As the saying goes, knowledge is power...
Learning new things can be extremely stimulating and essential to advancing your career. The body feeds off of taking on new things and testing your knowledge and level of performance in a variety of areas and other tasks. Not only is it good for your brain improving your health and memory, new skills allow you to increase your mental wellbeing and happiness and allows you to be adaptable in life.
Start by Brainstorming
Learning keeps your mind engaged and body active and that thought alone can put pressure of choosing the right areas to focus on. Learning is extremely subjective and because of that, it can be absolutely anything you have interest in or see return on investment in. The idea may come naturally, but the key is to remember that learning something entirely new can still have an impact on your everyday priorities, without the pressure of it being directly correlated to your career, it can simply refresh your mind and help you think differently.
Deconstruct Your Goal
Like any goal, learning a new skill can be broken down so you have a clear plan to reach your desired outcome. Once you've brainstormed the idea and decide what it is you want to achieve, Break down the skill that you want to learn into little pieces and learn techniques to master an isolated portion. The small pieces will come together to make up the whole skill.
For example, when you’re learning to play the guitar, learn how to press down a chord pattern with your fingers first without even trying to strum the chord. Once you are able to change between a couple of chord patterns, then add the strumming.
Use the Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle also known as the 80 20 rule allows you to identify the 20% of the work that will give you 80% of the results.The trick is to discover what that 20% is so we can apply our most effort to that 20% and eliminate as much of the 80% that does not produce the results we want.
Once you've reverse engineered your new skill, put together the list of all key components and then flag or highlight the tasks that will give you the biggest contribution towards attaining the skill. Those tasks will be the 20% of tasks that will take you 80% of the way towards completing the project. Focus on those.
Find a Mentor
Success leaves clues. The best short cut to become an expert is to find an expert and not have to make the mistakes that they have made.
Finding out what NOT to do from the expert will fast-track your learning when you want to learn new skills. It is a huge win to have them personally walk you through what needs to be done. Reach out and send an email to them.
Make it Measurable
A measurable outcome is key. Going from learning piano chords to playing in an orchestra can seem like a stretch, but isolating your key components and setting each as milestones makes learning a new skill more attainable. It is so easy to get frustrated and give up. But if you do, you’ll never get where you want to be. Utilise your breakdown of the goal and your 20% to set clear milestones and metrics to track your progress.
Start
Thats it. Start. Plans go to die without action so just start. Enjoy the process of learning something new.
Visualize It
The mind has great difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imagined.
Visualize yourself achieving your new skill and each step that you need to make to see results. If you are visual person, close your eyes, and see it done. Do this in the morning before you get out bed, and when you go to sleep at night - the key is to do this every day. The more you can do it, the better. Not only does it get you into the habit of focusing on the end result, it really does trick your subconscious mind into thinking it is reality, it's why athletes practice mentally seeing their success before attempting the real thing. If you’re not a visual person, write down affirmations and repeat them every day. However you choose to do it, the key is consistency.
Talk about it to everyone
It's easy to quit on a goal that only you know about. It's ten times harder to quit on other people. Telling other people about your goals makes them real. It represents a commitment. If you tell your friends, “I’m going to learn how to play the guitar,” then they will keep asking you how it’s going? or if you want to get better at public speaking, your friends and family will most likely support you. The more you talk about it, the more you get caught up and excited about the end result. It will go from fantasy to reality.
Remember, everyone gets discouraged at some point when they try to achieve a goal. It’s normal. But the difference between the people who succeed and the people who don’t is commitment and consistency.
Test your progress.
The best way to measure your progress when learning a new skill is to test yourself and your knew acquired skill or knowledge. You might record yourself doing it or teach someone else your new skill. Seeing yourself on video is a great way to learn from your mistakes and identify areas that you need to improve. This is very effective for any profession; coaches, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, actors, speakers, performers, etc. Teach your newly acquired skill to someone else puts the knowledge you've acquired to the ultimate so see if you've actually taken in the steps or information you've learnt.
Getting outside of your comfort zone is not something use all gravitate to but once you're out of that zone, thats where the learning begins. To grow, we have to get uncomfortable at times.