February 21, 2023
Perry
Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab podcast, Episode number six. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer, and I am very glad you decided to spend this time with me as we explore some new ideas that might lead to your own experiments and eventual evolution into the leader you were always meant to be. I would ask if you do find the podcast interesting, please take a few minutes and give it a review as that makes it easier for other folks to find it as well. And you can always recommend that if you believe that others might benefit from listening. Now this episode is about learning or being left behind. Now look a little just a little, I guess, caveat or clarification. There is a ton. When I started doing research for this, there is no shortage of information out there on how you have to continue to learn to lead. This is not that. You can find that on your own. We're going to talk about today is how we define and understand learning and understanding how adults learn and understanding and focusing on the mechanics of learning and the prerequisites. So I want to start at the beginning, not at the actual the pleasantry of leaning, learning and leading. You know, learning and leading are indispensable to each other. John F Kennedy said that. So you can go find tons of articles on how you have to continue to adapt. I get that. But let's talk really about what that means.
00:01:20
Perry
So as always, we'll start with a few quotes. The first one is one of my favorites. It's from a physicist and his name is Marcello Glaser. As the island of knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance. The boundary between the known and unknown. Learning more about the world doesn't lead to a point closer to a final destination whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyways. But to more questions and mysteries, The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance and the more we know to ask. The second is from Lillian Smith. When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions. Always new questions. Then it is time to die. So Lillian got right to the point. And finally, one of my favorites from Alvin Toffler, who wrote Future Shock. The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn. I'm going to start off with a definition of learning. And this is from Susan Ambrose and her team in a 2010 publication, How Learning Works. So here we go. Buckle up. She defines it as a process that leads to change, which occurs as a result of experience and increases the potential for improved performance and future learning. The change in the learner may happen at the level of knowledge, attitude or behaviour as a result of learning. Learners come to see concepts, ideas and or the world differently.
00:03:03
Perry
That bears repeating. So here we go. Learning is a process that leads to change, which occurs as a result of experience and increases the potential for improved performance and future learning. The change in the learner may happen at the level of knowledge, attitude or behaviour as a result of learning. Learners come to see concepts, ideas and or the world differently. So my first question would be, by that definition, when's the last time you learned anything? Again, the first thing they say, a process that leads to change. If you didn't change, you didn't learn. One of my biggest hangups with people is they say, Oh, I read a dozen books a year, I read 20 books a year. And I say, okay, great. What's different? Because if we're just plowing through books, if we're just consuming content and we're going to talk about the power of reflection later. But if we're just plowing through content and none of it is changing us. And I'm going to use this example because it's what pops into my head. Take it or leave it. But my pastor always used this statement. If your faith didn't change you, it didn't save you. And so if you think about this, if you're learning didn't change you, then you didn't learn anything. You consumed it. You read it. You understood it. You did all those things. But if you didn't change your view again as a result of learning leaders cum learners Freudian slip as a result of learning, learners come to see concepts, ideas and or the world differently.
00:04:57
Perry
So when we learn something, we change our point of view. We see things differently than we did before. And we're going to talk about unlearning later as well, because that's also a thing. If we can't unlearn, we can't learn. Now, I would argue that the greatest threat to our future success is our past success. The more successful we are the least. The less likely we believe we need to learn. Because our field of what is known gets narrower and narrower and narrower, because the more successful we are, the more we, quote unquote, know. Or else we wouldn't be successful. So if you think about this, the more successful we are can be our greatest danger. It takes effort to unlearn things that we already think we know. And I'll give you a couple of great books on this. I just threw in here because I love them and I always recommend them. Is Barry O'Reilly's book. It's called Unlearn Let Go of the Past to Achieve Extraordinary Results. And Adam Grant's book, Think Again The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. And those are two really good books on the concepts of not knowing and then unlearning. And we're going to talk about unlearning in a little bit. But when is the last time you remember coming to see concepts, ideas and or the world differently? It's tough.
