayons in your fist before developing the tactile refinement that allowed you to draw and to write with fine precision?). Through practice we gradually refine our skills so that we go through the different gradations between rough and smooth, beginner and master. This tends to occur as a slow process of trial and error as we learn the gradations relative to one another. We can speed up this process by specifically creating awareness of the extremes of the skill range. We start by finding the outer extremes of the opposing limits in our ability. Next we can judge the middle point as our intermediate reference point. Then we seek distinguishable points between the middle and the extremities. Through practice and awareness of these distinctions it becomes easier to develop refinement with less reliance upon intuition and many hours of practicing.

 

As one final tip for easing the way to transition, I sometimes find it very beneficial to imagine the result that I want before I do it. For example, if I need to finger a complex chord on the guitar I imagine transferring my fingers from the previous position to the new position. By visualising this change it helps to speed up the process from conscious and deliberate action to subconscious and automatic action. I don’t do this very often because I tend to get wrapped up in repeating my actions and I don’t like to come to a complete stop to think about this, but sometimes, when I really find it tricky, I do this and I normally get much better results.

You can read the second supporting article here: supercharge-your-learning-pt2

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