In a fast-paced, high-change and highly interconnected world, the people and businesses that thrive are those that are agile and can easily and quickly evolve themselves so they can take up new opportunities. If you’re a small business, you’re at a great advantage because you’re lean and it’s a lot easier for you to stay agile and change easily. One of the most important skills to develop to take advantage of this agility is the ability to do effective self-directed continuous learning, so Charlie Gilkey and I got together and recorded a discussion where we both shared our tips on effective self-directed learning (the link to download this is at the end of this page)

What conventional institutionalized learning has taught us

Most of us have been taught to learn in a particular way, through conventional school and university systems, and many of us have never been taught how to do self-directed learning. These days schools and universities are becoming more creative in their teaching methodologies and they’re bringing more self-directed learning and critical thinking into their curriculums, but many of us are used to the learning ethos of sitting back while “the expert” decides what information we need to learn and delivers that information to us, and our job is to understand and memorize the information and give it back to them when it comes to assignments and exams.

The most important part of self-directed learning

The most important part of self-directed learning that makes it different from conventional institutionalized learning is that, rather than following a curriculum determined by an expert, with self-directed learning you’re customizing your content around what’s important to you, choosing to research and integrate information that’ll help you get the specific results you want, and leaving out the information that’s not relevant to you. Self-directed learning demands that you take greater responsibility for your own learning and there are a few important questions you need to answer for yourself, in order to select relevant learning resources, but it can be much more efficient that conventional institutionalized learning because you’re only learning what’s relevant to your goals and the focus is on applying knowledge to get the results you want, rather than collecting and memorizing information that you can recite back on request.

When you’ve developed self-directed life-long learning habits, you’ll be driving your development proactively, and you’re a lot less likely to find yourself in the position where you’re in trouble and forced to learn reactively, in an attempt to put out one fire after the other. Being committed to life-long self-directed learning can dramatically reduce your fear and stress, and that in turn will support you to do your work from a place of love, creativity and inspiration where you’ll have much better quality of thinking - essential for thriving personally and professionally, whether you’re employed or an entrepreneur.

Some self-directed learning tips from me and Charlie Gilkey

So because self-directed learning is a such an important skill in itself, Charlie Gilkey, from www.productiveflourishing.com and I got together and recorded a discussion in which we both shared tips on how to do effective self-directed learning. Charlie coaches creative entrepreneurs and coaches, helping them with focusing their thinking and moving their businesses forward through meaningful action. Charlie is also one of the Bottom-line Bookclub experts - he provided an excellent interview for the Bottom-line on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, where we talked about the kind of whole-mind thinking skills you need to thrive in this era.

Charlie and I are both big on self-directed learning. Everything about the Bottom-line Bookclub is designed to guide you to do effective self-directed learning so that you use what you’re learning, rather than just collecting more information. Over the course of some of our recent conversations about the Bottom-line Bookclub and what we’re both learning, Charlie revealed that he gets through 6 to 10 books a month. And having followed Charlie’s work for a while now, and personally experienced the benefits of being coached by him, I know that he doesn’t just collect information - he uses it to get the results he wants and to help the people he works with to get the results they want.

So head on over to Charlie’s blog where you can download our discussion and find out the core habits we both use to get the most out of self-directed learning.

Photo by Paky

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