Reclaiming Genius is the Key to a Profitable Future

Are the instructional methods practiced in your organization keeping up with the breakthroughs in brain science?

Neuroscience research shows your brain and mind are brilliant. You are naturally capable of easily acquiring knowledge and skills. The key is your active participation in holistic, complex, meaningful environments organized around long‑term goals that matter to you.

Lost Potential

The unfortunate reality is that most instructional methods place us into classrooms that maximize forgetting, inattention, and passivity. As an unintended consequence, many adults have poor images of themselves as learners, compared to the real genius-level capacities they actually possess. Adults often proclaim that they feel inadequate in subjects such as math, art, writing, public speaking, reading, science, the humanities, rational problem solving, or interpersonal communication. They settle for less than their full potential, find ways to cover up for deficits, and hope others won’t discover the humiliating sense of inadequacy they feel.

Are Your Employees Wounded Learners?

I went through much of my public education as a “wounded learner,” feeling shut down by a system of education that forced me to “sit still, be quiet, and pay attention.” If I ever felt confused when receiving instruction, I experienced stress which shut my brain down even more. The trauma of negative feedback that I was not learning as well as others added to a spiral of helplessness.

Are employees at your organization forced to sit and listen to lecture as the primary means for acquiring new information? Do the fears of receiving poor reviews by learning facilitators and the impending sense of failure, ostracism, or job insecurity produce additional stress to the learners without you knowing about it?

New Strategies for Learning and Transformation

My pain in public education drove me to find and develop new ways to accelerate the acquisition of knowledge and skills required for success at college. Coding my findings into useful strategies that others could use became the basis for a series of provocative products and services and the creation of two successful businesses. And you can learn many of them in this blog series.

The good news is that when you need to get good at something, there are ways to maximize learning, awareness, and focused intention. I’ve designed learning systems to help anyone discover the brilliant resources we all already possess within us. My clients learn to facilitate transformative change within themselves and their organizations. From this work, leaders consistently emerge that make significant contributions in their fields.

Learning How to Learn

You would think that after making it all the way through secondary and post-secondary education that adults would be skilled at learning. The reality is that they often lack adequate skills for reading, listening and note-taking, critical thinking, problem solving, writing, and public speaking. Offering “learning to learn skills” at the front end of training courses can provide learners with a sufficient grasp of concepts, principles, or competencies. Learners become more receptive, generative, and persistent in the educational process. The result is improved acquisition of information and better skill transference for solving problems in real-life situations on the job.

You can assess learning preferences to discover whether an individual’s present competencies are sufficient for a course being offered, and in which ways one may be required to adapt. This puts the learner in control of how to proceed at any moment.

You can also examine the teaching methods being used to determine whether they can be enhanced for greater return on your training investment.

Find A Challenge To Explore

Can you think of any areas of performance deficit within your organization that consistently aggravates your desire for higher productivity? This can be a great target for using new approaches that could transform learning for your teams.

What areas of “low hanging fruit” could you pick to explore new possibilities for teaching and learning? Find one that can lead to a rapid positive return on your learning investments.

The blog series that follows will present 20 teaching strategies for “learning how to learn” anything that needs to be improved. Intended to help facilitate transformative accelerated learning in others, these strategies recognize and apply the full potential within anyone, because we are all naturally gifted learners who have been—at least partially—switched off to the magnificence within us. Greater profitability is possible when the true genius within your organization emerges.

Share your ideas for applying what you learn here. I will weave in common interests and ensure the relevance of each post.