00:06:30
Perry
Like I can tell you, one of the things that stuck out to me in the last six months, so I do a lot of work with with psychometric assessment called predictive index. So for shorter, just as a shorthand, it's a personality test, if you want to call it that. It's not a test and assessment, it's a whole thing. I got to I got a problem with the test because it's pass fail. It's actually an assessment. It's just input in input out. Now, what's interesting is I read this book. Called Personality isn't permanent. And it fundamentally changed my viewpoint on what something like the predictive index does. Something I'd worked with that assessment for 20 years. But after reading this book, I started to think differently about what it did, and then I started to talk differently to people about it. Because that thing changed for me. I started to see the world differently. I saw this concept, this idea, this assessment, this tool. I saw it differently. So I no longer talked about it the same way. And then the other book that really it's still I'm still trying to process it. I've read it twice. I'll probably read it again is how emotions are made. And that's. Well, I'll tell you what, man. That one kind of rocked me a little bit because essentially all of the research points to that we choose our emotions.
00:07:59
Perry
We choose our emotions. They don't happen to us. There they are. While they are neurochemical reactions, we choose them. It's mind boggling. It's a great read, but these are I can give you those two instances where I read something and it fundamentally changed what I believed. Now, I can also tell you it was kind of painful. It didn't happen immediately because almost immediately my response was, Well, this is bullshit. I don't believe this. And the reason I say that is because it didn't line up with what I thought I believed. Right? So any time our belief is challenged, typically our first offense is defense. Right. I'm not I don't buy into this. That doesn't make sense to me. You've got to prove it to me. And that's one of the challenges and learning. Because learning fills a vacuum. It fills something where we have a gap when we have filled all those gaps in after being successful and living for 30, 40, 50 years. Suddenly the world doesn't seem as complicated. We know a lot more stuff. What's left to know. Now the question becomes, do you have a plan for your own learning as a leader? How do you decide what you need to learn? How do you go about learning it? How do you find the resources? Do you set time aside to do it? How do you prioritize it? I mean, think about it.
00:09:28
Perry
Are you actively did you actively create a plan for your own learning? Four 2023. Did you say to yourself as a leader in this organization, as a potential leader in any organization? And by the way, potential leader, I don't care if you're currently a leader or you're not, you're always a potential leader because you're always recognizing that potential inside of you, which is done, by the way, by learning. Right. That's how you recognize potential. And so do you have a plan for it? Have you thought about what is my organization require? What do I require? What are those things that I need to get better at? I'm not talking about your performance evaluation and that stuff. I'm talking about learning. I'm talking about becoming the leader you were always meant to be. What's the plan for that? Do you have that plan? Is it written down? Are you accountable to it? How do you measure it? What does success look like? What's your intent? I'm going to throw a couple of things, a couple of terms out for you. Again, we're going to dive a little bit deep into adult learning. So the first one is Andrew Koji. Andrew Knowles came up with this. It's different than pedagogy. So, so pedagogy and. Andrew Koji So pedagogy or pedagogy, you know, depending on tomato, tomato, how you want to say it, pedagogy or pedagogy is how we, how we teach children. Andrew Koji is adults.
00:11:01
Perry
How do we teach adults how to adults learn, and are there fundamentally different things? And not that I'm telling you anything you don't know, but you don't learn like you did when you were ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Right. So there are some concepts here. There's some bullet points. So adults need to know why they need to learn something. You didn't need to. You were told you need to learn it to pass a test back in school. So you didn't care. You didn't that didn't you didn't have that need to fulfill. Adults need to know why they need to learn something. Adults need to learn exponentially. X I'm sorry. Experientially. We learn by doing. We don't learn by thinking anymore. You know, we have to apply that knowledge. We have to see what it does. And we also approach learning as problem solving. Again, back to the plan. If I'm going to learn something, it's helping me solve a challenge I have in my life. We're not learning for learning sake. Again, back when we were kids, we learned to give us a wider breadth of knowledge, right, To make us more successful later. As an adult, we're learning as problem solving. And that leads to the fourth one, which is we learn best when the topic is of immediate value. That's why YouTube is such a great place to learn. Because if I run into something, I can't and I don't know how to do something around the house, I can just go on YouTube and find a video.
