14    

Helping Others Learn

Informal helpers are involved in 20 percent or more of all adult learning.¹ However, this well-intentioned support doesn’t always make a difference, and can even interfere with learning. This happens, for example, when you talk when you should listen, act mainly as a judge (which adds to the learner’s anxiety and performance stress), or even take over the process rather than helping the learner own it.

It’s hard to help others learn if you aren’t working to master the learning process for yourself. But thanks to the insights in this book, you now know what learning involves and are in a better position to help others learn. You know about the learning brain, the psychology of the self who is learning, the seven 4.0 learning practices, and the three common learning paths. These are the basic insights you can use both for your own learning and to help others.

Now it’s time to use what you’ve learned in this book to help others. Think about and appreciate your role as a helper both as an act of love and as one of the best ways to develop your own learning skills. Successfully helping others involves having the right (caring) intentions, using the seven 4.0 learning practices as your helping framework, talking and listening across a variety of helping roles, and seeing helping as learning.

Have the Right (Caring) Intentions

Helping others learn is an act of generosity and love. You share your expertise and time while showing your interest and concern for another human being. You enter with another person into that vulnerable space between knowing and not knowing—the space where a person’s ego may be threatened and she will have to decide whether to close and defend or open up and learn.

In this sacred space, your intentions as a helper matter. And it is important that these intentions come from a space of caring, compassion, and love. Four intentions, which are grounded in what we know from neuroscience and psychology, are especially important from this perspective:

• Let the learner’s needs and stage lead the way.

• Help increase self-management capability.

• Support a learning versus performance mindset.

• Help internalize a learning framework.

Let the Learner’s Needs and Stage Lead the Way

Have you heard the saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”? Another way to think about this is that when you support others in their learning, it’s about them, not you. People use their own filters when they take in information and support. It’s their senses, needs, perceptions, emotions, and intentions that will determine what they ultimately learn and act on. You can influence this by manipulating rewards, punishments, and the environment to trigger new attitudes and behavior, which may seem to cause personal learning and change. But unless the person you are helping has an internal drive toward and ownership of the learning, you’ll get short-term compliance at best and resentment at worst.

Certainly, there may be times when you fall back on external control, persuasion, and rewards, like when you are helping a child learn to respect, not bully others. But, as a rule, when you help adults learn, the ethical (and most effective) helping stance is to support people in the calls to learn that are coming from and through them—from their needs and life stages; their sense of past, current, and future issues; or their sense of wonder. When you think that a person is on a path that won’t be in his best interests, help him see the consequences so that he can make a free and informed choice to act or not.

Increase Self-Management Capability

Psychologists, professional coaches, counselors, and educators generally agree that a key goal in any support activity is to increase an individual’s ability to self-direct and self-author. There may be times when somebody else has some control (think of a person in a highly structured degree program, or a disciplinary performance improvement plan), but these are exceptions. For most adult learning situations, the learners are and must remain responsible for their own learning process. Why? Because as you learned in chapter 2, the natural development progression of all adults is toward greater autonomy and responsibility. To take over a person’s self-management role is to ask her to regress psychologically. So, a key goal when you help others learn is to increase their confidence in managing their learning in the future.

Support a Learning Mindset

Many people are afraid to experiment, make mistakes, fail, appear to be learning, or even take time out to think versus act. Helpers often collude in creating these fears and anxieties. There may be times in the learning process when it is important to perform or even take a test—and when your role as a helper may be to evaluate and rate. But reserve this focus on perfection, performance, and evaluation for these times. When you help others, put most of your emphasis on exploration, trial and error, and alternating reflection and action. Your role is to ask questions, listen to insights, provide encouragement and support, and offer perspective on their learning process—not judge or tell them what to do.

Help Internalize the 4.0 Learning Framework

Very few of the people you support have upgraded their learning approach to the 4.0 levels needed in today’s nonstop learning world. Learning is just one of those automatic processes that most people take for granted most of the time. When they think about themselves as learners, they often feel inadequate. But in today’s fast-changing world with its rapidly expanding information field, learning can’t be left to chance and haphazard approaches. When you are in a helping role, you can change this. You can introduce the more conscious framework of the three learning paths and seven 4.0 practices to everyone whose learning you support. Doing this makes you a 4.0 helper—someone who helps others learn how to learn while you help.

Use the Seven 4.0 Learning Practices as Your Helping Framework

Draw on the seven 4.0 learning practices that are at the heart of this book when you are helping others. Here’s how to do it:

1. Hear the call: Help people notice when learning is calling them.

2. Create future-pull: Help people create a multisensory view of their future that will motivate action and guide deliberate goals, as well as below-conscious, automatic learning.

