Tag: learning

Growth Mind-Set

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“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” – Mahatma Gandhi

My mom, who will turn 83-years-old in a few weeks, just put on a piano concert for her senior living residence. It’s something she’s done since the pandemic started, trying to fill in the entertainment schedule especially for those who can’t readily leave their apartments. She has to do three performances to keep the audiences small, they performances have been broadcast over the in-house tv and she learns new music for each one.

All that is to say, my mom is a pretty confidence and very capable person. She still practices speaking Russian, a second language she learned in college and even typing out messages to her Russian friends in her What’s App phone application.

But when something goes wrong on her phone and computer, she brings it to me. Often she’s already figured out the solution but she just wants me to confirm it. Which I am more than happy to do. But it always amazes me and amuses me that she has a blind spot in her confidence.

According to Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book, The Confidence Code, this is not at all unusual, especially with women. Drawing on the research of Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, they describe:

“Most women think their abilities are fixed, Dweck told us. They’re either good at math or bad at math. The same goes for a host of other challenges that women tend to take on less often than men do: leadership, entrepreneurship, public speaking, asking for raises, financial investment, even parking the car. Many women think, in these areas, that their talents are determined, finite, and immutable. Men, says Dweck, think they can learn almost anything.”

The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

And the way past that fixed assessment of abilities is to adopt a growth mind-set according to Dweck. It ties with confidence because “Confidence requires a growth mind-set because believing that skills can be learned leads to doing new things. It encourages risk, and it supports resilience when we fail.”

When I first had children, I remember reading several articles about not praising your child for being smart but instead to focus on praising them for their efforts. It turns out that this is exactly the thing for building our own growth mind-set as well. When our internal dialogue is focused on effort and improvement, we reinforce the internal story that we can learn.

Sometimes we have blind spots in our abilities on purpose. We don’t learn things because our partner, friend or child can do it for us. It works fine for us as long as when life requires us to do those tasks, we adopt that growth mind-set, believe we can and then support that with the patience and praise for our efforts as we learn.

I’ve seen my mom do that in these seven years after my dad passed in the many things that were his specialties like taxes and car maintenance. Either through nature or nurture, I think my mom has a growth mind-set. I’m happy to be her computer help but notice that when I do it, she usually looks over my shoulder to see what I’m doing. Maybe by the time she’s in her mid-eighties, she’ll no longer need me for tech support.

This is my third post in the series delving into confidence. The first was I Can and the second was Fear and Confidence.

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Fruits of Blogging

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“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

I have just passed the milestone of posting to this blog 300 days in a row. Writing a blog has been so personally gratifying to me, mostly because of the community of friendship and support I feel with fellow bloggers on this journey.

So I looked around for studies about blogs and found some interesting conclusions that come from a paper published by the Canadian Center of Science Education. The paper entitled The Effectiveness of Using Online Blogging for Students’ Individual and Group Writing studied a students who were learning English as a Foreign Language. Studying their writing styles before and after a 14-week period of blogging, here are some of the key take-aways that caught my eye:

  • Not only do learners better improve their writing skills through blogging practices, they can also build their self-confidence as writers and attract a wider audience.
  • Blogging practices play an active role in encouraging learners to experiment, take risks and foster their awareness to be private and public writers.
  • Blogging helped both individual learners and groups come up with more engaging ideas.
  • As practice time progressed, learners using blogging tried to transform their writings when they acknowledged their audience and expected or anticipated a level of interaction in the form comments, criticism or support.
  • Blogging became a space where they could improve their writing, and where numerous readers and bloggers were also arbiters in matters of language usage and mechanics, cohesion, coherence, idea generation, debate, discussion, critical thinking and so on.

I couldn’t find a study that verified the positive benefits of interacting with an interesting and interested group of people with whom one would have never met otherwise and who comment in ways that inspire and delight. But I don’t need a study to affirm that – because I live it every day! Thank you my blogging friends!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Wired to Learn

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“Sharp people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” – Brandon Mull

I got a new client this week. She was introduced to me by a mutual contact that told her I could help. She is clearly very bright and has done a lot of research but given the huge amount of documentation on the technology choices she has to make, she just needed someone to weigh in on what would work best because she doesn’t have time to try out every option herself.

After only a 30 minute phone call in which we talked through her options, she was ready to go with what I recommended. Of course, the technology we were talking about is my specialty and has been for 20 years but what struck me was how openly she was able to learn.