00:12:28
Perry
The person will show me how to do it. It's it's problem solving and it's of immediate value. Now the differences between pedagogy and Andrew Koji are that with with the need to know, you know, so a with pedagogy I have a need to know like I've, I've elected to do this. The self concept, right? Children and adults alike are self directed, but adults are much more that way. One of the fundamental aspects of human motivation from social learning theory is the self concept that we have of ourselves. The role of experience, The learners experience is paramount to learning. I have to connect it and be able to embrace that person's experience and make that part of the learning process. So if you want to think about this contextually, or if you want to think about it like like a formula, you go in as an adult, you have a big foundation of knowledge. And I'm going to just say, you have your own book. Let's call your brain is your book. I have this book of knowledge that I've amassed up to whatever point I start to talk about something new. Then I have this new concept, this new idea, this new theory, this new experience. Well, what I'm immediately doing is I'm I'm. I'm balancing the two against each other. Is I'm taking what I'm I'm running into now.
00:13:50
Perry
This new concept is new theory, this new experience, and I'm banging it against what I already know. And I'm trying to figure out, does it fit or not? Does it fill any gaps that I have? Does it replace anything in there? Do I need to tear out a couple of chapters and replace them with this stuff? Because that's essentially what I'm doing. I'm always continually editing my book. So if you want to think about this from a metaphor standpoint, that's what we're doing. We have a book and then we're constantly updating and editing it based on new information. Some of the things in there will never take out. There are always going to be OC and other things we might need to replace. One, two, three, four, six times. But it's always looking at it, thinking to ourselves, This isn't a static thing. Like I'm never done, I've never finally published it and I never have to go back. And then the last couple of things are a readiness to learn. You know, as an adult, we have to get in the right mindset. You know, we're going to be more engaged if we see the purpose and we're able to apply it immediately to our world. If I'm sitting taking in content and I can apply it to what I'm doing right now. This was always one of the challenges I had. I taught in a master's program for a number of years, adults in the evening, an adult MBA program, and it was always challenging because we taught the typical subjects, you know, strategy and finance and marketing and all of those things.
00:15:27
Perry
The challenge really was if you had somebody learning managerial finance, but they had no their day to day didn't include finance, nor was it going to any time soon. The likelihood of them internalizing that and remembering it for more than a couple of months was slim and none because they couldn't apply it. They weren't using it. And that's what we do with knowledge as an adult. We want repetition. We want to go out and use it and implement it. That's why when we talk about explore, experiment, evolve, I mean, that's the whole concept, right? We're coming up with we're exploring concepts, we're devising experiments on behavior, and then we're evolving once we see the results of those. But we're actively experimenting with new concepts all the time because we can. But we don't talk about things that were we're not going to use because if we're not going to if all we're going to do is talk about them and we're never going to use them, then the experiment never happens. And it just it always stays as theoretical. I mean, we had this a very vibrant discussion one time in a class about going through a downsizing. And I asked the class how many people had ever had to go through and have those conversations with people, and none of them raised their hands.
00:16:42
Perry
And I said to him, I'm like, well, we can certainly talk about what's in your book when it talks about changes and organizations and downsizing and emotions and those types of things. We can certainly talk about those. It's never going to matter until you have to do it, because no amount of book learning is going to prepare you for having that conversation with somebody face to face. You can have all of the knowledge in the world, but the practical application of that conversation with another human being. Is going to happen very differently than you think it's going to. And so that's what I mean when we get into leadership, most of it is experiential. And I'm to be honest, I'm always a fan of the saying that leadership can be learned. It can't be taught. The leadership can be learned, but it can't be taught. And what I mean by that is you can't force somebody to learn it. You can put somebody in an environment where they have a desire and you can you can give them access to information and they can learn at their pace. But it's going to be frequency. You know, I, I actually work with leadership development, with within leadership development, with organizations. And one of the main challenges is we talk about lots of these things that we have to do as leaders, but we don't we don't allow people to have the reps.
