How your mind affects how you learn

My ideas about things are not the same as yours. As a matter of fact, what you have learned in your life up to this point may be entirely different to what I have learned. For the sake of simplicity, whatever you know about anything (your knowledge) is called you set of ideas. The set of ideas you have about things is very different to the set of ideas I have about things. If you are like me, you came from a background that is ‘working class’ which means the ideas I have about the world are largely shaped by those kinds of values. On the other hand you may be from a background where you had access to resources that were less than mine and you view things very differently to the way I do. The output of your ideas is your actions – that is what you think is what you do. Your thoughts are intrinsically linked to your actions. When you create new thoughts about something, in your mind you have already worked out how you are going to approach it. This is automatic.
For a moment stop and think of a problem you currently have. Write in the space below in one sentence what the problem is.

“…”

Now that you have done that, study the sentence above. What happens when you consider this problem? Did you automatically think of certain kinds of solutions? This is because you have been educated to think this way. Here is an example:

“The problem is my wife hates my guts.”

Some may say, “What have you done wrong? Do you need counselling? Are you getting divorced?” This is because when we are faced with a problem we automatically come up with solutions or an educated guess as to what the answer is likely to be. We have learned nothing! A guess is just that… a guess. Now this is not all bad news, this skill comes in very handy as well shall see later in this book.

As each new thought comes into your mind it gets filters through you’re your set of ideas about the world. Your view of the world will determine how you take action in the world. For example, if you have low self-esteem burrowing it’s way deep into your mind your actions, thoughts and reactions to the world outside will filter itself that perception of low self esteem. When your teacher at school said to you, “you will never amount to anything,” you took that idea and buried it in your mind. I am not a psychologist but I can tell you this – the bible tells us that as a man/woman thinks in their heart so are they. Say for example you are a young go getter looking for a way to improve your standing at work and go for a promotion. If you have confidence and faith in your abilities you are likely to create actions and take initiatives that will give you those kinds of opportunities. If on the other hand you lack confidence despite your abilities you will actively build that kind of reality around you. The people you associate with will support your low self esteem most likely, the job you take will agree with it, the way you interact with others will agree with it and so on. Your mindset of low self-esteem will build a reality around you that is entirely consistent with your thoughts. Another example of how our view of the world affects us is found in the words of our mouth.
Here is an exercise you can do to assess your view of the world, what comes out of your mouth. It is positive? When trouble comes, as to all of us it does, how do you respond verbally? Do you say: “that’s just my luck,” or something like, “Why does it always rain on me”. Why did you say that? You have not learned anything else. The way we see the world through our perceptions of it (deeply built into our subconscious) will negatively or positively affect the image we create. That picture we build of the world are deeply held assumptions about how it operates, what people are like and so on. Here are some examples:

“She’ll be right, mate.”
“What goes around comes around”
“What goes up must come down”
“You will never amount to anything”
“You’re just like your father”
“Everything happens for a reason”

Each one of these points of view holds behind a deeply held assumption about what the person who said it thinks. I would like to call these things ‘imaginations’ . These phrases are things people have built into their mind and are being expressed from their mind as words. An imagination is what I would call a micro view of the world that is held or bound to a certain way of thinking. For example the term, “you are just like your father,” automatically has a negative imagining attached to it. Why is it that being like your father is a bad thing? Maybe your father is a good person and that’s a compliment. This however, is very unlikely given the nature of people to use words to bring people ‘down’ to a certain perception of how they should think or act. The media are especially adept at this because they feed us imaginations all the time to engage with. What news we get, is given to us so we can form an imagination about it and turn it around in our mind. How often do we see a dodgy business on TV and instantly feelings of hatred and judgments immediately made. That imagination has now been built in you and you in turn build it into others by becoming an evangelist for your TV show. You spread the word by going to work and saying: “Did you see that business on TV – what a dodgy operation.”

That particular viewpoint expressed on television now creates a way of thinking about that place. There have been several classic examples of them getting it wrong and almost ruining businesses only to offer a brief apology as a way of operating in damage control. Too bad if it already has cost that business thousands. Why do they do it? They are trying to get you to build an imagination so you can engage with them and agree “what a terrible thing this is.” Every now and then they offer us imaginations to build our thinking on because most of us unfortunately have undeveloped viewpoints about things. That is, we have not learned anything except how to be spoon fed regular doses of whatever we are told. Our view of things is directly related to how we learn because what we do is build what we think on our imaginations of things.