According to Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist from Yale, this is the hallmark of the human species. Christakis’ work in the field of sociology is about the long view of human history. He’s deeply optimistic about our ability to cooperate, teach others and love because we are one of the only species that does that outside of the family structure. In his book, Blueprint, Christakis lays out the case that “natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation and learning.”

Of course one of the places this is easiest to see has been with my kids over the last few years as they’ve learned to talk. When my son was one and just starting to talk he called water, “Mamu.” He and my brother’s wife, who was nannying for me, use to have a funny verbal game they’d play. He’d said, “mamu”, she’d say “water” and it would go on for a minute until they both broke out in laughter. And then eventually he accepted that it was water, just like he’s learned all the other hundreds of words he can say, because he trusts the caretakers in his life.

Which reminds me of my ex-husband. He had good reasons to believe his parents weren’t reliable sources of information. His dad used to say to me, “I knew my boy was smart when I came in to beat him with a belt and he asked for me to beat him with the wooden spoon instead.” And it was in his senior year of high school when he was living with his dad and step-mom and they moved in the middle of a night to a different state to avoid a tax debt without telling him (or bringing him) so he had to find a place to live on his own.

I think they were one of the reasons that he couldn’t learn from other people (or maybe the primary reason he couldn’t). And that was behind my reluctance to have kids with him was because I couldn’t bear the thought of having him experiment on children as the only way to learn the best way to parent.

So I understand that we all have different levels of openness to learning and that it might vary within a person by topic. But it gives me great hope when I witness the human ability to trust and learn like I did with my client this week. Because it resonates with what I’ve gleaned from Nicholas Christakis’ work – that we have come this far because we are wired to cooperate and learn. Coupled with Arthur Brook’s concept of crystallized intelligence that I wrote about last week, the idea that as we age we develop intelligence more suited to synthesize, tell stories and teach, it seems we have the right ingredients to pass on goodness to the next generation and beyond.

(featured photo is of my dad teaching a class)

The Learning Curve

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“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

We worked hard on potty training this weekend. I found it to be a fascinating window into the nature of learning. And that’s not just me putting a positive spin on it.

Day 1: Chaos. The first morning was hit and miss (or more miss than hit). By naptime we were both exhausted. My son because of the huge change that comes learning how to use his body and me because infinite patience takes a lot of energy! So the first lesson came after we’d both napped. Rest helped consolidate the learning so that he was a better student and I was a better coach.

Then after an afternoon and evening of more efforts and celebrations, my son was never happier to have the feel of a nighttime diaper, jammies and to snuggle up and read books. And it underscored for me the need to have comforting rituals to soothe ourselves when in the midst of big change.

Day 2 was characterized by a lot of resistance and efforts to control everything else around. It reminded me of a Brené Brown podcast I heard years ago that whenever she has led or attended a three-day conference, day 2 was always marked by the doldrums. Brené likened it to the middle part of the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell. The hero does everything in their power to pursue all options except for the one that they are called to that leaves them feeling vulnerable.

Day 3: We needed expert help. Which is uncomfortable for me not have it dialed but the amazing teachers at my son’s daycare have said repeatedly that they are more than willing and able to help with this journey. For which I am so thankful. I left him on Monday with a “Good luck” and “God bless you” and I couldn’t have meant both more!

This learning curve at times has felt impossible, exhausting, vulnerable, and not worth it. Somehow it reminds me of learning to snowboard – and also mastering a new technology, figuring out to give my dog allergy shots, starting to blog, and learning how to do mosaic tiling.

Each new venture has roughly followed the same pattern of chaos, resistance and then leaning in and asking for assistance if needed. And it’s not just me. I have a dear friend who didn’t learn how to swim until she was 60 years old. And my 82-year-old mom has been figuring out how to do piano performances online for her retirement community.

Watching my son, I am reminded how hard learning something new is – until it isn’t. And while grown-ups might not be taking on changes as transformative as potty training, we still need to give ourselves the rest and rituals to support our learning, grace to survive the resistance and the courage to lean in to expert help when we need it.

Because as Nelson Mandela says, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Learning From Experience

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“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey

Ten years ago (I know because I found the picture), I was walking my dog on a busy neighborhood street and he found a stuffed animal. A cute little tiger with a soft white belly and my dog proudly picked it up and carried it all the way home until he could stow it away on one of his dog blankets.