3. Search: Help people sort through the increasingly dense and varied information field. Show them how to use scanners and chose the best resources for their needs and situation.

4. Connect the dots: Help people select and organize their resources and plans into a learning sequence that fits their challenge and current life situation. Help them see plans as guides that may change with new opportunities and information.

5. Mine for gold: Talk with people about what they are learning and help them get the most out of the various learning experiences they are using. Help them recognize different points of view and find deeper patterns and frameworks.

6. Learn to last: Help others achieve the learning outcomes they want by using the best techniques, such as those for remembering, developing a skill or habit, updating a belief or attitude, or having creative insights.

7. Transfer to life: Help others manage themselves and their environment so that they can and will bring what they’ve learned into their day-to-day life and sustain it.

Because learning is so pervasive and you might enter somebody’s learning process at any time, there is no one right formula for using these practices. In addition, the quality of your relationship with the individual, as well as his personal characteristics (for example, needs, life stage, skills and attitudes), will determine what your best kind of support will be. But if you understand how you can use the seven practices when you help others learn, you will be able to decide the best actions for situations as they come up.

Help Them Hear the Call

You know that calls to learn come from inside people, from their immediate environment, from the future, from past experiences, and from interesting information in the moment. But often people don’t hear the calls or fully explore what they mean. As an outside observer and potential helper, you can help others recognize when they are being called to learn. For example, a child may be having problems as school. You notice that there is a pattern—he consistently has trouble with math when he has to use it to solve problems—which you see as a call to learn how to think logically, and you make him aware of this. Or, imagine that you and a colleague have just heard about a strategy change in your business. You recognize that the change will require your friend to learn about a new customer segment, but she is not aware of it. You share your thinking with her, making the call to learn clear so she can think about and act on it.

Create Future-Pull

When people internalize visions of the future, these visions can operate as goals that motivate and focus learning from the beginning to the end of a learning initiative. These visions are especially powerful for learning when the sense of the future is a multisensory one, where the learner can see, feel, and imagine a new reality. Yet, it takes committed 4.0 learners to take the time to create this powerful learning pull on their own. The process can be a lonely task that is much more enjoyable to do with somebody else. This is a natural opportunity for a helper to step in and assist the process.

As a helper, you support learners by asking them to imagine what they would like to be doing, accomplishing, seeing, and feeling at a specific time in the future. Ask where they are and who is there. Expect the vision to be a stretch and engage multiple senses. If it seems impossible, don’t worry. Learning is a process with many opportunities to self-correct. Starting with a highly motivating vision can be a key to overcoming inertia and habit.

Search

Once people have made a decision to learn, they need to find the information to make it happen. But, how do learners find what they need? Their natural tendency will be to rely on the most accessible and easiest to use information. Perhaps they’ll turn to the expert in the next office, take the course a friend recommends, or open the first website or article in an Internet search. But often these are not the best resources for their needs.

You can help others sort through the information field. As a 4.0 learner, you know that scanners—people and tools to help you and others cast a wide net and narrow the learning resource options—are invaluable for finding experts, articles, books, courses, websites, and tools. There is a list of scanners in Tool 4, along with tips for how to use them. Use this list and recommend it to people you are helping.

Connect the Dots

A person’s learning may be retroactive through past experiences, forward to a goal, or in the moment. Depending on the level of challenge involved, there may be many or few, easy or difficult learning activities involved. You can play an important role in helping others gauge the difficulty of their learning agenda, and then decide and schedule the learning work they will have to do. Help them connect the dots for the best way to get to the vision that’s behind their learning goals.

Mine for Gold

The real adventure starts when people engage with a learning resource—a book, workshop, online program, experience. As a 4.0 learner, you know that different resources require different learning approaches, and you also know how important it is to be able to focus and see through biases to find the gold. So, as a helper, encourage people to use effective techniques. Ask them questions and encourage them to draw out what they need to know and make it their own. Use and refer others to the resource-specific learning tips in Tool 5. It will help you help others tailor their learning for the variety of situations they may face.

Learn to Last

Ultimately, learning is about personal change. It happens when a person turns information into one or more of four kinds of learning: enduring knowledge, skills and habits, beliefs and attitudes, and creative insights. Show others that these four learning outcomes require different learning techniques, and use the tips in chapter 10 to suggest some options for internalizing specific learning outcomes. Give people a copy of this book and suggest they read chapter 10 so they can better manage themselves to get lasting results.

Transfer to Life

There is a big role for you as a helper in this step. You can be an ally as well as recommend allies to support new behaviors in the real world. You can also help re-engineer the environment and give ongoing encouragement and support when someone has habits to change and new skills to hone. There are many ways you can do this, such as having weekly phone calls to check on progress, lobbying for changes in procedures and processes, creating an incentive like a dinner out after reaching a milestone, or giving periodic feedback about what you are seeing. If a big habit change is involved, be there for the long haul because it might take weeks or months to make the shift.

