Continuous Learning Should be Your Nr.1 Habit
With all the disruptions in the modern economy, especially the technology, acquiring new skills and expertise is critical to surviving. Changes occur daily in our life, career, organization and relationships. Every time we deal with a change, we feel more prepared for the next time. We go through the experience and we either succeed or fail, but at the end we learn and take that knowledge with us for the next change. As Heraclitus once said: “The only thing that is constant is change”.
The best way to cope with all changes that take place in our life, is through continuous learning. Continuous learning is the concept of always expanding your knowledge to gain new skills, competencies and expertise in order to develop future opportunities. It forms part of your personal and professional development in an effort to avoid stagnation and reach your full potential. At the same time, as human beings, we continuously search for growth in our life. Growth in every aspect: career, personality, relationships, business, hobbies, etc. Therefore, to ensure that we achieve that growth, we need to make continuous learning our number one habit.
How to Learn Continuously?
Build a vision for yourself!
It is easier said than done. We all know. Talking about a vision for your life is a scary thought itself. Everyone talks about how critical it is to “know what you want” to succeed, but no one talks about how you get there. How do you make it clear to yourself what you want?
They say: “if you love what you do, you will succeed”, but how do you personally define what makes you happy by doing it? Well, to answer all these questions you first need to try different things of your interest and fail; and then try again and fail again, and maybe also try something different.
You need to keep an open mind about your personal vision. It should be something that comes from within; Something that motivates you and will not draw your energy while working towards accomplishing it. A vision statement should describe a desire you want to achieve in the long-term, usually within a defined timeline. It depicts a vision of what you want to look like in the future, and it sets a defined direction for the execution of your life strategies.
Personal Action Plan!
Create an Action Plan – Now that you have a vision for yourself, you should work on a plan. An action plan is a checklist for the steps or tasks you need to complete in order to achieve the goals you have set. Components of an action plan include:
A well-defined description of the goal to be achieved
Tasks/steps that need to be carried out to reach the goal
People who will be in charge of carrying out each task
When will these tasks be completed (deadlines and milestones)
Resources needed to complete the tasks
Measures to evaluate progress
Having everything listed and written down is great because it helps you keep track of the progress you are or are not making. However, before starting with your action plan, it is important that you first work on your goals. For this, you can use the same method that organizations use. It is called the SMART methods and it stands for: Specific, Measurables, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
Once you have set your goals, it is time to reorganize the list by prioritizing the tasks you have to carry in order to achieve these goals. You might need to prioritize some of the steps because they can be blocking other steps or sub-steps. Remember also to add deadlines, and make sure that they are realistic. To make this right, consult with the person who is responsible for carrying out each of the tasks, and understand their capacity before deciding on any deadlines.
After you have prioritized and worked on the necessary deadlines, it is important to set milestones for each of your goals. This way, you will always stay motivated and get the feeling of achieving something and approaching your end goal.
Lastly, do not make the big mistake that many people do; A plan does not always stay relevant! You need to continuously monitor and evaluate your plan, and if needed update accordingly to stay relevant to your vision.
Build Habits!
The way that a habit works, is by providing yourself with a specific pattern that will remind you of the task or action you need to take. Once you do this for 21 days in a raw, it becomes a habit, and you will see yourself performing the task or taking the necessary action completely unconsciously. Of course, 21 is an indication based on scientific research, and it does not mean that it will work on the same way for everyone. For some, it can take 10 days to build a habit, and for others it can take one year. It all depends on how “significant is the emotional experience” you get when performing an action.
To build a habit, you can use the below proven methodology:
a) Make a decision – Decide that you are going to begin acting on a specific way, 100% every time that the required behavior is needed.
b) Make no exceptions – This is especially important, for the formative stages (those first 21 days we talked above). Make no excuses or rationalizations. Don’t break the pattern.
c) Share with others – when you tell someone that you are practicing a new habit, the amount of discipline and determination you get is tremendous. You know they will be watching and expecting from you a specific outcome. This will help you become more committed to your goal.
d) Visualize your new habit - The more often you visualize and imagine yourself acting as if you already had the new habit, the more rapidly this new behavior will be accepted by your subconscious mind and become automatic.
e) Create an affirmation – You need to repeat that affirmation over and over to yourself. This repetition dramatically increases the speed at which you develop the new habit. For example, repeat to yourself every night before you go to bed: “I get up and ready immediately at 7:00 AM”, and you most probably will wake up at automatically minutes before 7:00 AM.
f) Resolve to persist – Do that in the new behavior until it is so automatic and easy that you actually feel uncomfortable when you do not do what you have decided to do.
g) Reward Yourself - Each time you reward yourself for practicing the new behavior, you reaffirm and reinforce that behavior. You begin to associate, unconsciously, the pleasure of the reward with the behavior. You set up your own force field of positive consequences that you unconsciously look forward to as the result of engaging in the behavior or habit that you have decided upon
