Why We Learn Faster When We Love It

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I have never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it … I have written because it fulfilled me.”
– Stephen King

Practice doesn’t make perfect. There is no perfect. Great practice will hone the good habits, and get rid of the bad habits. Poor practice is practicing your mistakes over and over until they’re ingrained.

By now, most of us have read, or heard of, the 10,000-hour rule, in which 10,000 hours is the magic practice barrier after which we get to be experts and gurus. Unfortunately that has been a misrepresentation of the work of K. Anders Ericsson, and his colleagues from Florida State University from the 1990s. Ericsson never claimed 10,000 hours was the magic expert barrier.

However, research does support the idea of reinforcing “time on task.” In sports, most believe today the best coaching and training involves increasing the amount of “touches on the ball” instead of an older style of coaching in which players stand around watching a demonstration and then take individual turns doing one activity. A poor practice looks like kids standing in lines. A good practice has everyone involved.

We learn by watching, but we learn faster by doing.

Very recent research examined 88 different studies on the effects of practice over time and concluded that practice does count, but much less than previously argued by Malcolm Gladwell and others. Practice certainly matters, but other factors were equally important such as the age in which the activity was introduced, and how much the participant enjoyed the activity. In one example, children reported thirty times higher reading comprehension when they also reported enjoying the reading.

A successful person continues to look for work after he has found a job.

That may come as no surprise, but keep that in mind when making project and task assignments in your professional work. Yes, if you make task invitations that are a stretch but that people might enjoy, that’s an invitation for excellence. But when you offer project and task invitations for activities people detest, you are far more likely to get mediocre results. And research seems to suggest that no amount of arguing for pluck, grit and perseverance, will improve results when the task presented is against their skill set.

In an interview with Scott Turicchi, CFO of J2, a 500M dollar technology company, he said he very intentionally moves team players to different positions within his organization so they have the benefit of seeing different sides of projects and understand the greater picture of any particular project or deal in the works.

As Scott described, there’s an even more important reason to working in different roles, other than job experience and perspective. The most valuable reason is to find what you love, to find the intersection of what you are good at, and what you love to do. Scott said that the kinds of people he likes to hire are those who have passion for their work.

And how are you going to find your passion if you don’t try something new?

Your beliefs don’t make you a decent person, your actions do.
– Maya Angelou

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of thought-leaders and authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Performance Goals are not Learning Goals

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learning_goals

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
– Stephen King

A performance goal is when you want to perform well. You want to shine. You want to be brilliant. You want to people to applaud. You want to be amazing. You want the medal around your neck and the beaming joyful praise from those around you. A performance goal is tied to your ego.

A learning goal is an aspiration to learn something new or improve at a particular skill or task. Learning something new requires experimentation or hard work or studying something at length, or collaborating with others in new ways. Learning goals are hard.

Sometimes a learning goal involves staring intently at someone else who is more skilled in order to visualize, and then develop, a particular skill yourself. And sometimes a learning goal involves spectacular failure while attempting something new.

But these are two different goals.

Carol Dweck led a fascinating study in which she and her colleagues worked with 128 5th graders and gave them a series of tests – mostly puzzles – and then praised them in two different ways with eight little words.

Round 1: For the first round of puzzles, the kids were given a test that everyone did very well on. The researchers knew they would do well.

With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at these problems.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have worked hard at these problems.”

The first word set praises intelligence, and innate talent or skill. This is similar to how many parents and coaches get trapped into talking about our kids. This is sometimes how we speak to kids in performance situations. We tell them how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. We tell them they play soccer like Messi, or paint like Picasso.

The second word set praises effort, determination, preparation, grit. It’s a message that reinforces hard work. It’s a message that says You rocked it because you preserved through adversity. After delivering two different kinds of praise, the researchers were interested in:

  1. how would the kids view their own abilities?
  2. what kinds of challenges would they choose for themselves?

Round 2: Then they gave the kids another round of puzzles. But this time the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for hard work chose to attempt the harder problems. After all, they were just told they did well because they worked hard. Why not go for the harder problems.

The kids praised for their natural talent, and innate brilliance, selected the easier problems. Why? Because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing becomes scary. So to protect ourselves as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance. After all, no one wants to be revealed as an imposter.