So, when you are in that learning support role, use the seven 4.0 learning practices as a mental framework. Don’t do the work for them; part of your role is to help them become more self-directing, self-confident learners. Think about where the learner is in the process, remind yourself about your intentions, and offer the support you think will be most useful and welcome.

Talk and Listen Across a Variety of Helping Roles

You may help others learn by taking on one or more roles. These roles vary in how much you show and tell, and how much you listen. It’s tempting to think about helping as instructing, directing, telling, or teaching; for some people it even means doing some of the work for the other person. However, while some of what you do may fit into the more show and tell category, at least 50 percent of the time the situation will require the opposite. When you help adults learn, plan to do little or no show and tell and instead try to exert influence by asking questions, listening, or helping people put the what, why, and how into their own words. When you help someone reflect, you create an atmosphere of empathy and understanding. This increases trust, lowers performance and self-esteem anxiety, and makes more learning possible.

Reflective practices like listening, questioning, and empathizing are vital when people are hearing learning calls related to shadows, life stage transitions, and deeper or hidden needs. Take the time to help others understand what is calling them to learn and to create a vision with future-pull before encouraging any other action. Think about your relationships on a continuum where, depending on your role, the balance shifts from show and tell to listening and empathizing.

You may play one or all of the following roles with a person you are helping. However, be sure that you are always true to the four intentions: to let the learner’s needs and stage lead the way, to help increase self-management capability, to support a learning versus a performance mindset, and to help internalize a learning framework (like the practices framework).

Director

Directors tell people what to do and provide structures for doing it. In this role, you can help people move quickly through the novice stage to a point where they have skills to build on and take over their own process. But you may also create defensiveness and resistance if the learner doesn’t agree to being in a temporarily dependent and novice role.

Environment Engineer

Environment engineers provide rewards, recognition, role descriptions, and other external support for learning and behavior change. This is an important way to help if you can influence the learning and action environment. It’s a way managers in formal leadership roles can help support learning and change, and encourage the successful use of new knowledge and skills in the real world. Just be sure the learner understands and accepts these actions as support rather than manipulation.

Teacher

Teachers are sources of expert information about facts, ideas, and methods related to specific learning goals. When somebody comes to you for your subject matter expertise, you will often play this role. Be sure to help the learner mine for the gold in your teaching. Draw on specific learn to last techniques to help create the memory, skills, attitude, and creative out-comes the learner wants.

Coach

Coaches give feedback and suggestions to help increase a person’s confidence and competence in a specific area. This role involves a close personal relationship where you develop a contract to help a person achieve a specific set of goals. You will probably assist in all seven 4.0 practice areas when you coach, especially the connect the dots, learn to last, and transfer to life processes (practices 4, 6, and 7).

Mentor

Mentors act as a listener, sounding board, witness, and cheerleader for a person’s overall development. As a mentor you know the general needs, life stage, and life vision of another person. You are a supportive friend for his overall development, especially helping him recognize calls to learn and create future visions. You also encourage him through the ups and downs of the learning journey.

Sponsor

Sponsors open doors and provide access to learning experiences and people who can provide support. As a sponsor, you may not have much personal contact with the other person. But because you have confidence in the person’s intentions and abilities, you help her access your networks.

Helping Others Learn, in Brief

When you help others, you also learn. You refine your own learning skills—the seven learning 4.0 practices presented in this book. When you share knowledge, you develop new perspectives and associations when you organize and put it into words. As a result, your own knowledge structure changes and reconsolidates. Through questions and conversation, you discover your own biases, have an incentive to review what you may have forgotten, and expand and upgrade your expertise. You also develop your communication skills, including your ability to empathize and listen. You draw on and expand what you know about the learning brain because you are looking for ways to help others learn. You also sharpen your ability to hear the deeper needs and life stage issues at work in the person you are helping; this makes you a more competent partner and friend to everybody around you. As a side effect, you will probably increase your own self-awareness.

When you help others learn, you contribute, you expand your influence, and you experience a special joy of belonging within a life context larger than you. You connect within one of humanity’s biggest circles of evolution. Others played a major and multifaceted role in your earliest learning, and this has continued, directly and indirectly, throughout your life. By example and direct interactions, you can now pass your learning on to friends, family, colleagues, and people in your social networks.

You will continue in these cycles of learning and helping for the rest of your life. As you leave this part of the book, ask yourself how well you help others. How well do you use help from others? I hope you are drawing on, and will continue to use, this book to support you as a wise and competent participant, whether you are on the giving or the receiving end of the helping process.