An easy way to stop learning

Did you know that there is no learning without feedback? I heard Prof. Marian Diamond speak on this topic many years ago.  She’s an expert in the brain and is still working at 85.

She is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. I was lucky enough to meet her. Till I heard her talking about feedback, I had no idea how important it was. I thought it was dry and boring. Just something you had to do in a performance review or appraisal and perhaps once or twice a year.

Now I know better. The important thing to realise is that by not giving or getting enough feedback, you are not learning as much as you could be. You are making your life more difficult than it has to be. You are not moving forward and improving.

No learning

Have you seen people (or companies) who make the same mistake again and again? We all have.

One of the key reasons for this is just not checking information you already have about the results of your actions. You often don’t need to get feedback from others; you can get the information yourself. And that’s all feedback is: information.

It’s information that helps you to make a decision on what to do next time.

A small example of feedback working

I worked with Anne, a finance manager. She had a team member who was unreliable. He often did not complete tasks when they were required. Many of her requests were sent by email.

We printed them all out and she put them into two piles. The ones he had complete on time and the ones that had not been completed on time.

There was a clear different in the way she had asked him to complete the task. When she had given a specific time or date, the tasks were done promptly. Where she had said they were ‘urgent’ or ‘really important’ (with not date) they had not been completed on time.

So her feedback was clear – to get tasks completed on time, Anne needed to give a specific date.


Find out how to get feedback and make sure others get it.

Why books are bad for you

So often people fight against change and have all kinds of reasons for it. Apparently the ancient Greeks (Aristotle, Plato and friends) thought books were bad.

They thought that having books would stop people bothering to learn things off by heart.
Judging by the people who come along on my workshop “Improve your memory now and for the rest of your life” I would agree.

What surprised me the most recently was that on one of the workshops not a single person knew anything off by heart. Absolutely nothing. They professed to be amazed that I could recite an entire poem. So the Greeks were right.

Memory

The trouble is that not using your memory does mean that you get out of the habit of remembering things. Having a good memory is all about using tools and techniques to remember things.

If you use the right tools and practice them you can improve your memory quite drastically in a very short space of time. 

On the workshop there is a little memory test where you do your best to remember a series of 20 words. Most people who come on the workshop manage to improve their score substantially over the three hours. Some even double it.

It’s not magic, it’s just trying out a few techniques.

So are books really bad?
Of course books in themselves are not bad. What is bad is letting your faculties go, becoming lazy and allowing yourself to go into decline.

If they didn’t like books, what would the Greeks have said about TV? Personally I love watching something good on TV. But I wouldn’t want to sit all day every day watching TV, though it would be easy to do.

It would be easy to stop using my memory. I have a phone that does my shopping lists and reminds me to do just about everything. So it’s very tempting to get lazy. Then you find that, when you need it, your memory doesn’t work.

The trouble is that, if you are not careful, these useful tools become crutches.

Once you become totally reliant on them you are lost when they fail or are taken away.

I used to work with a chap who had had polio. He walked with two sticks. He told me once that he had been offered a wheelchair several times by well-meaning medical staff. But he never accepted. He said; “Once you get in a chair, you never get out.”

Improve your memory now. Get the recording of my teleseminar "How to Improve Your Memory"

How do you help people to deal with big changes?

Many organisations are having to deal with this situation at the moment. It's not easy, but there are things you can do to make it easier.

To help people deal with the shock and worry of thinking they might lose their job, go through some of the research on how your brain responds in these situations and what you need to do about it.

When we did this in a short workshop for one client they had people spontaneously thanking the HR department for running the workshop.

We got people to talk about how they felt (research shows that just doing this helps people to feel better immediately). We explained to them how they are likely to start behaving, how that isn’t going to help them in the long term.

Then we gave them some tools to help them in dealing with the situation including:

• A way to keep focussed on the long term
• Key actions to take to avoid getting depressed
• Ways of supporting each other

When you look at why some people survive major disasters and others don’t, you often see that those who survive knew what to do beforehand. They had been trained. It’s exactly the same here.

If you know and recognise the signals, you can take action to minimise the problems. You can be prepared for change, particularly unwelcome change, and put your plan into action as soon as it happens.

Often our clients have many employees that really don’t like change at all. Unfortunately many of these companies will be going through massive changes over the next year or so.

But some of their best people are the ones who don’t like change. So it’s really worth making an effort to help them.

For more on this People who don't like change - why they are so valuable