We've looked in the past at Learning Style preferences - whether you have an Activist, Reflector, Theorist or Pragmatist preference - and referenced Honey and Mumford's  Learning Style Questionnaire (building on the work of David Kolb/the Learning Cycle).

The Learning Cycle

I attended a workshop quite some time ago run by Peter Honey, where he spoke about how most adult learning is informal and part of everyday experience, and is tacit and unconscious and therefore 'fuzzy'. (This is learning that takes place accidentally, as a by-product of something, as opposed to learning as a mainstream, organised activity). Because of this, it's difficult to check on the validity and value of this informal learning - and being 'fuzzy', we don't share it with others; there's no check on it externally, by anyone else who might challenge it and also we can't tell whether it's 'good learning' or 'bad learning'. This got me thinking about how 'bad learning' can be a barrier to future learning, growing and developing, and how it can affect how we think and behave as a result.

What I take this 'good' and 'bad' learning to be about, in the context of our psychological wellbeing is:

Good learning produces helpful outcomes and helps us to
-   develop and grow

-   get it right/not make the same mistakes 

-   be effective

-   achieve our goals

-   make the most of ourselves and situations

It also encourages and inspires further learning.

Bad learning produces unhelpful outcomes and

-          restricts our growth and development

-          provides barriers to learning, e.g. to be self-critical, ' others are better than me'

-          holds us back from making the most of ourselves and situations

-          comes from our making faulty conclusions/learning faulty lessons from our past experience  

To re-iterate, what we've learned from our previous experience influences how we feel about our self, others and the world - our core beliefs - and as a result how we think, feel and behave. We've spoken before about the fact that how we think determines how we interpret what happens to us, the meaning we ascribe to events - the learning that ensues - and our consequent feelings and behaviours. So the lessons we've learned previously are going to have a strong bearing on what we learn, and how well we learn, from here. If it's been the good learning we've mentioned, then great, your future learning prospects are bright!! But conversely if it's been bad learning, it's likely to impact negatively on how well we learn and what we learn.

To put it another way, our learning is mediated by these 'good' and 'bad' filters: lessons learned from our experience (and correspondingly the experience will differ depending on these filters). Other factors will also come into play of course, to affect learning: how we're feeling, the context, our motivation to learn (or lack of) etc etc.

To illustrate this point

LEARNING AND BELIEFS

We cannot change past experience, but as ever, and as per the diagram above, we can do something about where we go from here, and change current and future experience, if 

- we are not effective learners

- we have learned unhelpful lessons in the past

- we want to make sure that our barriers to learning are minimised as far as possible

- our core beliefs/our thinking is unhelpful  

 

These messages/lessons are ones that are:

Explicit -we can hear them, we say them to ourselves and/or

Implicit -they are 'unconscious' and drive the way we think and behave

Just acknowledging it if we do find ourselves leaning to the right above, in the right-hand column, is the first step of course to help us do something about it. As ever, if we make the least of ourselves and situations only now and then, maybe because life's tough, we're going through hard times etc., and it's temporary and not really getting in the way, then it isn't such a big deal, for sure. 

You can be the judge of whether you think you need to do something about it, and make more of yourself, perhaps by saying and doing more of those things in the left-hand column above or by changing/re-learning/saying and believing less of some of the unhelpful messages/lessons you've learned.

Your starter for ten:

What can you do more of to make the most of yourself?

What can you do less of to make the most of yourself?

If you could choose 1 'lesson' from the 'Making the most of yourself' column above that you could learn a bit better, which would it be?  

Note the lesson down, somewhere where you'll remember it.

What are you going to do over the next month to re-inforce this learning, that's in accord with this lesson, to embed it in how you think, how you behave, what you do etc?

For more on this, take a look at the  Learning and Developing pages on our website.