#320: What You Can Learn from Dolphins

In an age when technology, innovation, and information updates rapidly, the need to learn new knowledge, skills, and motivation has become essential for personal and business success.

In this age, the most important personal effectiveness skill is not a specialist skill or an IT skill or even a people skill. It is the skill of learning itself.

Learning how to learn gives you the right mindset for the 21st century. It opens the door to all the information and skills you need. And it enables you to drop outdated learning quickly and acquire new learning with accomplished ease.

Learning How to Learn: Bateson's Dolphins

One of the best stories about learning how to learn comes from anthropologist Gregory Bateson in his book, "Steps to the Ecology of Mind". In these collected stories, Bateson describes how he saw dolphins working it out for themselves in a dolphinarium.

On the first day of a new routine, the dolphins were taught a new trick. If they performed it correctly, they were rewarded with a fish.

The next day, when they performed the trick, no fish were given. Fish were only given when a new trick was mastered.

This continued for two weeks. Then on the fourteenth day, the dolphins performed four new tricks they hadn't been shown before but had learnt by themselves.

The dolphins had learnt that learning, not tricks, is what gets rewarded.

It's precisely this skill that we all need to learn for our own personal effectiveness at work.

Learning How to Learn: 5 Essential Steps

Here are our top 5 tips on becoming an expert in learning how to learn.

1. Discover your personal learning style. Whether it's visual, linguistic, interpersonal, kinaesthetic, or a mix of these and others, knowing your preferred learning style puts you onthe fast track to personal effectiveness. It means that, when you need to know something new or do something different, you won't waste time on the wrong kind of training but will select only that kind of training that suits you.

2. Go back to your childhood. Your childhood was when your instinct for learning was at its most effective. That's because you had no resistance factors such as protecting your self- esteem or off-loading old learning. When you re-discover how you learnt as a child, you take off the blinkers and just head for home.

3. Learn anywhere, any time, any how. There isn't just one way to learn anything or one time. You can learn from others, from books, from mistakes, from doing, from failure, from thinking. Be an anarchic learner.

4. Don't let your ego get in the way of your learning. In adults, the biggest block to learning is the ego. It doesn't like learning because it likes to protect you from anything new and risky. Put the ego in its place and take those risks.

5. Enjoy the process as much as the end result. The learning process can be seen either as a hard slog of repeated failures or as a mysterious adventure into the unknown. Adjust your mindset and learn to enjoy the process.

"Learning is weightless: treasure you always carry easily." (Chinese proverb)

What Next?

If you are like the majority of businesses, you will have a workforce that is significantly lacking in the skills that the modern world needs today, in particular, what we call "people skills".

One of the reasons why this is a serious problem is that these soft skills are needed not by just a few of your staff but by all of them.

And, as a result, you may feel that this is an insurmountable problem.

However, it is not.

With simple approaches, such as the "MTL One-Hour Course Plans", and the back-up content on our 6 websites, you can overcome the problem and build a skilled workforce that will do you proud.

Thanks for reading this edition of the "People Skills" newsletter and good luck with your ongoing learning.

Oh, and one last thing.

In the spirit of making the world a freer, happier and more enlightened place...

...please pass this newsletter on.

Thankyou!

Manage Train Learn Is Now Selling it's Business - Find Out More Below

Are You Interested in Acquiring a Highly Profitable and Successful E-Learning Business?

Due to Eric's forthcoming retirement, we have now decided to put KSA Training Ltd, (parent company of Manage Train Learn), up for sale.

This sale comprises all 6 websites, over 22,000 soft skills learning items, and optional sale of all 37 e-books which have earned over ￡1 million in global sales through our publishing partners.

We have been leaders in Soft Skills e-learning since the late 1990's and, today, there is unprecedented demand globally for "People Skills" learning and training.

Uniquely, we currently offer our materials for free use and download but a new owner can easily commercialise our offering through a wide range of options.

There is a time limit on this offer when we will sell to the highest bidder.

So, if you're interested in owning a successful e-learning business with huge potential in a huge market, email us in the first instance at [email protected] for further information.

You can also view us on LinkedIn where we have over 1500 followers and over 200 editions of the "People Skills" newsletter. Click here for our channel: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/eric-garner-100a1b128/

For more about Manage Train Learn, view "About MTL" here: https://www.managetrainlearn.com/#/category-listing/147.

Eric Garner

Managing Director

KSA Training Ltd