SELF-IMPROVEMENT
3 Ways to Self-Learn Effectively
Teach yourself to learn beyond school and the workplace
Throughout the pandemic, almost the entire world experimented in self-learning at home.
More than ever, we have to rely on ourselves to navigate our tasks, from coping with new work requirements to learning recipes, exercise routines, coding or investing, self-learning has undoubtedly skyrocketed.
For most of us, the immediate shift to working at home led to decreased productivity. It’s hard to learn in a pandemic.
In fact, it’s hard to learn in general.
Here are three approaches to help you focus and self-learn so you can equip yourself with new skills.
Get the harder tasks out of the way first
Have you ever noticed that throughout the day, our ability to stay focused on a goal progressively worsens?
It’s a common pattern in all of us, where our capacity to stay on track deteriorates as the day continues. Consequently, as our work progresses and we get more tired, we start losing more focus. Our reluctance to complete difficult tasks heightens along with our tendency to procrastinate.
In fact, some of us tend to procrastinate doing the hardest work at the start of the day because we dread doing it. We instead fill our time with other insignificant tasks and end up not completing any real significant work at all because we tell ourselves that we’ve already been productive enough.
A much more efficient way of making sure we maintain steady concentration is to do the most important and most difficult tasks at the beginning of your day.
Brian Tracy puts it best in his book “Eat That Frog!” when he describes eating your frog as tackling the major task first thing each morning, the one which you’re most likely to procrastinate on.
When you begin immediately and persist working on that difficult task, you’re more likely to go on to be productive throughout the day, knowing that the first task you completed was the hardest one of all and it only gets easier from then on.
It also acts as a chain effect, because when we feel productive in the morning, we tend to become even more motivated to continue that streak of productivity throughout the day, even if it is bound to reduce a little.
Pretend you’re going to teach someone else
The interesting thing about this is when your brain is processing information, whether it’s instructions from a meeting or a class lecture, having the mindset that you’re going to explain this information to someone else will make us learn better.
There’s actually a name for this and it’s called ‘The Protégé Effect’. What this does is it makes our brains become more aware of what we’re learning. Not only does this sort of trick your brain into paying more attention, but our brains actually start finding ways to organise the information it receives so that it will be easier for us to explain to someone else.
By pretending we’re going to re-teach information to someone else, our behaviour changes.
In fact, not only do we develop a stronger understanding of the concepts we’re learning but we’re more likely to remember the concepts for a longer period of time.
Essentially, it teaches us to automatically review information and arrange it in a systematic manner, making it much more effective.
Build a network of learning colleagues
Also known as ‘collaborative learning’, the idea is to surround yourself with a group of people whom you can refer to in your process of learning. Ideally, these people would have gone through the experience you are currently going through.
Being surrounded by people who have knowledge in the area you’re learning not only provides you with different resources, perspectives and techniques of problem-solving, but is also mentally stimulating.
In fact, according to Business Insider, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk himself didn’t have any type of engineering degree. He instead self-learned rocket science by speaking to experts in the industry. By surrounding himself with this network, he would absorb other people’s expertise and integrate it into his own.
Learning from your own experience is important but learning from someone else’s experience is obviously going to save you a lot of time and effort if you’re diligent.
Eventually, their knowledge is going to become your knowledge if you ask the right questions.
When it comes to self-learning, you’re the boss. You dictate how and when you learn, along with the rate at which you progress.
Key Takeaways
- Begin with the hardest tasks
- Pretend you’re going to teach someone else
- Build a network of people you can learn from
By mastering the art of self-learning, you’re allowing yourself to be independent of someone else to make progress within yourself, for yourself.
