Most of us are interested in personal growth and one of the best ways to grow is by learning how to learn, but there’s a problem: we’re all busy adults. So how do you learn when you can’t seem to find the time or motivation? This post is all about introducing two key concepts that will help you learn anything more quickly and deeply.
Table of Contents
- The Problem
- Why is it Important to Continue Learning?
- Key Concept #1: The Importance of Emotions
- Key Concept #2: The Importance of Systems
- Conclusion
The Problem
When we talk about learning in this post, we’re talking about active, intentional learning. The problem is most of us… stop. There are a lot of reasons we stop actively learning in adulthood. Check and see if any of these sound like you:
- I don’t have time to learn
- I lack motivation to try and do one more thing
- I want to learn and grow but I’m worried about failure and judgment
If this is you, don’t panic! You are not alone. Let’s break down each of these barriers one at a time to understand them a bit more clearly.
We don’t have time to learn
Adults, particularly women, face time constraints that younger people and retired folks aren’t grappling with.
We have busy schedules, family responsibilities, and other commitments. This leaves us with limited time and energy to dedicate to learning new things.
In particular, women tend to carry a large emotional labor burden with their families and even in the work place. There is a lot of unseen labor that women in their thirties are doing. Just the mental and emotional energy required to take the lead with scheduling daily life, maintaining relationships, and navigating a world not necessarily designed for us, is huge.*
*I’m not saying that other individuals like men and non-binary folks aren’t also facing challenges or that they aren’t doing emotional labor in some cases, but this blog is primarily focused on women and female-presenting people, and helping them build a happier life.
In short, the demands of daily life can make it challenging to prioritize ongoing education and personal growth. It can be hard just finding enough time to rest, let alone rest and then also learn.
If you need help with time management, check out this post.
Lacking motivation to learn
There is nothing wrong with you if you lack motivation. You are not lazy. You are not inadequate in some mysterious way. The school system has not set you up for success and likely you’re grappling with some degree of burnout.
Often, our experiences with learning revolve around external motivation, like due dates. We’re trained from a very young age to learn under pressure and produce content under pressure. This does not build a habit of lifelong learning.
So if you’re having trouble figuring out your motivation, trust me, it isn’t you. On top of learning being associated with outside pressure for most of us, it’s also really hard to be motivated to learn anything when you’re tired or overworked.
In fact, it can be tricky to find motivation even if you’re well-rested because you’re likely trying to add a new habit into your life. Anytime we add new habits, it takes some effort to find motivation, so be kind to yourself.
Fear of judgment or failure
This one is also connected to previous experiences with learning. I have taught many university classes and taken even more and let me tell you, grades are not always helpful. They attach worth to what we learn, and while it’s good to value our progress, grades aren’t always a healthy way of doing this.
*I’m not the only one with this in mind. You can check out this article from the Harvard Graduate School of Education if you want to learn more.
There are other strategies you can use to find value in what you learn (I’m hoping to do a post on this soon, but don’t want to go too far off topic).
Long story short, we often think about how others will perceive us as we start something new. It’s tough to be a beginner. We get used to feeling competent as adults and being a beginner is a vulnerable position to be in. We don’t want other people to see us struggle or fail, but we often want to share what we’re doing with friends and family.
The fear of making mistakes can make it difficult to start to learn in the first place. It acts as a barrier to risk taking and the exploration of new and unfamiliar subjects and skills. Feeling connected with others is a great way to over come this.
So definitely share your learning journey with supportive people that you care about, but make sure you choose supportive people. Because you deserve to be celebrated. And be confident in the fact that learning something new takes self-assurance and strength.
We all fail when we learn and this is a good thing. It helps us recognize and fill gaps.
The thing teachers don’t tell you is that we all succeed when we learn too. This is a good thing. It helps us recognize what we’re doing well and apply those strategies to other topics.
Addressing these barriers often involves creating environments that value and support lifelong learning, providing opportunities for flexible learning that accommodates busy schedules, and fostering intrinsic motivation by focusing on the relevance and value of what you choose to learn.
Why is it Important to Continue Learning?
Is it really worth the effort to keep learning?
Absolutely YES.
First and foremost, learning is a benefit to you as a person. Learning enriches personal growth and fulfillment, but what does that actually mean? It means that engaging in lifelong learning can expand your horizons, foster creativity, and enhance your critical thinking skills.
It allows you to explore new interests, hobbies, and passions, all of which leads to a deeper understanding of yourself and a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
The process of learning also fosters adaptability and emotional resilience in the face of change. In an increasingly unpredictable and complex world, the ability to learn and adapt is a valuable asset to have in your toolkit. Lifelong learners are better equipped to navigate challenges, recognize opportunities, seize those opportunities, and thrive in the various aspects of their lives.