Next time you watch the news ask yourself this question: “What is the news trying to get me imagine?” These things you begin to imagine will become part of the way you begin to view the world. If you grew up with racist parents, the chances are your parents built racism into your view of the world. You may think you aren’t racist but go and walk amongst those of another culture and see what comes out of your mind. You may not walk up to them uttering racist sentiment but in your mind there are ideas floating around that may convince you otherwise. Not that is real learning, breaking the conditions we have been led to believe and getting the experience to challenge our underlying assumptions.

We evaluate things through our view of the world and this gives us the toolkit for building learning skills into our life. How we view things will tell us how things can be learned. If you grew up loving science, you will take a scientific approach to life and usually rely on all things scientific to give you answers. You may use phrases like, “there is a system to everything”. This is an expression of how you think things work. We will call these kind of people “scientific people”. If you are given to this style of learning you will struggle with life because sometimes the answers are not as cut and dry. For example, Henry Ford was a great pioneer but time has shown that his management style is nothing short of abhorrent. Why? Because he saw people as “resources” and not as living beings with a mind, will and emotions. He approached management as a science, when it is more like an unstructured art. Modern works have even urged us to think of our spirit in the workplace which would make poor Henry do flips in his grave. People are not numbers, they are living beings with real families and real personalities. On one hand people are the greatest thing about a business but on the other the biggest enemy.

If your view of the world is less scientific and more open to other views you might be what I call “unscientific” and given to large bouts of intuition. If you are a ‘free’ thinker then you will evaluate everything that comes your way and form your opinions based on what you think is right and perhaps a feeling you have about it. You might be someone who questions everything, especially science and never stop learning. The unscientific approach to management would use techniques found in Semler’s Seven-Day Weekend :

Organizations rarely believe they’re to blame when an employee under performs. But if the organization doesn’t provide the opportunity for success, then people falter. At Semco we accept that every individual wants and needs a worthwhile pursuit in life. It’s up to us to provide the environment and opportunity for their gratification.

This kind of approach to building a workplace is different as the human resources are allowed to be more human. It’s a well-documented success story but it started by breaking the mold and breaking established business rules. The rule breakers are always learning and never accepting common ill-conceived points of view.

We will never land on the moon. What really? Never? People that make these kinds of statements about learning are scientific and evaluate everything objectively in their world view. That world view will only take knowledge from those that know and they will eventually have a head full of other people’s ideas. Every pattern, every notion and every single last idea will fall into what somebody else came up with unscientifically. Learning is unscientific because it takes that which is unknown and tries to make it known. Scientists who were pioneers where the most unscientific of them all. They used faith in every endeavour and relied on personal intuition and vision as well as there academic abilities.

When we learn we are applying the single most unique and profound ability we have – the ability to gain new insights and gain fresh information. If our view of the world tells us we can learn then we can. If we are willing to question the way things are and build for ourselves new mindsets about things (despite the cost) then we can learn. Everyone can learn. As a lecturer in a business school I have found quite often that my students do not want to learn, they want to collect facts, but they don’t want to learn. So often I get smart questions like, “What’s on the exam?” My response to this usually is to tell them precisely what’s on the exam – lots of questions about the things I wanted you to learn. Invariably almost nobody gets what I mean by that.

What knowledge do you need to build upon to get through life? That depends on what you plan to do with it. The primary skill you need to make it is learning. A friend of mine once told me this story about learning:

My boss told me to do a job and I told him I couldn’t do it and he said to me, “Oh well I guess your going to have tell the customer that we can’t complete the job and they won’t get what they have paid for. I said to him that I would go back and try. When I did try I found a way to make it work.”

The problem is we are no longer willing to try and learn what we need to make it in life. Our view of the world tells us we can’t but in fact we can. Students often ask me for answers, I only give them more questions. After a while they stop coming to see me, because they don’t realize or cannot understand that the things I am teaching to them can only be learned by them. If the courses I teach are going to be valuable to them at all then they need to learn the stuff for themselves. I could offer them a standard response and tell them the answer but what have they gained. Where was the struggle for new concepts, the trial and error process? What happened to that? When the objective of learning is to gain an answer, that person has lost the reason they set out to gain insights in the first place. Learning is the gaining of new information about something that you didn’t know before. However, learning comes from and goes to somewhere it’s not purely self-perpetuating. Your learning accumulates.

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