How To Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine
I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them. ― Joe Abercrombie
Being successful in your life and in your career is a choice you have to make every day. That’s because every choice you make either moves you forward or moves you backward.
The problem is that we’re constantly inundated with ideas on how to be our best selves and be successful in our careers.
Attend this conference. Workout in this way. Eat this special meal. There’s no end to what we can buy or do to improve, but rarely does anything work as it claims.
The reality is that it’s not the big things that make the difference. It’s the small daily habits that don’t seem important that can have the biggest impact on your career.
After all, anything that you do over and over again becomes a vital piece of who you are. So, what are the skills and daily habits that impact your career in big and small ways?
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, echoed the importance of learning when he said, “The learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it all.”
However, it’s not as simple as acquiring new knowledge, the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn is vital for long-term success.
Learning
Since we spend so much of our time, energy, and efforts at our day jobs, they provide the most significant opportunities for learning.
The challenge is that we don’t invest intentionally in everyday development — we’re so busy with tasks and getting the job done that there’s no space left for anything else.
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” ― Isaac Asimov
Deprioritizing our development is a risky career strategy because it reduces our resilience and ability to respond to the changes happening around us.
Unlearning
Unlearning means letting go of the safe and familiar and replacing it with something new and unknown.
Skills and behaviors that helped you get to where you are can actually hold you back from getting to where you want to be.
Relearning
Relearning is recognizing that how we apply our strengths is always changing and that our potential is always a work in progress.
We need to regularly reassess our abilities and how they need to be adapted for our current context.
Identify habits that hold you back
We all have habits that helped us get to where we are today. However, habits can create blind spots that stop us from seeing different ways of doing things or new approaches to try out.
Our brains use habits to create mental shortcuts that might make us miss out on opportunities to reflect on and unlearn our automatic responses.
Pick three habits to consciously unlearn and try out a new way of working. For example, if you habitually set up meetings, see what happens when you leave it to someone else.
Ask propelling questions
Propelling questions reset our status quo and encourage us to explore different ways of doing things.
They often start with:
- How might we?
- How could I?
- What would happen if?
These questions are designed to prevent our existing knowledge from limiting our ability to imagine new possibilities. They fast-forward us into the future and prompt positive action in the present.
Stretch your strengths
One of the ways to make your strengths stronger is to use them in as many different situations as possible. If you become too comfortable applying them in the same way, your development stalls.
“You cannot open a book without learning something.” ― Confucius
Strengths solving involves relearning how to use your strengths to offer support and solve problems outside of your day-to-day work.
This could be in your networks, organizations you volunteer for, or even side projects you’re involved in.
We can’t predict how our careers will develop or what the world of work will look like in the future.
Investing in our ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn helps us increase our readiness for the opportunities that change presents and our resilience to the inevitable challenges we’ll experience along the way.
Reading this article is a sign that you’re at least in the pre-contemplative stage of making change. Once you’re done thinking about it and ready to take action, there are many tools that can help you implement the daily habits of learning.
Be Bold
Be Courageous
Be Your Best
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Citation: https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-learning-a-part-of-your-daily-routine
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