Are You Fueling Your Idea Engine?
What would make a well employed, highly educated, accomplished marketing professional decide to subject herself to being a novice again?
Why consent to being supervised after you’ve been running a consulting business for 10 plus years?
As a teacher with 30 years of experience and a comfortable retirement why choose to unlearn everything you know about helping people develop?
What on earth could be that important?
The craving to learn new skills, explore different perspectives and enhance your self-awareness in order to keep growing as a professional.
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Make the Old New and the New Comfortable
Learning new skills, or using existing new skills in a new way, can suck you into a sense of awkwardness and deep uncertainty – even when you are a full-grown, fully functioning and successful adult. That sense easily translates to “have I been doing this wrong?” When the answer might be yes, in this case you are, it’s hard not to feel like you are on the edge of chaos and vulnerable.
And that is just perfect.
The edge of chaos is where learning happens. That where you can stretch just enough to reach something new without snapping apart.
You have to be brave to do move to the edge of chaos and not retreat when it gets hard or unnerving, so that through practice what was awkward becomes graceful.
That’s what I’ve seen in the 18 women and men enrolled in the University of Wisconsin’s Professional Life Coach Certification (PLCC) program.
Assumptions Unlearned Fuel Ideas
A hallmark of learning is your ability to look at your convictions and habits, asking is there something better, easier, more useful? That question is gasoline for the idea development engine in you. Without on-going idea generation you run the risk stagnation. And stagnation leads to atrophy and death.
Teaching Makes You A Better Learner
At a PLCC session I was asked, “How does being a PLCC Supervisor impact your learning?” “It’s guided my thinking as I’ve contemplated my own assumptions and ideas. When you are teaching you learn more about what you are teaching. I’ve grown through the program too. You step up your game when you are charged with guiding others.”
Two Ways to Fuel Your Idea Engine
Here are a couple of ideas for you fuel your own idea engine.
- Find or found a Learning Group, such as a book group or mastermind group. These are great learning venues if you pick up a mind-stretching book or actively seek out constructive feedback.
- Enroll in a workshop to expand a skill set or your self-knowledge.
Both options can be lively and fun, which makes learning a lot more like play. Play is how we naturally learn. Play is fun and positive experiences lead to sticker learning.
The PLCC program is wrapping this month, I’m proud those 18 men and women. They’ve lived out the highs and lows and deep satisfaction that comes from learning. I hope you challenge yourself to keep learning too, it is fundamental skill in today’s world.
Here’s to the best in you,
