Be A Learner and Inherit The Earth

"In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists". -Eric Hoffer 

You are living in a highly unpredictable, uncertain and complex world. There are no absolutes and few black and whites any more, but many shades of grey. The days have gone when any professional group has all the answers within its own professional arena. Your success lies in how willing you are to open up to and draw upon insights from a multi-disciplinary field of expertise. This is about letting go of the professional badge of honour of becoming learned in your field of expertise and becoming as well a learner. Only if you do will you be able to stay up to date and work at the cutting edge in this rapidly changing environment.

As a professional, one way you tend to keep your foot on the brake is to maintain control of what you know. This sees you becoming the expert in your field. As one commentator has quipped, however, “an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less.” The learners, in contrast, would say that the more they have come to know, the more they realise how little they do know. They see no boundaries on the knowledge that is open to them that they can bring to solving the problems that their world presents to them.

This may well take you out of your comfort zone, create fear in you and make you want to put your foot even more firmly on the brake. At the same time, I’m sure you recognise that what Eric Hoffer says is right.

So What Do You Need To Do To Become A Learner?

• Become self-directed. Take charge of your own learning and professional development. Discover what you don't know and need to learn, find a way to learn it and people who can help you do that.
• Become a reflective practitioner because it is a very important process for understanding a changing and complex world and also understanding how you are responding to it. Learning then becomes a journey, not a destination as it is for the learned. When you attend a formal learning event like a workshop, tune into what you are saying to yourself in the workshop, as well as what the workshop presenter is saying to you. What you are saying to yourself is what you need to write down because following through on that is where the real learning is.

• Make becoming self-aware one of your high priority learnings. It is now seen as one of the most important skills for leadership, so if you want to accelerate your career it has to be at the top of your list. Self-awareness is about coming to know you, what makes you tick and how you are impacting the lives of those with whom you live and work. It is an on-going, lifetime process of discovering your strengths and weaknesses, what inspires and motivates you as well as what stresses and challenges you. You can then use what you learn about yourself to give focus and direction to making a reality the professional future you desire.

•  Move outside your disciplinary area and be open to ideas, thoughts and opinions that are different to your own. Attend events where you can experience things from another perspective and meet people whose starting point is different to yours. Experience what can happen when there is a cross-fertilisation of ideas and opinions.

• Be prepared to take on assignments and projects that stretch you, challenge you and take you out of your comfort zone. This is where you bring what you have learned already to what you don't know and need to learn, to create an exciting new learning opportunity for yourself.

• Develop a curiosity about everything and see everything as a potential learning experience that assists you to understand better the world in which you live. The learned often see knowledge as fixed and able to be learned in an organised and straight-forward way. Be prepared to become the learner who grabs fragments of information from a whole range of sources and gathers half-baked ideas and connects them together to provide creative solutions to the problems this uncertain environment throws up at you. Learn to ask good open-ended questions.Take nothing as given. Reflect on how what you learn and discover impacts on your work and life.

This self-directed process which takes you along the road less travelled, requires you to draw on inner resources that may not be well-developed or understood, so may trigger more fear in you. You can challenge your fear and take your foot off the brake because in doing so you will discover potential and talent you never knew you had. That is exciting. That is empowering. That will accelerate your career.

This article originally appeared in a complimentary e-book I wrote- Take Your Foot Off The Brake - 18 Inspirational Reflections To Accelerate Your Career