00:18:05
Perry
To use it. And that's really the issue. The issue is everybody reps like you need to do something over and over and over again until you understand it, right? Until you've actually done it in what I'll call a game situation when it matters. I can role play all day long. I can sit in a room in role play, performance evaluations and critical conversations and blah, blah, blah, whatever bullshit you want to talk about. We can do that. But that's never going to be like a game rep. It really is good to practice. But we also have to understand that practice isn't a game. And that in the moment things are going to happen. We didn't plan for it. So the more reps we can get. The more adaptive we can become. Because those things don't throw us anymore. We've seen a lot of those things and we're actually prepared for the things that may or may not happen. And then finally, just the sheer motivation to learn. If somebody is intrinsically motivated and interested in the material which adults need to be. It's going to grease the skids on the learning if they want to be there, if they've elected to be there. That's that's. That's literally over half the battle. If the person has volunteered and said raise their hand and said, yeah, I want to be a part of this now you have leverage.
00:19:32
Perry
In the situation, what you need that leverage. You can't make somebody go learn something isn't going to work. That leads us to talk a little just a few minutes about Kolbe. David Kolbe, 1984, developed this learning cycle, and the four components are concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. So concrete experience. So we do something. We have a new experience or situation, or it's even a reinterpretation of existing experience in the light of new concepts, like we're we have an experience or we evaluate a previous experience. Now we're going to think about it. We're going to talk a little bit about reflection later, but so reflective observation. We're going to look at how it mattered and then we're going to talk about the abstract conceptualization. What is the new idea that spins out of this? Again, back to my example earlier. I have my existing knowledge and new knowledge, and I start smashing this together. What's new? What comes out of it that's new? What have I actually learned? And if I go back to the original definition, right, what have I changed? What point of view do I see differently now? And then active experimentation. I'm applying the idea to the world to see what happens. You know, there's obviously similarity here with explore, experiment, evolve. Mine's just simpler, right? I just distilled it down a little bit.
00:21:00
Perry
But it's the same concept, just like many more of these learning models. But the act of experimentation, how am I applying it in my world now? And that's tough. And especially from a leadership perspective, because really with leadership, we're talking about how do we change our behavior? And in experimenting with new behaviors is risky. And it's challenging and it can be awkward. And to be quite honest with you, if you're not willing to look like a complete idiot, you're going to struggle. Because that's one of the things you have to do. You have to be willing to fall flat on your face. Or the old adage of you have to be willing to jump off the cliff and build your parachute on the way down. As long as you're open. And the idea of the experiment isn't to succeed. The idea of the experiment is to learn. Because from a scientific standpoint, you don't do experiments to win. You don't do experiments to prove proof things. Right? You do experiments to prove things wrong. And if they can't be proved wrong, then they're right. And so experiments are all about learning. I'm doing an experiment. Then I'm evaluating what happened. If you have that mentality, it'll be awesome. But if you have the mentality that I'm going to master this new behavior and this one behavior will be the right, quote unquote behavior, then you're going to struggle.
00:22:31
Perry
So I said earlier you talked about unlearning, because as we go through Kolb cycle of experience and then reflection, conceptualisation, experimentation, we're going to be challenged with maybe unlearning some things that we thought were correct or right. And the first step in that is just acceptance. We have to recognize that maybe our models or systems or processes that worked before don't achieve the same results anymore. And there's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't mean it was bad or wrong. It just means it's not working anymore. I had a conversation today with a leader of an organization and I and they're doing some changes in the organization. It's been around for a long time and there's a lot of people that work there that have worked there for a long time. And I said, it's very important that when you talk about changes in the organization, you make sure you're talking about things we're going to do differently, not better. We don't want to put better in that equation, because if we say better to people that have been there for 30 years, the first thing they're going to think is, Oh, so now you're telling me I've been doing it wrong all these years and that's not what we're telling them. The reason that we that organizations must continue to evolve is because the outside world is evolving at a very quick pace. So as an organization, all we're saying is, is we have to continue to evolve to serve our clients and to serve our partners and to be a viable entity.