While I didn’t think much of it at the time, I now realize with great horror that it likely was some child’s precious stuffy that got tossed out of a car in a moment of great emotion. I’ll never actually know if the family went to look for it but by allowing my dog to carry it home, we certainly made it unfindable.

Before bed, my 6-year-old daughter and I take turns reading. She practices her reading skills and then I read a few pages of something longer we are working on. We just finished J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig in which a child loses his most precious friend, a stuffy that his step-sister throws out the window in a moment of rage. The child then takes a precarious Christmas Eve trip to the Land of the Lost to try to retrieve it. In J.K. Rowling’s incredibly imaginative tale, there are several places the things we lose go – Mislaid (think eyeglasses), Disposable (e.g. batteries), Bother-Its-Gone (that poem you penned on the back of a napkin), The Wastes of the Unlamented (the tchotchke you never wanted to buy in the first place), The City of the Missed (where we meet someone’s Principles) and The Island of the Beloved (where Santa lives).

In the story, she includes not only things that we lose like a diamond earring but also the intangibles – the bad habits, the tendency to bully, our pretenses, ambition, power and hope. It is so incredibly insightful that it is one of those books that was a pleasure for me to read as much as my daughter to listen to.

Which brings me back to the stuffy I let my dog take home. Often it’s only through experience that we can relate to someone else’s pain. This is the case now that I realize that stuffy was likely a well-loved object of a kid’s affection. Fortunately, my kids have not (yet) thrown a stuffy out the car window, but I have spent many fretful moments in a full sweat looking for the item that we just HAVE TO HAVE before going to sleep.

Suffering, as much as we might not like it, helps us to know each other.

Learning Every Day

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“I am learning all the time. My tombstone will be my diploma.” – Eartha Kitt

I’d like to say that when I was growing up, it was a family tradition that we went around the table to say what we learned that day. I have a vague memory that we did in fact do that but as the third and youngest child, I think that maybe it fizzled out by the time it got to me.

Regardless, I’m happiest when I’m learning something every day. In fact I was happily driving alone in my car the other day to Costco, listening to a Brené Brown podcast and thinking in the back of my mind, my blog should be titled or subtitled “What I Learned Today.”

At possibly the very same moment, fellow blogger Rosaliene Bacchus of the Three Worlds, One Vision blog typed a comment, “Wynne, it’s a joy to witness, through your reflections, the way in which you learn from even the smallest experiences in your day-to-day life.”

My kids were 4 ½ years old and 7 months when this pandemic started. I find them fascinating to watch and interact with and I learn from them every day something about what it means to be human. But the isolation of this time and the slower pace of our schedule of activities meant I had to find sources of adult conversation, inspiration and meaning. What I’m listening to and reading has helped me not only learn how I can grow but also process the tidbits of what I see about how my kids grow.

Podcasts, which I can listen to in the car, when I’m cleaning or late at night when I’m getting exercise by repeatedly climbing the 47 stairs I have in my house, have brought so many experts and depth right to my doorstep: Krista Tippet’s quiet and spiritual On Being, Brené Brown’s insightful and research driven Unlocking Us, Dan Harris’ urbane and slightly sardonic mindfulness podcast Ten Percent Happier.

I read as much as I can – sometimes thrillers and spy novels that take me completely away from my life for an hour or two. But mostly I read as many blogs as I can and I’ve loved the books penned by fellow bloggers than I’ve read or am reading: The Twisted Circle by Rosaliene Bacchus, How to Heal Your Life by Tamara Kulish, Voices: Who’s In Charge of the Committee In My Head by Julia Preston and Be a Happier Parent or Laugh Trying by Betsy Kerekes.

It was on the Unlocking Us podcast (I think) that I heard neuroscientist David Eagleman talk about the research that we are powerfully influenced by the 5 people we spend the most time with. I’m delighted because I’ve been spending time with you all – you’ve inspired me, taught me, made me laugh and made me think. What a joy!

So, if you have a moment, please leave a comment about where you get your inspiration.

I’ll close with a quote from an On Being interview I heard with Thich Nhat Hang, “You have the right to make mistakes but you don’t have the right to continue making mistakes, you have to learn from your mistakes.”

Here’s to always learning!

(featured photo by Pexels)