Don’t just learn stuff, become a better learner!
How can we find ways to increase our impact and effectiveness?
Improvement starts with awareness. If you you observe your self carefully enough to know how you do what you do—really understand the process of doing, not the result—you can start exploring different ways of doing it. Exploration enables us to discover better ways and leads to a higher skill level. That higher level of skill gives the possibility to be more effective in what we do.
And awareness goes further than observing our self in action in order to improve a skill. We can extend awareness to the very act of observing. Being aware of how we observe our self gives us more choices in how to observe and enables us to become better at the process of improving. When we know how to make changes in our self—in how we act, think, or feel—we can turn improvement into a habit.
It helps to think in terms of three distinct levels of awareness:
Action: How am I doing what am I doing
Observation of action: How do I observe my self in action? How do I change how I perform the action as a result of observing it?
Observation of learning process: How do I notice how I observe my self? How do I change vantage point to get a more complete picture?
Often we maintain the three levels of awareness at the same time. But in unfamiliar situations it can help to address each in turn.
For example, I use the three levels to build awareness in movement:
What parts of me am I using in this movement?
What about my self am I observing? What attracts my attention to inform the movement I am making? How can I make the movement easier?
What else is going on in me as I observe my self? Do I have a full picture? What feelings are present (such as joy, fear, self-consciousness, anger) and how am I reacting to them?
The same approach can be applied to other areas of life. For example, to improve time management skills, ask your self:
What am I spending my time on?
What makes me aware of how I use time? How do priorities emerge? How can I help my self organise how I use time?
What is causing my preference of what to spend time on? What helps me focus and what distracts me?
We can also apply the three levels to the act of having a conversation:
What are we talking about? What is the topic of conversation? What do I have to hear and to say?
What is the flow of this conversation? How can I make it easier and more likely to end up useful?
What is the context of this conversation? How do I feel about my relationship with the other and how can I make it better?
Each of the three levels is needed if we want to use ourselves to our full potential. Practicing the three levels increases our self-knowledge, gives us a wider range of choice in life, and enables us to learn faster and better.
How do you observe your self? Please leave a comment.