You:
A Lifelong Learner

Think of yourself on a lifelong learning journey where you periodically upgrade your learning skills and approach. Changes in you and changes in the world around you drive these upgrades. How has your learning evolved throughout your life? You are now entering a new era for learning and are on the precipice of new and exciting upgrade possibilities.

Your Earliest Learning

You have been learning since before you were born. You learned to recognize your mother’s voice. You began to develop preferences for music and city or country sounds. You learned about stress and calm from the chemistry in your mother’s body. During that early development time, billions of neurons and potential capability pathways burst into being, readying you for the most complex programming that we know of in the universe.

The brain pathways that formed while you were in your mother’s womb were not random. Some were organized into patterns of potential behavior drawn from eons of human evolution. You were getting ready for the growth of you, ready for a lifetime of constant wiring, rewiring, and developing your brain. In other words, you were getting ready to launch into a life of continuous learning!

Then came a massive burst of development as all your senses and that marvelous brain inside you encountered the external world, creating many more potential learning pathways than you would ever need as an adult. The connections that are not used by age three will gradually disappear. Brain scientists call this “blooming and pruning.” So, your first years were very important for creating your brain infrastructure.

When you were little, most of your learning happened without your conscious awareness because you didn’t have the language to help you make meaning. You watched the people around you and began shaping your behavior to be like theirs. Without your conscious direction, the part of your brain that operates “incognito” (even today, this is most of your brain) began learning all it could about love and safety, food and feelings, cause and effect, and so forth.¹ Your brain continued to wire, rewire, and develop.

Then you began to acquire language and mobility—and wow, did your body and brain development accelerate. You soon developed the ability to expand your environment and to create information in your internal world. Your environment and the people around you played a major role in this early programing: You were significantly influenced by the rewards, punishments, and role models around you. More wiring, building, and developing.

This process of wiring, rewiring, and developing of material and connections in your brain continued through your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. And it goes on today!

Your Learning Through Adolescence

Most of what you know about learning as a process is based on experiences in childhood and adolescence—in and for school. Your school experiences helped you upgrade from learning 1.0 to learning 2.0. You learned to learn to make good grades, pass tests, and please someone in authority. You probably equated “learning” with “studying” and filling your head with facts. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, you felt joy and discovery, but it was often in the context of the school experience. You may have seen learning as something somebody else organized and you didn’t often feel in control of the process.

Brain science tells us that during your school years and into early work life, hormone shifts make it difficult to consciously focus on learning. And this is all happening at a time when your conscious, executive brain functions are still under construction! Brain researchers tell us that the prefrontal cortex—the front part of our brain responsible for self-control and planning—isn’t fully developed until our mid-20s.

So, through your mid-20s, learning was your main job. However, the school context and your own chemistry determined many of your learning goals, what you did to learn, and your overall attitude toward the process.

Your Learning as an Adult: Upgrading to 3.0 and 4.0

After these early years, you are left on your own as a learner. It is time for a new perspective and methods—for a broadened sense of yourself as a magnificent learning organism. However, research tells us that although 70 percent or so of an adult’s learning is self-directed and managed, most adults don’t manage it very well or skillfully. (Think about how many learning projects you have dropped.) The need for competent learning is there, but few people upgrade their learning capabilities beyond the 2.0 skills they learned in school. Even when friends, family, work colleagues, or managers try to help, they often draw on the learning 2.0 assumption that learning is primarily an information absorption and sharing process. For example, they may talk when they should listen. Or they dump lots of information on you when you need space and time to experiment and absorb. Perhaps they don’t support you when you are stuck and instead try to solve your problems and make your decisions for you, not realizing that part of your learning comes from tackling these issues yourself.

You have been learning all your life, yes. But imagine bringing advanced learner powers to this amazing process that you have been engaged in since before you were born. It’s time to upgrade your skills to learning 4.0. Let’s get started!