Educated Learning

Learning How to Learn.

Why the Well Educated Have Trouble Learning

Barriers to Learning

How to overcome the biggest roadblock to learning for highly successful professionals and exceptional students.

We naturally expect top ranked students and successful professionals in the sciences, engineering, medicine and business to be adept learners, so it may come as a surprise to find that these people actually have a high propensity for one of the most difficult problems when it comes to learning.

Don't Get Defensive

The problem I am talking about might be considered a matter of pride, or it may be thought of as a fear issue. The point is, when you are going to learn something, your present knowledge will be challenged. Your world view will be questioned. You will face occasional failure. All of these events will trigger your natural defenses to protect your pride and self image. That "defensiveness" is a major road block to learning.

An article by Chris Argyris suggested that professionals and successful students have not experienced enough failure to have learned proper methods to cope with the feelings of shame, guilt or inadequacy that go with failure. Whether that is the case or not, it is true that all people dislike being challenged about their knowledge or skills and will naturally tend to blame circumstances or other people for their own failures. Although this attitude is natural, it is not conducive to learning. In order to learn, you must be willing to accept that you will make mistakes, you will experience failures and you don't know everything. You don't even know everything you need to know to do what you're doing --nobody ever does.

Don't feel bad about your lack of knowledge: it is simply a fact of life. We are always doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. One way to deal with this uncertainty is to believe that you do know all you need to. As a survival method, this works pretty well. You face the world with absolute certainty, feel like you are in control and you can be commanding and inspiring as a leader. The unfortunate side effect is that you close your mind to learning. You can't accept that you may be wrong, you can't accept that you're not fully equipped for the task and you won't tolerate challenges to your ideas, methods or actions.

I wish I could help you resolve the discontinuity between the fact that great leaders tend to be absolutely certain of their goals and methods and the fact that such certainty closes the mind to learning, but I can't. The best I can do is suggest that you learn to accept your own fallibility so that you may learn, but also realize that the great leaders you aspire to emulate were just as fallible whether they realized it or not.

When you find yourself becoming defensive, feeling challenged about your knowledge or ability, step back and recognize that your reaction is one of fear. You don't need to be afraid and you don't need to be absolutely right. Allow yourself to question your knowledge and ideas just as you would someone else's. Listen, you may learn something.