If we stay too long in our comfort zone, we will stagnate therefore I try to learn new thing all the time

“Why bother to learn new things all the time Glenn, you must soon be finished educated!” These are feedbacks I hear often.

The other day I received a back message from a former senior executive with too much ego and less self-insight. The guy knew most about digitization. He told in broad detail about everything he had done in his career. Now he was retired. He then said; “I see you study new things all the time, but it is important that you stick to one thing otherwise it will be difficult for others to understand what your specialty is. When you are constantly talking about new topics, it is difficult to understand what you can”.

YES, I can understand that it might be demanding for someone to follow the various topics I write about. Another leader once said: “Glenn writes on a lot of different topics”. Yes, and it is a conscious action from my side that I write about different topics and read about new topics and try to learn something new. Research shows that if we do not want to stagnate, we must keep our brain on alert by learning new things all the time. I rarely do things that I do not try to find the answer to in evidence-based research. But there is a common thread in everything I do, and it is changing processes and helping organizations to develop. But then one cannot just talk about digitalization, then one must be able to understand basic psychology, philosophy, and the ability to familiarize yourself with new industries and understand this.

The same is valid when it comes to all the different change initiatives leaders initiate, why not spend more time looking at what scientific research shows and try to work with what is fact based and evidence based. I am sure that if the senior executive in a greater extent, tried to do this they would also have a greater success rate on their change projects rather than 70% of all change projects failing.

My views coincide with evidence-based research from one of the world's leading universities, Yale. (https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/19/arent-sure-brain-primed-learning

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30529-4)

Research from the university of Yale shows that if we don’t get out of our comfort zone, we're not developing, and we will stagnate. When our brain stays in too long in a familiar and safe environment it shuts down.

Not knowing what's going to happen next is generally stressful. Uncertainty signals that you're unsure of your environment, your skills, or both. But uncertainty also signals the brain to kickstart learning, new Yale research published in the journal Neuron has found.

That means crazy, unstable situations might be uncomfortable, but they're also essential if you want to make the most of your brain.

Stability is a shut off switch for our brain.

If we want to maximize our learning, we need to make sure we're doing hard things 70 percent of the time. It's tough to face the possibility of failure for such a huge chunk of your working life, but this new research confirms that we need to do new thing every day to development. If we're not at least a little stressed about the outcome of what we're doing, our brain shuts down learning.

The scientist a team of neuroscientists measured the monkeys’ brain activity while they played with the targets. A clear pattern emerged. If the monkeys could predict how often a target would pay off, brain regions associated with learning basically shut down. When the monkeys couldn’t guess what would happen, their learning centres lit up.

This makes sense. Once you’ve figured out the best way to behave in each environment learning new techniques or approaches is pointless. For this reason, stability kills learning. In many areas of life — including the professional domain — we want to continually improve and learn. And to do that we need to avoid the easy and comfortable in favour of the unpredictable and probably hard.

Or as Yale neuroscientist Daeyeol Lee put it to Quartz, “Perhaps the most important insight from our study is that the function of the brain, as well as the nature of learning, is not ‘fixed’ but adapts according to the stability of the environment…When you enter a more novel and volatile environment, this might enhance the tendency for the brain to absorb more information.”

To add strategic instability to our life

If we want to develop and not stagnate, we need to put this insight to use. ?It’s all too easy to get into a rut that leaves your brain idling. Avoiding that outcome if we’re everyday reality isn’t inherently changeable and challenging means consciously building variety, uncertainty, and newness into your life. One can:

-?????????Reading a new book each month with a new topic

-?????????Try learning a new subject and study more

-?????????Study philosophy and or psychology - learning is guaranteed, especially about our own capabilities, likes, and values.

-?????????Changing our routine. Even a new lunch place or afternoon activity might jolt our brain into learning mode, helping us master new skills or see old ideas in a new light.

-?????????Starting a new project. It might fail but we’re guaranteed to learn something.

-?????????Talking to people we disagree with. It’s both an empathy and a learning booster.

-?????????The goal needs to be to inject unpredictability into our life, so we keep our brain learning and not shutting down. Stability can be restful, but science shows it will teach us pretty much nothing.

Nothing comes from mediocrity and believing and claiming that one is finished educated is the sure way to stagnation and a quicker death. If you want to stay up to date and have a brain that is constantly evolving, make sure to do something new all the time and learn new things and skills. This also helps prevent both Alzheimer's and dementia.

Create a glorious Sunday, do something new and learn a new thing today!

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