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Strategy Fifteen: Continuous Learning with Purpose
Ongoing Enhancement of Life Through Personal and Professional Growth

Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skills. It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening, although it requires spiritual growth. It means approaching one’s life as a creative work.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Learning and unlearning from past successes and challenges is a life long process! We continuously learn new skills, new ways of thinking, new technology, new business strategies, new information, new self knowledge, new management and leadership thought. We believe that is it so important and so daunting that we are focusing this entire strategy on providing a process for lifetime learning that connects to purpose. Strategy one, we began with your relationship with self, where you determined that which is most important to you. This last strategy returns your focus once again on you, and on your own growth and development.

This strategy integrates the three relationship themes not stated but woven throughout all the previous excerpts:

• Spiritual (relationship with a higher force)
• Intrapersonal (relationship with self)
• Interpersonal (relationship with others)

It takes you to the next level of continuous learning along an upward and deepening spiral of growth and development. Central questions guide this process. While your own questions will emerge, here are examples that may serve you along the continuous learning cycle.

• Does this choice enhance your purpose in life?
• Does this doing reflect your purpose and intentions?
• Does this relationship enhance your life?
• Is this relationship mutually rewarding?
• Does this learning reflect your purpose and intentions?

Getting in step with growth and development in all dimensions of our life puts us in touch with our capacity for continuous learning. Growth is defined here as expanded potential. It is the awareness of where you’ve been and an integration of personal and professional insights and skills that improve your effectiveness now. Growth is the awareness of all those choice moments along your way.

Tom Peters, business consultant and author, encourages cultivating towering competence, honing new skills and capabilities.

Discernment

In the book, The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, the authors refer to the musicians of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra who were asked to name their all time most effective conductor. Arturo Tocanini was chosen. When asked why, one of the musicians said, “he could anticipate when you were about to make a mistake and keep you from making it.” That is one way to describe discernment.

Discernment is the ability to make an aligned decision, to grasp and comprehend what is not immediately obvious. It is the power to distinguish and select what is most appropriate. Applied through astute observation skills such as Arturo Tocanini demonstrates, you make the adjustment that is needed precisely as it is needed. That is using continuous learning in the present, letting go of what may have worked previously to discern what is needed in this moment. Now, take a look a little further out into the future. As you look ahead at goals and objectives that are set, discern what knowledge, information, skills, education is need. Through discernment, choose that which reflects the direction you intend your life to take.

Here are four principles to help you toward continuous learning...

The First Principle of Continuous Learning:
Process Knowledge Versus Content Knowledge

With a vast amount of content knowledge, educational programs, and a menu of skills to choose from, where do you start? We emphasize purpose as the touchstone for decision making; your choices come from purpose. Once you start there, you must still look at two factors: process and content. In previous decades, content was king. You were rewarded in school systems with the highest grade when you could demonstrate retention of a vast amount of information. Now, in school systems and in the work place, it is the process of gathering and generating information, working with others, and creating relationships that is most transforming. Understanding process, how your own process works, and how you work in relationship is paramount. Your process must also include the ability to discern. You must constantly discern and choose what is most aligned to your purpose, that which is most important to you.

The Second Principle of Continuous Learning:
Maximizing the Ability to Learn

This principle focuses on the process of learning. This process learning approach integrates eight learning intelligences developed by Howard Gardner, Professor in Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School. You will increase your ability to learn when you are able to discern which method to choose in a given situation. While you will have more then one preference, your favorite learning process may be the one that is the most natural fit for you.

