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.

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