Learning, how do I do it? By learning to think and forget copying.

Bridget loaned us the book ‘Presence’, thank you Bridget!
This book is co-authored by four people, Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers and C.Otto Scharmer and it deals with learning.
They were wondering what it takes to change the world drastically, so it becomes a better place to live in.

I too wonder why we still go to work we hate and why traffic jams cannot get solved.
So the book got my attention.

And surprise, surprise. The authors aren’t impressed with our current learning style.

They say we don’t learn new things and we actually are not well equipped for real learning.
They say real learning is knowing how to make sense of radical new stuff that is unknown to us.
Currently we only want to and can learn things that are familiar to us and thus digestible for our mind.
We totally dismiss new concepts as we cannot reference them back to something familiar and thus we struggle to make sense of them.
It is like spicy food, the first time we cannot handle or digest spicy food at any level.

I visited Bulgaria once and not being able to read the road signs freaked me out completely.
I did not venture far from the bus stop, I can tell you!

The fear, the turmoil, the ingenuity I had to display to get around was phenomenal and my rate of learning went up pretty fast.
In such an environment real learning is taking place, however I can also see that I will not often want to place myself in such a radical situation.
To be honest it scares the pants out of me.

Most of the time we don’t live fluidly in the world, experiencing what is going on, we don’t observe first and we are too quick in deciding that we know what is going on.
We are too quick to compare things with what we already know and miss seeing the unknown.

Most of the time we live in a routine and we seldom do radical things which require learning and innovative thinking.
John did the radical thing of learning by building his own boat and going sailing.
His rate of learning went up big time, his skill in learning is currently still higher than average and he holds a radical new vision of prosperous communities which currently don’t exist.

To have a radical different more humane world, I can see my learning style has to change.
I am busy changing it and it takes some doing.
It has taken me seven years so far and lots of emotional turmoil and lots of coaching and doing Leverage & You, Landmark and Victoria Castle’s Embodied Abundance teleclass and lots of mindgym.