Round 3: Time for tough love. In the next part of the study all of the kids were given harder problems. And all of the kids performed poorly. Yes, the kids praised for hard work spent more time on the test, and did a little bit better. But next came the interesting twist. After the test, and the scores were given out, the researchers invited the kids to share the results with their classmates. After all, it was just an experiment. It didn’t really count as part of their school work. Who cares, right?

When the researchers asked the kids to share their results, the kids praised for talent lied just a little bit about their scores. They told their friends they did better than they actually did. Presumably this was to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.

Round 4: Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this set of problems was just as challenging as the first. Remember the first set of problems was easy. Everyone did well.

The group praised for their genius and innate talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round. They did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they did 20% worse.

The second group did 30% better the second time they took the same difficulty test. The difference was just 8 words.

Performance Goals vs. Learning Goals

Finally, Carol Dweck and her colleagues looked at the choices the kids made after receiving the two different kinds of praise. I’ll skip right to the punchline:

  • 69% of children praised for intelligence preferred performance goals
  • 88% of children praised for hard work preferred learning goals

That’s right. When we praise for intelligence we reinforce a predisposition to protect a “gifted and talented” status by choosing tasks which we are more likely to perform well at. And when we praise for hard work, perseverance, tenacity, and pluck, we reinforce the notion that learning is a good thing – that choosing difficult tasks for the sake of continuous improvement is something to be sought-after.

Next time you see excellence, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also reinforcing the idea that continuous growth and learning is a good thing. Because it is a good thing.

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outthink_book_coverShawn Hunter is the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

When You Close One Door, Another Opens

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“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” – Alexander Graham Bell

In Bronnie Ware’s book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying she describes her years of experience working with patients in their finals days. As a palliative nurse she cared for those who had often lived a long life, and were reflective in their last days. As she recounts in her book, if any of her patients had regrets reflecting on their life, the themes were consistently of being authentic and true to oneself, daring to take on their dreams and challenges, and staying in close touch with friends and family.

The number one regret voiced was “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” It’s not laziness and indolence that holds us back. It’s an inability to overcome the fear of trying. Courage is not blindly facing the unknown and stampeding ahead anyway. Courage is instead carefully understanding and recognizing the risks, obstacles and opportunities before us, and proceeding in measured steps.

By carefully understanding, and preparing for each forward move, we mitigate risk and become stronger and mentally sharper with each step. But the stepping is critical. The starting means everything. When initiating a new endeavor we have never attempted before, it’s important to overcome fear and paralysis by making forward progress, however small. Action creates clarity.

Here’s what I mean: You can think and envision and ponder and predict what will or might happen when you start that new business, give that big presentation, run that marathon, or travel to Madagascar. But you won’t know, really know, what it’s like until you start. Experience is invaluable, and micro adjustments along the way are required, which is why action creates clarity.

Consider the acrobats in a Cirque du Soleil event. Their tremendous feats flying high above the arena are the result of hours and hours of careful and methodical training. You know this. But there was still a first time they leapt without a net. There was still a first time that an Olympic skiing long jumper launched off of a 90 meter jump. And there was also a first time you gave a presentation in front of fifty people, or gave a formal report to your executive team.

It’s often not fear of failure that hold us back, but rather fear of success. That’s right. Success is stepping out and doing something different, perhaps something different, or radical, from your peer group. We may feel isolated and alone in this new effort. And explaining where you have been, what you have accomplished may be looked on with scorn or fear or envy. You have stepped out. Accomplished something your peers and colleagues haven’t or aren’t interested in, and now you feel alone.

Fear of social and emotional isolation is the first hurdle to overcome on our way to taking on, and crushing, our own audacious challenges. Leaders recognize the fear of success, and then encourage and nurture bold thinking in others.

The greatest leaders, and our dearest friends, cheer us on when we try something new.

Demonstrate to others they are safe in following their ambitions. Cheer on and support your friends and colleagues when they step out and try something bold. True, they might bomb anyway, but make sure they don’t bomb because you made them feel like they don’t deserve to succeed.

Courage can be learned and courage can be practiced. The more we practice risk, the more we are able to take risks.