Learning Intelligences

• Visual/Spatial: Through a visual and spatial process, images, drawings, sketches, maps, charts, pictures, puzzles, designs, films, charts, pictures, puzzles, designs, films, videos, visualization, and imagination help you strengthen your ability to retain and apply your learning.
• Logical/Mathematical: Through a logical and mathematical process, reasoning, deductive and inductive logic, facts, data, spreadsheets, databases, sequencing, ranking, analyzing, judging, evaluations, assessments are tools that help you retain and apply your learning.
• Verbal/Linguistic: Through the process of speaking, writing, listening, reading, papers, essays, poems, plays, narratives, memos, bulletins, newspapers, e-mails, faxes, dialogues, and debates, you are better able to digest your learning, retain the learning, and apply.
• Music/Rhythmic: Through music, tones, and rhythm, you are naturally drawn to use beat, melody, tunes, choir, rap, ads, or jingles in learning and interfacing with others.
• Bodily/Kinesthetic: Through activity, motion, action, experiment, hands-on, acting out dramas or role plays, disassemble, reassemble, touch, feel, and other experiential processes, you are better able to experience and retain the learning. It is through the act of doing and application, that you best absorb and integrate new skills.
• Interpersonal/Social: Through interactive gatherings with others in groups or one-on-one, you strengthen your ability to learn through conversing, sharing, or “chewing up” information, facts, or data. Through this process you strengthen your understanding in the process.
• Intra-personal/Introspective: Through solitude, meditation, and reflection, you are able to envision, plot, plan, dream, write, goal-set, and analyze your own ideas to then integrate with the learning resources that you have received from others.
• Naturalist: Through listening, watching, observing, classifying, categorizing, and discerning patterns, you see systems and better learn and unlearn, letting go of that which no longer works—has died a natural death so to speak. You are pulled toward living things, lakes, rivers, water falls and see the connection between eco systems and human systems.

As Gardner implies, the more fluidly we understand the different types of learning intelligences, the better we understand that there is no “right” way to learn. There are many ways to integrate learning to heighten comprehension of various concepts, knowledge and skills. Diagnosing the learning tools that are available and choosing the one or ones that may better help in a given situation is your discerning challenge. We can apply this process approach to learning intelligences with someone we are living with, teaching, parenting or when we are simply seeking to find a bridge to another.

As a teacher and consultant, I am better able to understand the ways in which my students learn. Thus, the more students know about their own learning styles and the host of other ways of learning, and the more I understand the dynamics of learning, the more able we are to partner in the learning, comprehension, and application process. The same is true in every environment.

The Third Principle of Continuous Learning:
Diagnosing and Learning Forward

To continuously discern, you do not decide to become a plumber when you are wanting to understand the basics of operating your sink. You do not need to become an electrician to use the hair dryer.

• What are the expert skills and competence levels to move you toward the success you’ve imagined?
• What knowledge aligns with goals and objectives?
• What Just-in-Time (JIT) and Expert Knowledge helps along the way?

Focusing your continuous learning on your current profession, and related disciplines, as well as exploring other career directions, keeps you learning and fuels your learning forward. It was long ago said that we will have five, six or more careers in a lifetime. Multiple careers co-exist. Teaching, consult/coaching, training and development, and writing are four distinct careers paths that I am developing, with project subsets under each. Look around and see if you are finding that for yourself and for others.

The Fourth Principle of Continuous Learning:
Ongoing Identification of Support and Resources

Along the way, you will have many choice points as well as many challenges. A question to ask yourself at these junctures: what support and what resources do you need in order to take the next step? The support of others is key to your continuous learning success. As we’ve said earlier, we have not gotten to this point in time without the help of others. We must remember this as we go forward. We are interdependent beings and as we ask others for help, we are better able to give back and help others along their way. We must also make conscious decisions to be open to teachers we meet along our path.

Thinking Points for Connecting Forward

• Look for a focused direction in all aspects of your life, as you discern forward. Suspend logic and reach for creativity to make up something new. Logic, facts, and information are not to be solely relied on, but are helpful tools within the discerning process.
• Develop the ability to diagnose: What is Needed Now?

Summary

Using this model as a framework for continuous learning, you see how it is possible to cultivate a deepening spiraling process of growth and development.

This entire strategy provides a process for you to tap into your greater vitality and intelligence. Doing so, you move toward ongoing enhancement of all dimensions of your life.

This strategy caps off Part Two. We are at the edge of this new understanding of relationships as the core in the business world. Rich and complex, focusing on relationships as the primary organizing force will change your world, and is world-changing.

The transformation of the human being requires something more~~it can only be achieved if there is a “real meeting” between the conscious force which descends and the total commitment that answers it.
-George Gurdjieff (1877-1949)

 

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Ron Sukenick is the Chief Relationship Officer and founder of the Relationship Strategies Institute, a training and Relationship development company that provides innovative, effective and relevant programs and systems for corporations, organizations, and associations. To learn more about the value of Relationship Development, visit his Web site at www.RelationshipStrategiesInstitute.com. You can reach Ron by phone at: 317-216-8210, or by email.