Not only does learning help you understand yourself more deeply and improve your adaptability, but studies have shown that continued learning can have a positive effect on your cognitive health and overall well-being.
Keeping your mind engaged improves your emotional stability, but it also helps to stave off cognitive decline and reduce the risk of age-related diseases such as dementia (there is a genetic component to many of these diseases, though).
On top of this, as we age, it’s important to have an identity independent of our careers and social connections. Learning new skills and hobbies can give us this stability within ourselves and lead to a more consistent sense of purpose and fulfillment.
That’s not to say that social connections aren’t important, they are. Lifelong learning often involves interacting with others who share similar interests and passions. Whether through formal classes, online communities, or informal discussions, learning facilitates networks and friendships, fostering belonging and camaraderie.
Finally, it’s great for professional growth. The job market of the 2020s evolves rapidly and acquiring new skills and knowledge is essential for career advancement and remaining competitive. Continuously learning new technologies, techniques, and strategies can help you stay relevant and adaptable in your profession. It can also give you a huge cushion if you need to change professions or pivot career-wise.
In other words, it might be hard to find the time. It might be hard to find the motivation. But lifelong learning is essential for your personal development and professional growth. The benefits far outweigh any barrier, if only because to know more is to know yourself.
Key Concept #1: The Importance of Emotions
When it comes to learning any skill, there are two key areas you should focus on, and the first one is your emotional response to the topic and process. There are a few problems with a negative emotional response to the topic we are interested in or the process of learning in general.
Challenge #1: Avoidance, the Block that Occurs Before the Process Begins
First, our brains are built to recognize and avoid dangerous situations. The problem is the human brain sometimes struggles to differentiate between tigers and mathematics. Our brains label both as dangerous and then try to avoid both with religious zeal.
Don’t blame your brain. It’s just trying to keep you alive.
And fortunately, even an ingrained response can be overcome. The first thing that needs to happen is for you to reflect on why you dislike the topic. Did you have a negative experience? A bunch of negative experiences?
For example, I had a math teacher in ninth grade who asked me to demonstrate problems in front of the class, but they were problems I didn’t understand. The experience was traumatizing. Now, I hate doing math in front of anyone. I’m fine if I’m alone, but as soon as there is another person even in the same vicinity, my brain shuts down.
Which doesn’t help. I’m still working on this one myself, but it’s much easier now that I know why I blank when I’m doing basic addition next to my co-workers.
In other words, understanding your feelings towards the subject can help you work through them and approach the topic or process with an open mind.
Next, make sure you are kind to yourself and acknowledge that it’s ok to struggle with a topic. Focusing on progress and growth over time is called “Asset-Based Learning” and is a great way to overcome avoidance. Plus it helps you identify transferable skills.
Goals and rewards can also be a great way to create intrinsic motivation, though they’re more helpful for some people than others. Still, consider breaking the learning process into smaller milestones and celebrating when you reach those milestones. Finally, make sure you understand why you are learning what you’re learning. If you don’t have a reason, it’s easy to lose momentum or even avoid starting altogether. Understanding how your topic connects to your goals or interests can increase your motivation and help you get through any rough patches.
Challenge #2: Learning Blocks that Occur During the Process
When we are stressed during the learning process something wild happens. It becomes difficult to actually learn. This is why some people do great in class, but flunk exams.
Stress releases a hormone called cortisol into the brain. Sometimes cortisol is great. It basically increases your ability to heal, your blood flow, and other responses essential for survival or rapid response.
The major downside is that it also shuts down functions that your brain sees as non-essential for survival or high-stress situations.
These functions include things like detailed cognitive function, emotional regulation, attention, and memory retrieval. It turns out that these are the four major skills necessary for things like decision-making, concentrating, processing information, retaining new knowledge, and recalling previously stored knowledge.
*You can read more about it here.
You can see how you would fail an exam if you couldn’t remember anything and couldn’t make good choices about how to answer a question.
And it has nothing to do with your skills as a person. It is completely related to the amount of stress you experience before and during the exam.
This is where mindfulness strategies start to become really important. Mindfulness strategies allow us to exist in the moment without judgment, therefore reducing the stress we experience. They’re a way for us to tell our brains that we are not in a fight/flight/freeze situation.
4 simple and quick mindfulness strategies include:
- Identifying when you are stressed and then taking a deep breath.
- Identifying when you are stressed and then focusing on what you can touch, see, hear, and feel.
- Identifying when you are stressed and then using a positive aspiration like, “I have survived 100% of the difficult things I have faced, and I can survive this too.”
- Identifying when you are stressed and then doing a mindful movement where you stretch or draw an shape on your palm with your finger and focusing on the physical sensation of the action.
All of these strategies take about 10-seconds each and help you re-center and stop the cortisol response.