Innovation isn’t rocket science. It can be deconstructed and learned by anyone. Try our course Out•Innovate the Competition to build measurable innovation in your workplace.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

The 8 Sources of True Confidence

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Whether you think you can, or you can’t — you’re right.
– Henry Ford

Confidence. That elusive je ne sais quoi quality. It’s like art, you know it when you see it. You know it when you feel it. The thing is, confidence isn’t summoned on demand from the heavens. Confidence isn’t brought on by clenching your fists. Although you can strike a power pose and allow a burst of dopamine to create a burst of confidence, true and profound confidence comes from …

Preparation
One way you can step up on the field, on the stage, or at the meeting with strong confidence, is if you have done the work that will set you apart. Being prepared ranks as one of the highest confidence measures among professional athletes. Competence is almost always a strong predictor of confidence.

Visualizing Past (and Future) Performance
Recollecting past positive performances can give you a confidence advantage. When you take a moment to recollect a time in which you were previously successful, you’ll fuel a sense of confidence that you can repeat that success. Just as powerful is visualizing future success. Common among high performing professionals and athletes is visualizing the events unfolding in the most positive light. Wayne Rooney does this before every soccer match:

“Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what color we’re wearing — if it’s red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life… you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game.” (David Winner interview)

Great Coaching
There are many aspects to great coaches that can instill confidence, but the greatest coaches have the ability to be honest, specific and positive all at the same time. Honest, in that they don’t ignore the behavioral or performance weaknesses of the people they coach, but instead address weaknesses head on. Great coaches provide correctional advice that is both specific and positive.

For example, if you are practicing a presentation and constantly turn your back to the audience and read bullet points, your coach might say, “You know your content. Turn and face your audience and smile. They can read your bullet points on their own. Or even better, tell your audience a story that illustrates the bullet points on the slide.”

Innate Advantages
If your team is simply bigger, faster, and stronger, you will likely show up with more confidence. Just don’t let confidence become arrogance. If your firm simply has more capacity and resources than the competition, your team will likely enter the proposal negotiations with more confidence.

Social Support
First-time parents, exercise clubs, cooking classes, and OCD groups all get together for one purpose: to support each other through a specific change, or toward a specific goal. When you feel a little lost or unsupported, that’s a good time to reach out to those in your work or community who are experiencing the same pain point. You aren’t as unique as you think, and you can bet someone else is going through the same issue. Asking for help is the first sign of strength.

Competitive Advantage
The sun is in their eyes, the field is tilted, their lane is full of gravel, or the competition simply has a crappy internet connection. Recognizing a competitive advantage is a valuable source of confidence. The key is you have to do the diligence to recognize the advantages you might have. This is when competitive sleuthing can be valuable to help you both recognize, and articulate clearly to the customer what your advantages are.

Self-awareness,
Contrary to the old wisdom of positive self-talk such as “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” using positive questions is much more powerful as a confidence booster. If instead you say to yourself, “Can I do this?” you will have to answer the question in your mind and be specific about how you will overcome the obstacle, win the debate, or conquer the challenge. Be both positive and explicit in your self-talk is much stronger than simply repeating “I think I can.”

Trust
Could be the biggest factor here in team settings. I once watched a dynamic, high trust youth soccer team crush a team of hand-picked all-stars. The all-stars been told that each of them was amazing, so they played like that. The kids passed the ball as little as possible and selfishly worked for their own glory. The other team was a team – a team that had built the strength, experience, and trust of each other over years of working together. They were never told that individually they were great. They had built their wins by always relying on each other.

The Importance of Showing Up

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ridebikeFrom the kitchen window Christopher could see his wife was getting frustrated. Over and over again, Dana was running awkwardly, hunched over, down the driveway while holding on to the back to Will’s bicycle. At the time, six year old Will was still terrified of riding without his training wheels, or without his Mom holding him up. Christopher watched as his wife and son repeated the same failed routine again.

Finally, Dana came inside exhausted and frustrated. Christopher Reeve said to his wife, “Let me try.” He rolled his wheelchair gently down the ramp outside and onto the driveway where his son was wiping away tears. Christopher spoke to his son slowly. Since the accident his voice had become soft and measured. He told Will to place both hands on the handlebars and hold them steady. He explained by doing this the bike wouldn’t shake as much. He told Will to look up, far ahead, to where he was going and not down at the pedals or the front wheel. He told his son to first place his right foot on the pedal and his left foot on the ground, prepared and poised to push hard.

