The Four Critical Skills For Learning To Succeed

To achieve your goals you need to learn. After all, learning is at the heart of the process of bridging the gap between where you are now, and where you want to be.

Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for learning to succeed. Each of us must find our own unique way of being successful through understanding ourselves, the the world we live in, the people we attempt to succeed with, and how these three elements relate to each other.

Therefore, learning to succeed is very much about learning how to learn, and this requires the ability to learn from experience. That is, being able to step back and reflect on the way you approach the challenge of achievement, the way you define and solve problems and the lessons you can learn in terms of accelerating your future success.

Unfortunately, most people miss the opportunity to learn from experience. This is because they are either so busy rushing around, or ashamed at their lack of progress, that they don’t take the time to step back and reflect.

This is a huge missed opportunity.

The secrets to your future success are in your current and past experience. You just need to take the time to look for them.

So what does it really take to learn successfully from experience? Here are the four critical skills:

1. The willingness to look inside
2. Generosity of spirit
3. The willingness to challenge your thinking
4. The willingness to experiment

1. The willingness to look inside

Experience is not neutral – at least not in terms of how we perceive it. We put labels on our experience such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’, ‘progress’, ‘winning’ and ‘losing’. Experiences that confront us with our own perceived shortcomings can teach, but only if we are willing to come to grips with our defenses against them. The experience of ‘struggle’ and ‘difficulty’ and ‘failure’ are more critical for our long-term success. But we can only make the most of the ‘gold nuggets’ in our experience if we are willing to explore the areas where we are less than perfect.

2. Generosity of spirit

How you view yourself as a learner matters. Give yourself permission to be imperfect. Give yourself permission to be a work in progress. View your mistakes as critical and necessary for your short-term development and long-term success. You can’t reach your full potential with out making hundreds of mistakes along the way. It is how you work with them that builds character and success.

If you find it hard to be generous with yourself as you learn, try this exercise. Imagine that instead of teaching yourself to learn from experience you are actually teaching a five-year old child to learn. What questions would you ask a child and how would you encourage them to learn?

3. The willingness to challenge your thinking

Here is some shocking news. You are not always right and there is always a better way waiting to be discovered. If you assume that how you see the world is ‘reality’ (rather than one version of reality) then you close yourself off to seeing better possibilities. You end up creating a rigid boundary around your learning because you limit your learning to seeing the world only in terms of how you believe it to be.

Instead, you need to be able to reflect on and observe experiences from many perspectives. For instance, your view vs. a child’s view vs. a genius’ view vs. an accountant’s view vs. an artist’s view etc. When you entertain other ways of seeing as you reflect on your experience, you can challenge your own beliefs and assumptions and open other possibilities.

4. The willingness to experiment

The best way to learn successfully is to see yourself as a scientist. That is, someone who is making a series of experiments about a topic in order to discover knowledge. In your case, it is knowledge about what it takes to succeed. Judging each ‘experiment’ as a success or failure doesn’t make you willing to experiment, let alone learn from the process. But if you view what you are doing as a series of experiments in your own journey of discovery, you will be much more willing to step out to the future.

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