Learning how to learn

IT’S EASY to dismiss the success of someone by saying they have an innate ability. Whether it is sales, tech, writing or managerial – there will always be people who stand in the limelight, their talent seemingly beyond doubt. This dismissal explains everything: quick promotions, compliments from leaders, the reason they seem to grasp everything so easily.

Most highly successful people have a similar enterprising spirit, a keen motivation to excel and a penchant for hustling. These traits might seem innate, coming naturally to them. But there is one factor that even successful people must build upon from scratch: catalytic learning.

Catalytic learning is defined as “enduring learning that objectively prepares the learner to continue to learn and implement new knowledge, positioning the learner for future self-directed learning”. In other words: learning how to learn.

The concept is an explicit learning-based schema built over time. Adult education, educational psychology and cognitive science have long documented what works to promote learning in various fields. If one can learn how to learn effectively, how complex a subject matter is becomes a little less important.

Catalytic learning can be especially beneficial for leaders to understand. As technology evolves – and so society and the workplace with it – it’s more important for people to know how to learn, rather than what to learn. Leaders can help to prepare their colleagues and workforce against this frenetic pace of change, not with technical expertise but with catalytic learning.

As the old adage goes: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Understanding metacognition 

In order to harness catalytic learning, understanding metacognition is key. It is known to comprise one’s thinking about thinking – including what one knows about oneself and how one learns best, strategies to set specific goals, and tailor-made ways to achieve these goals.

The importance lies in what the US National Research Council calls the role of transfer, which is the ability to use what one has learned in new settings – in an environment and context that is different from that in which the subject was learned.

Leaders and teachers must understand this in order to bring out the full potential of colleagues and students. Catalytic learning is more of a behaviour than anything else: it requires one to behave actively, instead of simply learning and absorbing passively.

Self-awareness as a journey 

At the crux of catalytic learning is self-reflection and self-awareness – being able to understand who you are and how you learn will be invaluable in your learning journey.

With self-awareness comes an understanding of your strengths, weaknesses and what makes you thrive. According to research, we are more confident and creative when we’re self aware, we become more effective leaders with more satisfied employees, and even better workers who get more promotions.

Self-awareness is a tricky balancing act. Most people think they are self-aware – according to research by organisational psychologist and author Tasha Eurich, 95 per cent of people think they are self-aware, but only about 10 to 15 per cent actually are. And sometimes, reality doesn’t line up.

Further research shows that experience can lead to a false sense of confidence and overconfidence about our self-knowledge, and that the more power a leader has, the more likely they are to overestimate their skills and abilities.

Asking what, not why 

A common misconception about self-awareness is that it is closely linked to introspection. But according to the same research, the opposite is true. People who introspect are less self-aware and report worse job satisfaction and well-being. The problem is that people are introspective in the wrong ways.

Asking yourself “Why?” – for example, “Why do I like employee A more than employee B?” – is an ineffective self-awareness question. After all, we do not have access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings and motives that we need to tackle such questions, and so we invent answers that feel right.

“Why” is inherently subjective – it requires emotion, contemplation and self-judgement. Instead, Eurich posits that we should ask ourselves “what?” – “What did employee A do that was better than employee B?”, or “What are the steps I need to take to do a better job?” While “why” is subjective, “what” is objective, asking a more impersonal, detached question.

This is why catalytic learning isn’t something one just picks up as a convenient skill. It’s a behaviour to be nurtured through time and intention, through exercises of self-awareness.

In conclusion, an important process to becoming highly successful is through catalytic learning. It’s the art of learning to learn – by understanding metacognition in order to unlock self-awareness, and in achieving self-awareness to rely more on objective analysis rather than subjective reasoning. In this, one learns how to fish, and feeds themselves for a lifetime.

The writer is managing director of Hyper Island Asia Pacific.