In short, your emotional state has a huge impact on your ability to learn. Stress or a previous bad experience can result in avoidance and an inability to retain or use any information or skills you learn.
So, before you dive too deep into a new learning experience, do a quick check on your emotions. You don’t have to feel stoked about what you’re learning, but you do want to avoid negative feelings by seeking out a centered state of mind.
Key Concept #2: The Importance of Systems
Having a system when you learn– and understanding that system– can often mean the difference between success and failure.
This is why it’s really hard to learn a foreign language. Even if we have a system, learning a foreign language is such a huge undertaking that it’s hard to visualize the whole system, so a lot of us feel bogged down, get frustrated, and stop.
Systems help us avoid feelings of being overwhelmed by what we’re learning.
So how do you get started with system-based learning?
Many topics will require some variations, but here is a system you can apply to new learning adventures. I recommend you use this as a roadmap and adapt it as needed:
First: Identify the Type of Learning You Want to Do
First you have to determine if you are doing linear learning or exploratory learning. These are my own terms, so bear with me.
With linear learning, we have a clear objective AND a clear path to achieving that objective. A lot of us are pretty good at this type of learning.
For example, you might want to learn how to play the Jaws theme song on a piano. Clear goal, and a relatively clear path to the goal (you could listen to the song and match notes until you’ve mastered the pattern, or you could watch a YouTube video, etc.).
This is often what we’re exposed to in school and it’s manageable, so it’s what we pursue and, therefore, what we practice and get good at.
With exploratory learning, you have a goal, but it’s so large that there’s no clear path to get there.
For example, you might want to learn how to play the piano. Huge goal, right? Where do you even get started? What do you do first? How do you move forward without wasting time?
Think of it exploratory learning like a landscape. There might be mountains and rivers and a coast and a forest and fields. You don’t have to visit the whole landscape all at once.
Maybe the fields are musical scales and reading music, and you spend some time getting comfortable there. Then you think about where you want to go next. Maybe you’ll visit the mountains and learn about classical music, or maybe you’ll head to the coast and try out jazz.
Each type of landscape feature gives you a different view of your bigger topic. And some of us like the mountains better than the fields and that’s ok. This will help you figure out what you like and don’t like as much about your chosen subject.
Second: Identify Your Goals
Whether you are doing linear learning or exploratory learning, you should work to have small objectives that enable you to achieve your bigger goals. For example, you might want to learn the correct hand positions for a piano player and master them.
This is a great goal to have whether you want to play a movie theme song or learn bluegrass. The thing that’s great about it is it facilitates further learning and it’s small enough to be achievable.
Think about finding one or two stepping-stone goals that take you closer to your bigger goal. You don’t have to have the whole thing figured out. You just need a place to start and a willingness to pivot if necessary.
Then: Figure Out Where You Are Now
Before you move forward with your new learning project, figure out what skills you already have. Are you a raw beginner? Can you read treble clef but not base clef? Did you take a year of piano as a kid or have you been playing for a while? Your starting point doesn’t matter, but it’s really hard to get where you want to go if you don’t know where you’re starting.
Finally: Make Two Lists
The first list should be of resources you can use to reach your stepping-stone goals. This might be YouTube, Google, Pinterest, books (one of my personal favs), online or in-person forums or groups, friends, parents, children, or siblings, or something else altogether.
The resources might be free or paid, but they should specifically fill the role that a teacher would normally fill: providing content and explaining how to use that content. I recommend you keep this list short, no more than 5 resources.
Anything more and it can feel overwhelming or it becomes easy to get distracted. Honestly 1-2 resources is enough. Don’t get so caught up in writing your list and finding materials that you don’t start your learning journey.
Your second list should be about how you learn best. Remember, so far you have survived 100% of the learning experiences you’ve had so far. And I bet you even thrived learning certain topics.
Think about what made you successful in the past and then see if you can apply those strategies going forward. For example, I know that I personally hate using flash cards. They don’t work for me and I find them frustrating.
And we all know from earlier in this post that frustration does nothing but inhibit learning. Instead, I like to recreate my notes on a whiteboard or have someone quiz me on information or a skill. I like repetition under varied circumstances.
Can I play this scale tired? Can I play it at night? Can I play it from memory? I like quizzes. So I use quizzing as a way to learn.
Some people hate this, and that’s great!
Choose the methods that work for you. Write down at least 3-5 learning/study techniques that have made you successful in the past and then think about how you can apply them to your new learning goal.
Conclusion
A lot of us love growing and learning, but we face some problems: we don’t have a ton of free time as adults, we might feel self-conscious or have previous bad experiences with learning new things, and/or we lack motivation to get started.
But by developing an awareness and non-judgmental understanding of our emotional state when we learn and by taking a half an hour to set up a system or two to support us, it’s possible to learn anything.
What’s your favorite learning strategy? Let me know in the comments!