00:24:05
Perry
Again back to acceptance, recognizing that model systems and processes that worked to achieve certain things in the past don't work anymore. They cannot sustain us in the present time. And the sooner we learn to accept that, the faster we can move forward. And learning to unlearn requires admitting that we what we once followed and knew is no longer effective or useful. That's it. It's not judging. It's just saying the shit that used to work doesn't work anymore. Done. We can't get emotionally attached to it. We can't say it's not us. We're willing to adapt. We're willing to do something different. So it isn't us. We're not we're not working anymore. It's the process isn't working. Let's change the process and make everybody successful. And then the second step is you're going to have to find sources of learning and relearning. Right. It needs to be once you start getting rid of habitual knowledge that it needs to be replaced with something new. So what's the process? Fostering curiosity can be key in an attempt to relearn, you know, make asking a lot of great questions, always being curious, not judgmental. Just remember that. Always be curious. Abc. Always be curious. If because most of the time when we get to a certain point in our lives and our careers almost instantaneously, we're judging everything.
00:25:29
Perry
People, results, processes, news, whatever. Immediately we're judging. If we shift to curiosity. We can't judge. And if you shift to curiosity and get out of judgment, then you can actually care about people because you can't care about people and judge people at the same time. And that's what leadership I believe the root of all leadership is, is love. You have to care about people. Otherwise, not worth it. If you don't care about people, you can't lead people. And then finally, the third step is just being open to new experiences. Finding a way to break ourselves down, to be open to those things, and then stopping doing the things that we're doing all the time. And it requires dedication to learning to unlearn by allowing relearning to take place. And again, the key to this is just not judging ourselves. We're not bad. We're not good. We're just different. We want to evolve. We're not changing to from like it's a constant process. And that's really important because if we look at ourselves as a static thing and we say, Well, I've been this for five years now, I have to change to something, that's a significant. That's a heavy lift. Emotionally. But if we look at ourselves as as an evolving, it's why I always like the thought of instead of human being where we should be. We should refer to ourselves as human becoming. Because if we look at ourselves, our whole life as an evolution.
00:27:10
Perry
Then we're never finished. You know, we're not done with anything. We're never going to tap out and go up did it. And there's a whole nother we could have a whole nother one. And I might at some point about how much bullshit retirement is. Retirement is complete and utter bullshit. In my mind, in my humble opinion. Because it arbitrarily sets up this thing where it's like, I'm done. Like I'm. I'm done. Becoming. And I think much like and I can't remember Covey's daughter's name who wrote the book Crescendo, but she wrote a book with her dad and her dad passed away. She finished, took her ten years to finish it. But living life in the crescendo, living life in crescendo, not dim diminuendo, you know, living life as you get louder in life. Continue to evolve, continue to learn, continue to contribute. Not diminuendo, which is getting quieter and softer. The science of unlearning and learning is a little bit interesting, so it has to do with neuroplasticity. For those of you that haven't heard the term, it's the ability of our brain to change and to create strength and weaken or dismantle connections between your neurons. And it does. It's scientifically proven. Now. They used to just crap. I was going to say 20 years ago, but 40 years ago in the eighties, they actually thought at one point that you're born with so many cells in your brain, in so many, so many neurons, and that was it.
