LEARNING MINDSET

In this, I am going to talk about the learning mindset. What is it? how can we develop it? And how can we keep it growing with time? I divided this block in segments for the proper understanding to the reader.

What is a mindset?

Mindset means a general attitude of a person and that are often difficult to change. It basically means the way by which our brain thinks and work upon. Mindset is very difficult to change as it is a part of our personality, but if we continuously work upon on it and also have the much need motivation as a catalyst then we can surely change or improve our mindset.

Now talking about the topic that is learning mindset, why is it required? why should we need it? Learning mindset is not a thing that we should have for some period of time in life learning rather it needs to be a life-long pursuit.

Author Richard bolles in his book “The three boxes of life and how to get out of them” present a model of life and divided into three sequential stages. First is a big block of education, second is a big block of work and third is a big chunk of leisure. First stage is the period when we complete are learning and education, includes going to school, high school and then college and for some person post-graduation also. 2nd stage is related to work, that is when we built our career (job or business) and earn wealth and the last stage is related to the retirement or leisure.

This model might work good in earlier time but not in today's world which keeps on changing very fast. This model is not suitable for constant changing world. As we are talking about constant changing scenarios in world, recently Covid-19 playing a role in drastically changing the way the world used to work. Work from home, virtual meetings, e-learning and e-classroom are the new commons to people and in the coming future it will be going to Change More. What we can do, is that we have to think differently and prevent us from the constant changing environment from affecting us.

What can work best for us, we have to identify it ourselves. The model discussed earlier needs a change in today's world that is we must make our first block (Education and learning) for whole life not for a certain limited period means we have to treat learning as a life long journey.

Motivation behind Learning

Motivation plays a very important role in achieving your goals, it is the driving force that pushes us to overcome the difficulties in crossing our limits to achieve success.

In Learning new things motivation is very crucial as without motivation any new learning will be useless.

I think there are 5 different motivation that drives us to learn new things.

        ·         Someone telling you to learn it

        ·         New goal for self

        ·         Change in the circumstances

        ·         Fear about falling behind 

        ·         Fun

The best motivation comes from within you and if it is external then there are few chances to keep it going for the long run.

     Parts of learning

  Any learning can be divided into three skills that are Knowledge, skill and traits.

· Knowledge

It is the understanding of specific information in a field of interest or activity. For example, information about the recipe, the theoretical insight of an engine, etc. but only knowing a recipe doesn’t mean you are a good cook.

·Transferable skills

These are the skills which you can use somewhere else also like if you know how to design a web-page then you can have some idea about designing magazines or say if you know C language then you can do programming in C++ or related languages.

·Traits

Skill that are used to manage yourself like controlling your emotions, focus, anger during the implementation of your knowledge. These traits are also skills, some have it in their personality and some haven’t.

Let’s take an example for better understanding of these.

Knowledge = Driving
Transferable skills = hand-eye coordination, focus
Traits = Patience, confidence

Any new learning must be breakdown into these 3 segments

1.       What new knowledge will you gain?

2.       What transferable skills will you learn?

3.       What traits will you continue to develop?

     How to develop or grow as a learner?

We can understand this by taking analogy of a plant in a garden which grows from a tiny seed when proper care, proper soil, proper light, required amount of water and space to grow is given.

In the same way, we also have a learning garden in our mind in which we cultivate new skills and learning.

To learn something new, the first thing we need is to put a seed in our learning garden which means that setting a new goal to learn something new. As the right soil is required for a seed to grow, the right environment is required for our learning. Having a good environment is very helpful to learn the things quickly but lack of such environment doesn’t mean that we cannot learn, in such cases we have to put extra effort and get the required support from our colleagues and friends to help us to learn.

Sunlight is a very important part in the growing phase of seed. In the same way, the light of knowledge that we required to get the insight of what we are learning are important. Sometime it happens after reading some article or watching some videos about some skills, we open our mind to generate interest to know about it more.

Even the seed with good soil and sunlight, it still cannot survive or grow without water and in our case, water is corresponding to love towards the learning. If we are not loving the process of learning that skill or it goes on decreasing with time then despite having a good environment and knowledge we cannot succeed in our goal.

Like seed needs the space to grow, similarly, we also need the space from our busy schedule. Unless we don’t have space, we can’t learn something new. We have to take out the time to learn new skills.

So, whenever we learn new things, we have to make sure all of these are present as only then you can learn something new that can be kept for a longer time.

According to me, a lot of skills are there to be learn be it soft skills, technical skills or skills related to our profession but the greatest personal asset that we can have is the Learning Mindsets through which we can learn all these skills.