The Learning Coach

What does it mean to be one?

Everybody is familiar with the concept of coaching. It has become one of the modern buzzwords of the last five years or so. Although there are many different types of 'coaching' (personal, professional, coaching aimed at behavior, at performance, and at task etc), everybody has an image in mind, when speaking of coaching.

And learning? Well, this is a word open to many interpretations. We know how important it is 'to learn something every day'. Who didn’t spend their first 20 to 30 years studying--and trying to learn?

That is exactly the point. We 'know' we have to learn continuously to stay on the cutting edge of competitiveness. We are encouraged to learn continuously — from every experience, every event, every interaction. We feel it so deeply, that we almost doubt if we can escape from learning something at every very moment... like a kind of permanent, unstoppable exposure to the rays of knowledge.

This seems to be confirmed by the definition I’ve found in the New Webster’s Dictionary: To learn is to 'acquire knowledge, skills, become informed'. And the Thesaurus gives some other clues: ascertain, determine, discern, discover, gain, gather, master, memorize... etc.

In view of this, the question that arises, is: If we cannot avoid being constantly inundated by knowledge generating situations — if we cannot avoid discerning, discovering, mastering and memorizing, why do human beings repeat the same mistake? Fall into the same traps more than once? Are unable to clone our best success stories? Feel we don’t have the least idea on how to handle certain situations? After all, don’t we have ENOUGH information to manage them?

This is the point, again. I’ve asked many times the question, to anyone: Did you learn something today? And the answer was, always, ' Of course!' But when I asked, 'What did you learn today?' the reply didn’t come out so promptly. 'Well, we constantly learn, I learn all the time, I cannot tell you exactly what, so many things.

At this stage of my life, I believe that we have a kind of internal mandate to 'be constantly learning' which talks to what we are expected to do, not necessarily to what we actually do.

But I think the problem is that we don’t know how to influence this 'learning'. Is it something that happens through reading? Studying? Not always, experience shows. Is it something that just 'happens' to us, independently of our will? If people get wiser with age, it might be so.

Howard Gardner, Professor of Education and Psychology at Harvard and researcher of the learning process, observes that one of the key elements is reflection: 'Creative people spend a lot of time reflecting on what they intend to do, if they were successful, if they failed, what they should change. They ask themselves what can I learn from this? What did I do wrong, what could I do better next time? …have a learning journal, they exchange their experiences with others, they think a lot...'

Reflection is the link between the action and the conscious learning. We can learn intuitively, while doing and without really knowing what we do and why.

It is a ‘gut’ response. Driving a car, riding a bicycle are good examples of this intuitive learning, which goes from one action to the next, without a full awareness of the content. It’s like the knowledge of the body, or the 'voice of intuition'. Learned movements, reactions. One characteristic of these unconscious learnings is that they are almost impossible to be transferred to others. When we have to explain what we do or why, we are simply unable to pass on this 'too familiar knowledge'. ('I just do it this way... how can I explain it to you!?')

This is the edge where reflection makes the difference between unconscious knowledge and conscious learning. Reflection is a process where we 'lean' over an event, we put a distance between ourselves and the pure experience. Reflection permits us to take a step out, to consider, analyze, evaluate, assess, and critically review. It places us one level above the event. We can assess, and draw meaning from, what has happened.

Reflection enables us to get full ownership of our actions, because when we 'see' ourselves reflected in a mirror, we can influence our own behaviors, we can recognize them to repeat them. Or we can try to change them, if the results were not the expected ones.

This is what a Learning Coach does. He/she creates learning scenarios, through introducing the reflection process, asking questions and providing tools and concepts 'just-in-time'.. ..after the action. A Learning Coach will follow the flow of the action and provoke awareness of the knowledge that is flowing out of the situations.

Simple, like dancing the tango!

[ top ]