Personal development – The ways to learn.
Getting better is all about learning – Most high level executives, spend hours besides their already busy work week on personal development. It’s an investment and while over time the area’s that are being develop changes, the ways of doing personal development stay’s the same.
The key ways to learn and improve your key skills and behaviors
1.Reading
2. Listening
3. See
4. Practice
5. Mentoring
- Reading is a very traditional way of learning, some people do it through taking an education, some through reading good books and more recently many people find and follow useful Forum’s and Blog’s of their interest. These 3 are all very good forms of learning
– Education will most likely never disappear and as this can be done in many levels and stages, it’s generally a structured way to learn and help push people that struggle to give their development the needed focus without the pressure.
- Reading books is another very used way of learning from other people’s experience and gather knowledge in area’s where you might be lacking behind. The great benefit with reading is that it can be done almost everywhere and it doesn’t matter if you have 20 minutes or 4 hours, you can always pick up a book.
- Reading Forum’s and Blogs, is a new way of learning and bring other benefits as well. A book is static, it takes a long time to write it, then it’s published and after that gets older – However people posting things online can be both very relevant and can help you to stay on top of many things and being up to date on relevant business news is a key to success in many areas. Further more focused participation in forums and blogs helps people build their network in places they would else be a lot less likely to meet people. - Listening is another great way to learn, experienced people talking about their knowledge and what they have learned, used to happen in the likes of conferences, training sessions and schools, however the technology have now brought both webcasts & podcasts into the picture as well. This have for me been one of the best ways to learn, as similar to reading, listening to a podcast can be done everywhere and for some people it often explains things in a different way then reading them.
- Seeing others do is used in a number of development area’s, this could be the likes of presentation skills, running meetings or simply looking at other people’s body languages. The seeing often comes with other parts of learning, but is still a very important aspect.
- Practice is another very common and fast way to learn, “learning by doing” is a very used phrase and many people really learn the fastest by doing. The great thing about practice is often that you get to see and correct what you do there and then, which is a great way for most minds to learn and remember things.
Delegation is also a key to most successful businesses and delegation & practice goes hand in hand. - Mentoring is another form of learning that has been around for many years, the concept of a mentor is widely recognised and used in many organisations. It’s a great way form individuals unsure of what to do, how to develop and generally wanting to learn new skills and abilities.
Where mentors used to be people “high up” with focus very much on forward career, the “mentor” role is now also used a lot to learn individual skills from people at any level. If a manager is struggling with Excel, he can easily find someone to help him learn this, and without this being someone higher up the organisation. Other examples of this could be running effective meetings, doing great presentations or learning basic skills like sales, marketing etc.
Overall people have different learning styles and it’s important to do a bit of trial and error to see what suits you the best, but at least now you have some suggestions of “how” so all I can say is get started!