Will froze. Then Christopher reminded his son that he would never let him do anything too scary or dangerous – that riding a bike was something he knew Will could do. He told Will he was going to count to three, and on three, it was time to go. Christopher counted slowly and when he reached three, Will pushed off hard and rode down and around the driveway. The first time he circled back, his face was a mask of concentration and focus, and the second time around his face only reflected joy.

In his book, Nothing is Impossible, Christopher Reeve writes that before the accident that left him paralyzed he was a whirlwind of activity. He constantly took his family sailing, horseback riding, traveling, hiking and adventuring around the world. He writes that he never really asked if they wanted to go, he just took them. And after the accident he learned to listen. He learned to speak to them where they were, at their level, with a deep sense of empathy.

Christopher writes that prior to his accident he would not have believed that he could teach his son to ride a bike simply by talking to him. Teaching was about showing, demonstrating, and leading the way. But during his recovery process, he learned the power of conversations, words, intention and meeting people at an intersection of where they are ready to learn. Because each day the physicians and care-takers around him would introduce an idea or an activity that he was ready to tackle, or else it would fall unnoticed. It’s all about introducing learning opportunities when people are ready to learn.

An important nuance of excellent leaders is that they have the capacity to recognize when someone else is ready to go to the next level – ready to take on a new challenge. And instead of doing it for them, encourage their heart and prepare them to make that leap. And it starts by simply showing up and being willing to share your skills and experience.

Make the Comfortable Uncomfortable

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I coach lacrosse with my friend Pete. Coach Pete, who played Division I lacrosse back in the day, certainly looks the part. Big, fast, strong, and possessing a booming voice, one would think the new kids on the team would be intimidated by him, and only the seasoned players would be the ones who would dare to push his buttons, or have the audacity to slack off during drills.

It’s just the opposite. The new kids find him approachable, inviting and encouraging as a coach. Yet the kids who have been playing with Coach Pete for a few years find him sometimes demanding and expecting excellence. He pushes those experienced players the hardest.

Pete has a coaching philosophy worth borrowing. “Make the comfortable uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable comfortable.” What he means is that the new kids are already moderately intimidated by trying a new sport, developing new skills, immersing themselves in a fast, and often chaotic game. They are already on edge, and perhaps even a bit past the positive learning state that creates excellence. When the challenge and chaos of the game exceeds their skill and ability to deal with it, they feel overwhelmed, and move from a state of thriving and learning to a state of retreat. They close down. They drop a pass, take a hit going to a ground ball, and can’t figure out the strange offside rule. The game suddenly isn’t fun.

Inversely, the kids who have played the game for a few years have their posse, their attitude, and their predictable set of moves. These are the ones who need to try new things, who need to cradle and shoot with their non-dominant hand, play a new position, and work on the face-offs that start the game. They need to get out of their comfort zone. They will learn to see more of the game and become better players.

These are emotionally fluent leaders – those who can read people at their current comfort level and present just the right amount of challenge to let their skills and capabilities evolve. Sometimes to accelerate excellence, circumstances need to be chaotic by design – intentionally unstable.

Working in a world of constant change is half the fun of it. Deadlines shift, goalposts move, budgets shrink, markets evolve, new competition emerges, perceptions alter, stakeholders clash, and just when you are ready to deliver, your product is antiquated. After all, it takes a storm to make a rainbow.

Talent is cheaper than table salt

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reality

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
– Stephen King, Author

Carol Dweck led a fascinating study back in 1998 in which she and her colleagues worked with four hundred 5th graders and gave them a series of tests, mostly puzzles, and then praised them in two different ways with these six little words.

With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at this.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have tried really hard.”

The first word set awarded intelligence, and innate talent, similar to how many parents and coaches (myself included) get trapped into talking about, and to, our kids. We say how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. The second word set praised effort, determination, preparation, grit. What the researchers were interested in, was how the kids would view their abilities, as fixed and unchanging or as malleable and able to grow and change with work.

In the next round of puzzles, the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for effort choose to attempt the harder problems. The kids praised for talent selected the easier problems because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing expectations becomes a liability. So to protect yourself as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance.

In the next part of the study both sets of kids were given harder problems to solve and both sets of kids performed more poorly. But here’s the interesting thing. When the researchers asked the kids how they did on the problems, the kids praised for talent lied 40% of the time, presumably to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this next set was just as challenging as the first. The group praised for talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round, and did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they do 20% worse.

