BarroMetrics Views: The Learning Process

A Tribute to HOS March 2011

At the end of the first day (Sat Mar 12) of this year’s Habits of Success, one of the assistant trainers was rightly  chuffed: “What a fantastic crowd!The energy was high, so many questions and so focused! You won’t get any complaints!”

On hearing the comment I totally agreed with the first part  - it was a great crowd; I held my counsel on the second because given the way the brain learns, it would be unlikely that the second part would prove true. The only way that could happen was if all the attendees knew and understood how the learning process works. And I did not think that to be true.

On Sunday and most of Monday. my assistant’s words seem to be echoed by the attendees. ‘Kane’ (not his real name) said:

“Ray, thank you! The seminar was fantastic! I am still coming to grips with the trend identification. I understand the process but need to make the process automatic….”.

But by Sunday evening, my reservations that there would be no complaints were being proved correct. The best of these came from ‘Rue’ (not her real name):

“I really admire your dream & can see you’re coming from 10,000 feet to reach us at 1foot & its giving both you & your audience a headache. This is a little feedback that others in the audience have commented in various ways.

Do you mind some feedback that could help the audience to understand you better & your training more effective.  Its obvious you need to restructure your delivery inorder to ease the learning curve/reduce frustration.”

Can you see the difference between ‘Kane’ and ‘Rue’?

It’s true that both were in ‘pain’ BUT notice that they each handled the pain differently. Yes, both were uncomfortable with aspects of the content but Kane looked inwards, took responsibility and said ‘what do I need to do to make the concepts comfortable for me’;  Rue externalised her discomfort and projected the responsibility for the solution onto my shoulders.

Now don’t get me wrong. This has nothing to do with personalities: I barely know ‘Kane’ and ‘Rue’ is someone I like a lot. This has everything to do with how the brain learns.

Figure 1 is a picture of the brain with established Neural Pathways. You see that there are established patterns and connections. The brain is most comfortable on automatic where new information can be slotted into pre-existing patterns. When we introduce new ‘learning’ (Figure 2), new connections and pathways have to be created and this results in feelings of discomfort, frustration, dissonance etc.

So you budding teachers and presenters, be aware that if you want to help create new learning, you must expect that learners will feel uncomfortable; without discomfort there can be no new learning.  Our job is to dampen the feelings of discomfort  and to create an environment of safety so that the new learning can take place. Trying to ensure that all adopt ‘Kane’ viewpoint also will not work. Accept that some will seek to place the blame for their feelings on your lack of ability.

That’s not to say we trainers should shut out criticism. Our brain will also seek the easy way out by blaming our perceived ‘poor performance’ on the attendees’ discomfort. Our improvement only comes if we examine every bit of criticism for validity and change what needs to be changed so that we achieve our aims.

So what has this to do with  trading? I can think of umpteen different ways. Tomorrow I follow a few of the threads.

(Apologies to Kane [my nephew] and Rue [my sister] for hijacking their names for this blog)

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Refer this blog post to a friend or colleague…