Meta learning and me
My first blog of the Makers remote course ended “I have a very tough few months ahead, but these are months with enormous potential for a reordering of my work”. Understatement!! I have in fact dismantled and am building new learning structures in my mind.
The last 7 intense weeks have been cerebral exfoliation, starting with initial panic on recognising that the scaffold I had built up around my thinking processes was stopping me learn technology. Dan our cohort coach diagnosed my “cognitive dissonance”, explained it in a complimentary way that my competence was above my confidence; but essentially this is “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change”.
Without my being aware this course has so far been a refiner’s fire like journey, for “out of comfort zone” read “long hike along a narrow precipice at 2000 metres”. I am now on the downward slope, enjoying seeing where the terrain leads me! Whatever my career outcome I have a life change, my mind has been wrenched free of some unhelpful restrictions that work pressures, relentless short term targets and project ‘coal face stress’ had encouraged. A simple explanation is that a pressured project environment too often demands and rewards a commitment to known ways of getting the job done, rather than learning to do the job well often in a new way.
My technical learning had become blocked and this hindered my professional life, causing me misery . These are the identifiable learnings which have aided me thus far. For theory behind my experience see Sam Morgan’s blog post on self guided learning.
- Work at my own pace, review and build up new learnings by adding them to the concepts I have mastered. This maintains my confidence.
- Draw the system or principle out with examples, use software like draw.io and Zoom whiteboards when working remotely. Doodle!!
- Avoid avoid alcohol during week (desperately seeking exponential growth of grey matter !!). I did dry January mainly driven by my fear of not keeping up.
- Communicate your struggles. For every blocker I have, there is normally at least one other person who is stuck, or else has just resolved that issue. These people, love to help, they get a good feeling riding on their wave of accomplishment.
- The support of a team with a common goal is the best boost to mood and performance. The sharing of a remote cohort and real belly laughs have helped me through a really challenging few weeks.
- Let go of the need to be in control, accept it is OK to feel utterly lost. As a child I was told, if you haven’t fallen over you haven’t tried anything new today. My brain will select the information it needs when deluged with new knowledge
- People who know more and work faster have generally put more time in, read more and practiced relentlessly, they often try out different approaches to a problem e.g. tracking a variable backwards through a class, or deleting lines one by one to understand exactly what each does.
- Watch how those people work and copy their habits. Experimentation, practice and revision increases understanding and recall, read and review your work.
- Learnt fear of technical unknowns led to my ‘fly buzzing around a room’ behaviour and random approach to tasks. While as a tester my random key strikes, lost windows and frequent typos, led to my discovering bugs beyond dreams, as a developer this leads to chaos. Save it for exploratory testing.
- I can learn technology well and I have many years of learning ahead, limits are self imposed if in good health. Age is not a barrier, once I recognise accumulated fears and inadequate strategies for learning, my brain is as effective as it has ever been.
- Debugging is a lesson for life… tighten the loop, reduce the variables to identify the real problem and P everywhere!! (P being dev speak for print output). An unhealthy script is healed with a structured approach.
I approached this full stack development course, assuaging guilt for taking time out of earning by applying a tight career focussed objective; to be an efficient and effective auto tester. This now seems trivial, as I have a new confidence in my ability to approach the unknown and challenging.
These are the ‘take aways’ which will guide me through the latter half of my working life, wherever and whatever that may turn out to be. Luckily I found this Makers course and relish being part of a vibrant community of learners.