But the second group did 30% better this time around. There’s the difference – 6 words. But keep in mind there are a lot of ways to say, “You must have tried really hard.”

Carol and her colleagues use these kinds of effort or “process” praise: which is praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, etc.

– You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
– I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
– I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things

Next time you see excellent, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also building growth and confidence.

A group of all-stars does not make a team

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teamworkThey were unbeatable, invincible. The supergroup, the dream team.

There must be thousands of ten year old boys in New England that play soccer. About forty of the best players from the very best teams were hand-picked to be evaluated by the best coaches. Of those top forty, twenty-eight were cut. They picked twelve players to form the all-stars. From thousands down to twelve. Twelve boys were plucked from the masses to form an elite team – an elite team that would make just one appearance at a tournament and then disband.

They had to work out a few kinks in their first match. They won 12-3, allowing three goals. Their second match was 10-0. Their third match, against us, was 14-0. I was surprised someone kept count. Towards the end of the game they were scoring every few seconds it seemed. We would gather the ball out of our net and trudge back to midfield to kick off, to be trampled again by the little Rooneys, Maradonas and Peles. They played in a stampeding rush down the middle of the field. With flashy footwork to be sure, and passing when necessary, but like marauders all eager for a goal. They played like what they were – mercenaries. Hired guns.

All of the other teams at the tournament, were exactly that – teams. Teams that played and practiced, and ate and laughed and traveled together. And there was one team at the tournament called NEFC that had been playing together for years, probably since they were only five years old. They were amazing, and unlike any U11 soccer team I had ever seen. In their match against us they held possession of the ball at least 90% of the time. I do not exaggerate. And when we did somehow intercept a pass, they were upon us, deftly extracting the ball to resume their hypnotic passing.

They were mesmerizing as they glided around the field, passing sharply from one to another to another. After they scored 6 goals against us (in the first half), their coach instructed them to stop scoring. So instead, they would pass up the alleys, to the corners, into the middle to create a scoring opportunity. And then not score. Instead they would pass away from our goal to the outside and back down the far side of the field, all the way back to the goalie. The goalie would reset the ball, and they would commence to pass again up the field to build a scoring position. Again and again, while our players stabbed at the ball and ran in circles chasing their spellbinding passes.

Then their coach told them to play on their off foot – that is, pass and dribble using primarily their less agile, non-dominant foot. It didn’t matter. They didn’t lose the ball. We’re a good team, and we had a great experience at the tournament. But against NEFC it was all clearly a training exercise for them as they continued to hone their skills together.

And so it was destined that the all-star elite team would meet the NEFC team in the tournament finals. NEFC won 6-0, and although I didn’t see the game first hand, I bet their coach again asked them to stop scoring after 6 goals.

That’s excellence, class, precision, and true teamwork. Unlike the all-star team in which every player wanted a heroic goal, it was impossible to tell which player was dominant on the NEFC team. The quality of the team was such that everyone was elevated together. Instead of competing for an alpha team position, the NEFC players supported each other so well, everyone was great.

Think about that. Do you want to be on a team in which everyone is fighting for glory? Or a team in which the camaraderie and support is so tight everyone gets better?

Go deep. Immerse, and learn something new.

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mindfulI thought he was kidding. Until I watched him do it right in front of me. He didn’t do it fast and flashy like a televised spectacle, but he solved the Rubik’s Cube before my eyes in a few minutes. I was impressed, but not in the kind of way that I felt inspired to try it myself. Just impressed.

“Here, you try. I’ll teach you,” Jason said.

I hesitated. I needed to think about this. Maybe I didn’t have what it takes. Since I was a kid it had seemed impossible. We used to “solve” it by taking it apart and reassembling it in order.

“C’mon, we’ll have time while we watch the kids’ swim meet.” It was true, we would have hours to kill while the kids waited for their turn to compete in 30-second events at the swim meet that afternoon.

“OK, what first?” I said. And for the next few hours I went from overwhelmed confusion to steadily learning concepts, patterns, and strategies in different situations. I knew, of course, that it wasn’t impossible. I only initially felt it was impossible for me.