00:28:40
Perry
You're done. And they have since come to find out that is not true. Like you can generate new gray matter in your brain. Your brain constantly can, can, can shift and change, which is neuroplasticity. Right. And that is we're built in learning. If you get down to the science of it, learning is building the connection between neurons. Like you have synapses, you have dendrites at the end of your neurons. And there's a fatty substance called myelin. And what happens is when neurons connect with each other and you may have heard the term neurons that wire together, fire together. And so as you learn something, the connection, which is an electrical impulse, travels from one to the other across this fatty tissue called myelin. And the more you do something, the more you repeat a behavior activity, the thicker that myelin sheath gets, which means the quicker the electrical impulses translated from one to the other. So it's that instantaneous. You don't have to think about it anymore. It's that if you want to use the term muscle memory, it's I don't have to think about it anymore. But then the other side of that also happens where your brain will that's called synaptic pruning, that if you don't use knowledge after a while, it will go away.
00:29:59
Perry
Your brain will automatically prune those connections. And the best example I can give you is for anybody that's older that maybe hasn't ridden a bike in 20 years. You get on a bike, you can still ride it. But I didn't like it was 20 years ago. You know, you'd all come back to you because you'll you'll figure it out. But when you get on, you're still shaky. Right? And that's because that those connections have been pruned because you didn't use them. And so anything we learn, the more we do it, the more we talk about it, the thicker that myelin sheath gets and the quicker we are to recall it, and then the more we move away from it. So some of you that are leading organizations that used to be maybe a subject matter expert in some area of your business at some point and you haven't done that for a while. You may have people that are in the organization now that are that have exceeded your capacity to to know those things because you no longer do it all the time. Nothing wrong with it. It's just the way our brain works. And so we want to repeatedly activate those neurons. We want to practice a lot and retrieve that information from memory. Right. And then we want to space that activity. Practicing more often, but in a shorter period. So instead of trying to do like 2 hours in a row doing 40, 40 periods of 30 minutes over a few days, they don't they haven't really figured out the best spacing.
00:31:25
Perry
But all they know is that if you come in and you try this and you practice and you go away and for some period of time, come back later, do it again, that that is a better way to cement things into your memory than doing it for one long period of time. And so again, we back to talked about synaptic pruning. You know, your brain is going to prune connections that you don't use. So just be aware of that. And then as we learn, we're actually generating so it's synapse generation. We're creating new habits with practice. Right. And I want to give you a couple of interesting quotes here about that I'm going to share with you in a minute, because we're going to move from now talking about kind of the brain and how that learning works in the brain and unlearning and learning to the power of reflection. All right. And this is going to be the last little section that we talk about. So I'm going to start this off with two quotes. The first is from John Dewey. And it's a really interesting quote. We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience. So you talk about the power of reflection. We do not learn from experience.
00:32:38
Perry
We learn from reflecting on experience. And then Confucius is credited with saying by three methods, we may learn wisdom first by reflection, which is noblest. Second, by imitation, which is easiest. And third, by experience. Which is the bitterest. So again, three methods to learn wisdom. First by reflection, which is noblest. Second by imitation, which is easiest. And third by experience, which is bitterest. So in an academic paper by Giada DeStefano, Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano and Bradley Stotts on the role of reflection in learning, there's this quote. So bear with me a minute. Just hang in there and listen to this. It's really powerful. Our findings suggest that reflection is a powerful mechanism by which experience is translated into learning. In particular, we find that individuals perform significantly better on subsequent tasks when they think about what they learn from the task they completed. Interestingly, we do not observe an additional boost in performance when individuals share the insights from their reflection efforts with others. Results of mediation analysis further show that the improvement in performance observed when individuals are learning by thinking is explained by increased self efficacy generated by reflection. So essentially, they note in their academic paper that if people reflect on what they've learned, they learn better. And that even takes into account they don't have to tell anybody. They don't have to talk about it with anybody. But they have increased self efficacy generated by reflection. And self efficacy is really important in learning because self efficacy is our belief that we can get better.
