Being consistently successful in any walk of life requires non-stop learning. You need to attend conferences and seminars, read books, and constantly embrace more responsibilities. You need to adopt active learning strategies if you want to stay above the curve.
The same applies to relationships and parenting. Having conversations, reading books, and continuous self-reflection is necessary if you want to keep your relationships and family life harmonious. The same can also be said about your health. You need to exercise more, eat healthily, and keep your body in check for any ailments to keep yourself healthy. All of this usually requires gaining new knowledge.
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What learning strategies can be used, especially if you are tied up in a busy schedule? You should ideally look to have active learning rather than just going through a self-help book or articles. You are more likely to retain your learning if it is active.
New Year is the prime time when most of us decide to adopt practices that will make our lives better. We may resolve to exercise and eat more healthy food, or we may resolve to learn some new skills for the upcoming year. However, we fail to take into account if we are even motivated to act on these resolutions or if we will even get the time to do this. The actions linked to our New Year resolutions initially start on a daily basis, then weekly, then monthly, and so on until we ultimately abandon our resolutions.
Here are some of the active learning strategies we can employ to bypass our busy schedules and make good on our resolutions.
Sort Out Commitments
You can sort out your commitments by first committing to yourself. Instead of making your resolutions public, make an internal commitment to learning new skills or whatever else it is that you wish to achieve. Decide that whatever you are aspiring to learn is important to you and how to do whatever it takes to achieve your goal. It will be best to write down your learning objectives on a piece of paper and hang it somewhere in your room at eye level so you will constantly be reminded about the commitment you made to yourself.
You should also tone down other commitments that may not necessarily serve your intrinsic interests. Even though we may want to achieve more, we should accept that we only have limited time and energy.
Use a “one in-one out” technique. Consider you are working on multiple skills. If you want to learn a new skill, then let go of one of the skills you have been learning previously for the time being, so you will get time to learn that new skill.
Adopt a Long-Term Orientation
Having a long-term mindset will significantly enhance active learning. Some years ago a study was conducted on kids learning how to play the piano. It concluded that those kids who adopted a long-term orientation to learning the piano were far more skillful than those kids who only had a short-term horizon. It is much better to say “I will learn this skill for ten years or the rest of my life,” rather than saying “I will learn this skill for the next few months or years.”
The study found that after a couple of months, the long-term orientation group that practiced for just 30 minutes a day turned out to be as skillful as the other group that practiced two hours a day. Having a long-term orientation means you will keep on learning till you master a skill. This ensures your commitment to learning will not vane with time as opposed to having only a short-term orientation to learning.
Summing Up
The busier our lives become, the more important it becomes for us to continue learning. Use these active learning strategies to build on your existing skills and learn new ones.
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