To Become a Better Learner – Try This!

After a long day of grinding it out and getting stuff done, you have finally got the chance to sit down and relax. You pick up that book that someone recommended that you read, and you have wanted to get into for a couple of weeks, You start to read, you quickly see why it was endorsed, it is a good book! It is full of insight, inspiration, and new ideas! You read a key point, something that resonates with you. It makes sense. You learn something new!

You think to yourself this can help me be more effective and more efficient, it could help me with the daily grind and how much work I can get done! You just about say out loud, ‘I need to start doing this!’

Fast forward to the next morning, you are back at work, grinding it out and getting stuff done. After a week of this, you finally grab a spare second in the rush of your busy week to catch your breath, and you remember that there was something you were going to do different, now what was it?

Sound familiar?

Why is it that we struggle with the transference of new knowledge into new performance?

When we know that it is important, why don’t we remember?

Probably the best person to defer to is Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German Psychologist from the 19th Century, who was among the first scientists to research to understand how our memory works and how we retain information. Through his research, he discovered that after learning new content, our memory quickly declines.

To explain this phenomenon, Ebbinghaus coined the phrase ‘The Forgetting Curve’ to help explain this rate of decay. He discovered that even as quickly as 24 hours after learning something new, we could only remember less than 30%! Startling this deterioration doesn't stop there after a month we will only retain as little as 10%.

Our brains are designed to help us navigate through our world - day in day out. Helping us focus on what is currently happening, comprehending and helping us decide how to respond and react. It attends to the present; living in the now - moving forward. While it is absorbing all of this new information, it is pruning all of the data, memories it believes isn’t important anymore.

So, how do we convince our brain that this new information is important? We need to tell it! How do we do this?

We Write It Down!

The number one way we can tell our brain that something is important and worth remembering is by putting pen to paper! While writing something down, we involve many of our senses and use multiple parts of our brain, including the hippocampus to synthesise the information. This neural process helps establish what you are writing down as important and what is worth keeping. This process is called ‘encoding’.

“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”

Albert Einstein

Secondly, when we write it down, we retain this new information as what psychologist call ‘external storage’. Especially if we write it down somewhere important, like a notebook we specifically keep for our new insights and learning opportunities. By keeping a learning notebook, it provides an invaluable resource for us to review and reflect on what we have learnt and how we may apply it to what we do and how we do it!

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

Louis L’Amour

Try this, start carrying a small notebook and a pen with you! When you read or hear something worth remembering, write it down. Then start adding actions and behaviours that you can implement to convert this new learning into improved performance.

To get clarity, we first need to clarify; we can do this by asking ourselves three important questions. What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to continue doing? What do I need to start doing?

Ebbinghaus’ second major discovery was that we could fight ‘The Forgetting Curve’ by reflecting and reviewing our new learning at spaced intervals. You do this by checking in on what you learnt and finding ways to apply it. Do this daily, before the grind takes over, and your brain is distracted by new information. Share with someone else what you learnt, every time you verbalise it, your brain is reminded that this is information that it needs to retain and be ready to recall.

Taking new learning and turning it into improved performance is how we grow and develop, and it starts by acknowledging that this is important and worth remembering.

So, put pen to paper and start improving your performance.

Regards,

Peter Edwards