00:34:29
Perry
Our belief in ourselves. And so the more we reflect, the greater level of self efficacy we have, it's generated by reflection. And so this was, again, an academic paper that talked about, you know, in particular, we find that individuals perform significantly better on subsequent tasks when they think about what they have learned from the tasks they completed. The power of reflection. Now, reflection is defined technically as the articulation and codification of experience accumulated in the past. To put more simply, reflection is careful thought about our behaviors and beliefs. It involves assessing our assumptions and reactions to an event or pondering the meaning and implications of an experience carefully and persistently. With reflection, we act and move forward in a more meaningful and thoughtful way. Now, my question real simple. How often do you reflect? Do you have a built in time so that you can reflect, so that you can think about what you did during a half a day, a meeting, a full day, a week, a month, a year. It's really important because it is kind of the cement for learning. We can't learn if we don't reflect. Right. If you think about this, remember what Dewey said. We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience so we can be busy and do lots of stuff. But if we never take the time to reflect on what happened.
00:36:07
Perry
And there's. And I'll get to it in a minute. But it's just really interesting. It's like, what? So what? Now what? Just ask yourself those three things. Like what happened? So what? What does it mean? And now what? What do I do? This isn't and again, the argument here I know is going to be time. We don't have time. We have time for this. You do because we're only talking about minutes. You're talking about maybe after something significant, five, 10 minutes. Just just. And again, this can't happen unless it's written down. I cannot say this enough. If you're going to type it, fine. I don't think that's the right way to do it. I think writing is better than typing, but typing is better than nothing. So a on a scale, I'll, I'll, I'll condone typing, but only if you're going to choose between that. Nothing I'd prefer. You're right. Right. But if. But just sitting down for 5 minutes and thinking about what happened. In some significant event that you did some meeting that you had some sales call, some strategy session, some interaction with somebody, what went well? What didn't go well? What would I do differently? And when they look at the it's interesting because when they look at functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is an FMRI, the studies of the brain have shown that neural networks essential for learning from classroom content are separate from those involved in the reflection and consolidation that should accompany the formalized learning.
00:37:41
Perry
Now, think about that. The neural networks for learning the content and then reflecting on the content are different. In this neural partnership, one system is responsible for looking out for conscious effort. And the other is focused on looking in introspection, remembering and reflecting. Each system is equally important. So you have two different if you look at they're doing fMRI of people's brains, so they're having them do activities and watching what part of their brain lights up. And they're saying that when we learn content, it's one neural system. And then when we reflect on that content, it's a separate neural system that works in partnership. So you can't tell me that there's no evidence that reflection isn't important. But I still, on a routine basis, would be challenged to believe that everybody is building in time to do that. Not a ton of time. We don't need hours or days. We need minutes. Need to build that ritual in. So that we have our thoughts on what we did. Because without that there is no learning. We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflections on experience. So you could be having tons of experiences and you could be learning nothing. Without reflection. Now, how does this pertain to leadership? Well, reflection is an executive function, and true reflection galvanizes your willpower. It promotes self awareness. It empowers you and ensures your value.
00:39:21
Perry
It gives you the self-awareness you need to quicken the achieving of your potential. If you think about this as how you're going to learn. It's how you're going to evaluate your own behavior. Nobody else is, by the way. Nobody's going to do this for you as a leader, and nor should you want them to. Now, certainly you can invite other people to give you feedback, and I love that, but do not depend on other people to give you feedback and help you with your reflection. You can share with people if you want to, but remember what it said. Merely reflecting increases our ability to learn. Telling other people about their reflection doesn't add any material value. If you want to get input from other people, I love that. 360 evaluations. All of those things, the more the better. But let's start with the fundamentals, which is you being responsible for your own learning. How are you building reflection into your day? And so here's a couple of ideas, right? So one is, I told you already. What? So what? Now what? It doesn't get any simpler. What? So what? Now what? Answer those three questions. Now, if you want to get a little more detailed, there's something called the integrated Reflective Cycle from Bassett 2013, and it's a model of reflection that'll guide you through four steps to make sense of and learn from an experience. The model will allow you to explore feelings, assumptions in your own professional practice, and those four pieces are the experience.
