no one can stop you from learning

that's your business

I don’t really know who Zig Ziglar was, but when I saw this quote I wanted to do a Wonder Woman kick.

I’m bringing this to your attention because our relationship here involves a deep-learning journey, and it will help us both if you have a sense of how I think about learning, and why I create learning environments.

Multi-sensory collaboration spaces for adult learners, onsite and online. #gamestorming

To illuminate that, I need to share a sliver of personal context. I was what you might optimistically call “a D.I.Y. kid.” Neither of my parents actively participated in my education. (They were mostly not around.) No woman in my immediate family had an advanced degree, nor did they want one. (This is a cultural phenomenon.) I attended truly crummy public schools, (no offense to our beloved nurse, Mrs. Harrelson), and a significant number of my early-life friends either went to prison, got pregnant as teens, became drug addicts, or were killed. I myself was almost never safe, and few of our futures looked promising. But in the mud there is a lotus, and mine was that normalized neglect forced me to learn how to learn. With nudges from a few attentive, underpaid teachers, I taught myself a host of useful things: How to read by the time I was three. How to write in cursive. How to avoid bullies at a loading dock. How to use humor to disarm people. Later, how to start a business. How to speak in public. How to write books. How to heal your mind, and so on. Learning how to learn became a core competency and I eventually became an unconventional public educator, inviting tens of thousands of people to learn together in real-time, while closely observing their behavior. From those experiences, I’d like to share just a couple of learning nuts and bolts (Or it soup to nuts? I forget.) Both phrases share a word, so here are the nuts:

1. Learning by ourselves is relatively safe, but it is not entirely safe, for reasons I’ll cover in the next post.

2. Learning in the presence of others is terrifying. Less dramatically, it’s unnerving. Least dramatically, it’s uncomfortable. (To be clear, I’m mostly referring to adult learners.)

Why it can be unsettling to learn is because your brain evolved to avoid uncertainty. Biology invested a LOT of energy in you knowing - or at least thinking you know - what the hell is going on. To be in learning mode is to directly confront the reality that there is something you don’t know or can’t do. And to be in group-learning mode is to be confronted with that in front of other people.

Does this look fun to you?

If you look deeper, perhaps the most fundamental task for initiating learning involves making learning safe (enough) so that eventually, hopefully, your brain realizes that to learn is to consume the heart-shaped herb, and it starts to trust that you have what it takes to endure the fraught, not-knowing process, over and over again. Learning = existential risk: Looking stupid, feeling less-than, experiencing ridicule, not belonging, perhaps dying. This means that if we don’t feel safe (enough) - physically, emotionally, psychologically - there are 1001 compelling reasons to shut learning down.

Now I know my community is full of highly intelligent people so, for those of you über-confident that you’re already a pro at learning, I give you my personal guarantee that during our time together, you and I will find learning edges that you’ll actively resist crossing over. I know this without a shred of doubt - it does not matter how brilliant you are - and I know it for two reasons:

1. Our relative level of comfort with not-knowing is directly connected to our experiences of safety and secure attachment, ego strength, self-awareness, resilience, and mindset, and NO-ONE has zero cracks in those foundations. No one.

2. I’m going to help you become an inner scientist, and most people are unfamiliar and inexperienced with inner science. The internal world actually scares us more than any external obstacle. And yes, I know that’s a big statement.

What matters now is that as you and I get to know each other, you’ll find me to be one of your most passionate learning champions. As best I can, I’ll come alongside as you’re doing the hard things I ask of you. I’ll be in your corner as you flounder, which always happens when people explore common unknowns like visual language, self-leadership, or experiential gaming. But you should know my working assumption is that you are strong (enough), more than capable of tolerating purposeful, productive discomfort. You should also know that if you’re actively devoted to martyrdom, self-sabotage, learned helplessness, or self-pity, I am not the collaborator for you. This doesn’t mean I don’t have compassion when you’re shaky or empathy when you’re freaked. It means that I can’t responsibly collude with any version of self-abandonment no matter what happened, or is happening, to you. I can’t shield you from challenging techniques and show respect for you at the same time. This is your life force we’re talking about, and it will not serve you, or anyone around you, if I help you corrode it. Might there be times when I need to hold the belief in your strength while you struggle to remember it yourself? Absolutely. And you’ll discover that I really have walked through fires, hell-scapes, and a Bog of Eternal Stench, so I won’t take you anywhere I haven’t gone myself.

The rewards on the other side of deep learning - creativity, confidence, joy, love, connection - make it worth the discomfort. It is in those qualities that we find the drive to keep going, onward through the fog of not-knowing, together.

I’ll do my best to write again soon from the wilderness.

Sun