How do you harvest energy for the learning process?
You started a deliberate effort to learn something. Maybe you also defined a clear learning objective and a plan to get there. Somewhere along the way you lost momentum. You feel you don’t have energy, confidence or courage for the next step. Other more urgent/important/attractive/addictive things in your life use-up all your energy.
Invitation
Notice what happens with your motivation when you try to learn. Also, notice where your motivation is actually going in your life. What do you daydream about? What do you ruminate about? Where does your mind go when you take a shower?
Align your plan with your motivations from two ends: (1) change the plan to ride the energies in your life and/or (2) gather more energy from deep down inside you or from your environment;
(1) For gathering energy to be resilient, you can contemplate A RADICAL SHIFT in your environment or just tweak it by (DISS)CONECT WITH YOUR ENVIRONMENT. You can also look at deeper dynamics and try to reframe two critical relationships: with the process (LOVE THE PROCESS) and with yourself (LOVE YOURSELF).
(2) If you want to change your plan to align better with how the energy in your life is configured, go back to THE CLOUD TOWER; either a) change what you learn (change your badge or refocus this one) or b) change
how you learn (make another plan). Also, consider not planning all your available time for learning but just a minimal number of activities that will enable the rest of the organic learning process. Leave room for serendipity, curiosity and flow.
Choose one of the options below:
Contemplate a Radical Shift
If the environment you are immersed in makes the transformation you crave for difficult, you might need to hit the “escape” button from your current life. Choose this temple if you want to contemplate a radical shift, be it a sabbatical to travel the world or ending a significant relationship.
(Diss)Connect with Environment
Clean your room. Uninstall that addictive game. Reconnect with some inspiring old friends. Go to this temple for tweaking your social, virtual and/or the physical environments you inhabit.
Remember to Love the Process
If you are overwhelmed by failures and all kinds of unforeseen hardship, reframing your focus from being outcome oriented to being process oriented might help you.
Remember to Love Yourself
How do you treat yourself when you fail? When you break your own promises to yourself? When you prove to be weaker than you thought? The most valuable learning will need you to get yourself at the edge, where you are weak and stay there long enough. Go to this temple to work on your relationship to yourself when you are experiencing your limits.
Master this micro-skill
At the very core of THE ROOTS microskill and probably of the whole Learning Agility is this reflex: when you are just about to quit a learning process, come to this place instead and consider the 5 options you have.
The rest of this micro-skill is about how you choose one of those five options. Most of the times, you can and need to create a better plan but planning is just a side of this coin. The other side and the trick of this point of decision in the learning process is being attuned to the forces you are riding and sense what you need and can do. Your learning is driven by forces largely out of your control but you can learn to use them. You don’t control how much focus you have when you open a book. You don’t control how tired you are just before starting a practice session. You don’t control how afraid your are before speaking in public. Your conscious and rational planning and your willpower are just one of those forces and they they can’t overpower all your internal drives (The Elephant) combined with the external forces of your social arangement, your virtual world and your built and natural environment influence your internal landscape. What remains to be done is to use your strategy and willpower to recruit those forces to your learning objective. As you become aware of the flow of energies in your life, you can stretch your roots to those places and also adjust your plan so that you take advantage of those energies.
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.” Alan Watts