I filled two pages in my notebook with formulas called FaRT, TURTLE, Right TOP and Suicide, with drawings depicting which cubes will move where, using what sequences. I learned patterns for varying situations, and developed memories of the twists and turns of the cube. Jason remained a patient tutor throughout the exercise, and often mixed up the cube to build particular puzzles I was having problems solving. It was sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprising, and increasingly addicting.

This was an immersion – and exercise in mindful learning. Ellen Langer describes in her book The Power of Mindful Learning, mindful learning occurs when we are present, focused, curious, and intellectually adventurous. And the result is you learn faster, have greater memory retention, and enjoy the learning more.

As Langer describes, three valuable characteristics are present in mindful learning moments: novelty-seeking, persistent engagement and open flexibility.

The first is an interest in novelty and the confidence in our ability to learning something new. With a growth mindset we adopt the belief that we have the capacity to learn something new. The second characteristic is persistent engagement in the activity. With a heightened level of engagement, we are more likely to notice changes in the situation, the context and the environment. That heightened sense of engagement in the activity, decreases what researchers call “change blindness” – that is, an ignorance of changing circumstances. This persistent engagement requires, of course, that we remain interested in the activity. But the thing about those who curiously seek novel experiences, is that they are often more inclined to remain engaged in new learning activities.

And finally, mindful learners develop the flexibility to adapt to dynamic environments. In novel learning environments, unexpected things occur more often. A key trait of mindful learning is an ability to adapt flexibly despite changing, and often unpredictable environments.

Go ahead. Learn something new.

Investing in others is investing in yourself

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“Teaching is the highest form of understanding.”
– Aristotle

tutorSometimes Charlie, who is two years older than Will, comes and helps out at our U11 soccer practice, just as he did this evening. Eleven year old son Will often finds his brother’s presence annoying and intrusive at his practice, but the other kids really like it.

Charlie uses his bigger size, speed and ball-handling skills in a helpful and instructive way. He never tries to score a goal and instead uses his experience and skill to distribute the ball around the field to the younger players. But here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking this isn’t just a charitable exercise for Charlie. I think he may get just as much out of this mentoring opportunity as the younger players. He gets an opportunity to teach, and in the process develops his own skill and confidence.

Often kids who perform below their peers are presented with remedial learning materials that meet their level. So, for example, if a sixth grade child is doing fourth grade level math, they may be asked to work on fourth grade math until they elevate their skills to meet their classmates. It can be humiliating and discouraging to be identified and asked to do remedial work.

But there are other ways to enhance learning in students – by asking them to help others. And interestingly, sometimes being a tutor to another can be a more effective learning tool than being tutored.

Once upon a time (in 1970), two researchers at Stanford tried something a little different. They took two groups of sixth graders. One half were high-performing readers, the other half low performing readers when compared to their sixth-grade peers. The researchers asked both groups to participate in sessions tutoring kindergarten kids with their reading.

All kindergartners who received the tutoring learned reading skills faster than their peers who did not receive tutoring, and later performed better in reading exercises. It made almost no difference to the learner whether their sixth-grade tutor was one of the high-performing students or not. Also, all kindergartners reported looking forward to their sessions with their sixth grade tutors, and described the sessions as fun and enjoyable.

How talented the 12-year-old sixth grader was at reading had almost no effect on how well the five-year-old kindergartner learned from them. All kindergartners improved equally well by having a sixth grade tutor. The better sixth grade students did not necessarily make better tutors.

But here is the real surprise: While the high-performing sixth graders who participated in the tutoring program did enjoy the program and reported a positive experience, those lower-performing sixth graders who engaged in tutoring showed a much higher increase in social attitude, school attendance, and self-esteem. In other words, the tutoring exercise had the greatest positive social impact on the lower-performing sixth grade students – precisely those least likely to be chosen as tutors, but had zero impact on the quality of the tutoring itself. The lower academic-achieving sixth graders were just as effective as their top-performing peers at being tutors to kindergartners.

When we participate in teaching, coaching and mentoring activities, often we gain the opportunity to learn as well. And as this small experiment demonstrates, often those with less mastery are the ones with the highest benefit when they reach out and take the chance to be a coach or mentor to another.

A word of caution of course…if you have never gone ice-climbing, you probably aren’t suited to teach it. But just because you believe you aren’t talented or expert at something, doesn’t mean you don’t qualify as a coach or tutor to another who is much less experienced. And in teaching, you may make the greatest leaps in learning.