00:40:55
Perry
So you describe the experience right out. This is what happened. Then I'm going to reflect on that action, look at the experience and identify what wasn't well, what could be improved. It's in here where you're going to explore your thoughts and feelings and assumptions. Ask yourself why? Why did I do that? Why did this happen? Ask yourself those tough questions. Then we're going to get the theory. Think about the experience in a larger context of professional literature in your own learning and personal experience. Start looking outside of yourself and saying, okay, what do other people say about these types of experiences? And then finally, preparation, using your reflection to prepare yourself for future experiences. Again, similar to explore, experiment, evolve. Right. That's what we want to do, because that preparation, using your reflection to prepare yourself for future experiences, what am I going to do differently next time? How am I going to evolve? How am I going to incorporate what I've learned from my reflection into my future behavior? Because again, if we go back to the very beginning of this, remember, we started with a process that leads to change, which occurs as a result of experience and increases the potential for improved performance and future learning. The change in the learner may happen at the level of knowledge, attitude or behavior. As a result of learning. Learners come to see concepts, ideas and or the world differently.
00:42:20
Perry
So that's what we're striving for. And if you think about what's so what now what? And if you want to get a little more scientific about it, you can use the integrated reflective cycle. You can use, explore, experiment, evolve. All of them are going to get you to some place. Use any of them. I don't care. Just do something. Just do some level of reflection and then find out how valuable it is for yourself. So where do we land? Well, here's why. Land leaders must have a written plan for your learning that aligns with your goals and the goals of the organization. Pretty simple. It's got to be written down. If it's not written down, doesn't count. It's not a nice to have or we'll do it. Sometimes this is central to evolving into the leader you were meant to be. If you don't have a written plan, you cannot evolve into the leader you were meant to be. And the second part of that, as you well know, is the leader we need. We need everybody's contribution because the world needs and deserves better leadership. Reflection is critical. There's absolutely no learning without it. And then ask yourself, how are you changing through your learning? How do you view things differently? What fundamental things that you believed do you no longer believe? What things do you believe now that you didn't believe six months ago? That's what learning is.
00:43:44
Perry
It changes the way we think. It changes what we believe. It changes how we look at things and people. There's a great quote, and I can't remember who said it, and I'll probably I'm not going to get it exactly right. But essentially, they said if you're not embarrassed by the person you were 12 months ago, you're not paying close enough attention. And we should all think that. And then finally, what are you doing differently that exemplifies your learning? How are you behaving differently? If I ask if we ask people close to you, could they see it? Because it doesn't matter what you think. What matters is what other people perceive, because their perception is your reality as a leader. Are you setting that example for people? That's the biggest thing here, because people listen. They watch what you do, not what you say. Are you exemplifying a learning leader? Are you somebody that people around you go, Wow. It's hard to keep up. Like, I see. I see evolution in that person. I see them shifting. I see them adapting. I see, you know, whatever whatever verb you want to use there. But are you still just talking about the things you say you want to change? Or are you actually changing them? Are you leading the way for others? Are you setting that example for the organization? Are you going to be a learning leader that creates a learning organization and has that expectation of others? Because if you're not doing it, you can expect others to do it.
00:45:26
Perry
So I'll leave you with these three closing quotes. So the first one is Neil Gaiman. I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something. The second one is by Pablo Picasso. The first half of life is learning to be an adult. The second half is learning to be a child. And finally, my last one is from Epictetus. It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks. He already knows. Just let that sink for a second. So thank you again for joining me. And remember that your evolution is a choice and one that you have the opportunity to make many times each day. Until next time, continue to explore, experiment, evolve because the world needs and deserves better leadership. In fact, the world needs your contribution. Remember, if it were easy, everyone would do it. It's not and most won't. And that's why we need the commitment of those relentless few willing to become the leader they were always meant to be. Until next time, take care of yourself and be intentional about the impact you have on those you care about.
Your Best Resource to Move Forward