If you're a teacher, you might be surprised at times at why people seem to learn so slowly.
You may wonder if it's because of your method of teaching or if it is the material. The reasons why learning is so slow aren't always apparent, but it usually comes down to a factor of trust—and control.
Find out how trust and control become crucial elements in learning as well as teaching.
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Rerelease: Why Does Learning Seem To Take Forever? The Surprising Reasons Behind Slow Learning
Original: Why Does Learning Seem To Take Forever? The Surprising Reasons Behind Slow Learning
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
You probably heard of the bird called the fairywren, but then maybe not, because it's tiny little bird.
What the fairywren does which is so remarkable is it teaches it chicks while they're still on the egg. It teaches those chicks and embryonic code. Now why would it do that? The reason why it does that is because the Australian cookoo lays its eggs in the fairy-rends nest.
The coo-koo doesn't want the task of parenting. So it drops it in the nest and then all of the chicks grow up together, but only the fairywren can communicate with their parents.
When they chipped, they chipped with that code embedded in their chipped when they asked her food, that's what they're using that code. And it is that code that allows them to be fed and the cook whom to be left alone.
As someone who's teaching, as someone who's training, you are sending out a code to your students to the people who are learning from you. And yet they don't seem to learn the code. They don't seem to pick up the learning just as quickly.
And you think, wait, is there something wrong with the way I'm doing things. And maybe there's something wrong with the system. And yes, there may be a lot of things that are wrong with the system. That has to be improved all the time and over the years.
However, the reason why people struggle so much, it's not because it's just transfer from one person to another. It's not just that. There are other psychological factors. And in this podcast, we're going to cover three of those.
Why is it that clients learn so slowly? Why is it that they're not getting the code fast enough? Here are three of the reasons. The first is, they don't trust themselves. The second is they don't trust the teacher and the third is they don't trust the system. So let's just expand each of these to figure out why that code is not getting across as quickly as it should.
1) Let's start out with they don't trust themselves.
Many years ago when we were conducting the article writing course, a client said to me, and this is the end of the course, she said, “I don't think that my writing is good enough. I don't think that I express myself as well as probably you do. And I disagreed.”
I asked her permission and I said, “Look, I'm going to take your article and I'm going to publish it in the membership site at 5000bc and I'm going to say it's my article.” And then we're going to look at the response.
She agreed and I followed through with what we discussed.
I put it in 5000bc and I didn't say it was anybody else so automatically everybody assumed that it was my article and there were a whole bunch of responses and questions.
And questions come when people are really interested in something that's when they start to ask more questions because they want to delve deeper into it and since this client was a member of 5000bc and still she could see how the people responded to her article. But the problem was that she didn't trust herself.
And this is not very unusual.
When you're a trainer and someone is joining your course or buying into your product or service, they don't trust themselves. I mean, if they did, then why would they need you. Now this might seem like a very minor point, but it is in fact quite substantial, because it becomes the reason why people struggle so much and are so slow to pick up their code.
They're always looking at their work and they're comparing it with someone else. In a cartooning course, for instance, or storytelling course, what they say is that treasus work is so much better than mine, or marina's work is so much better than mine.
They don't physically take names, but in their head, that's what they're saying. So when they don't trust themselves, day hold back and you know how it is when you hold back.
It's almost like the first time you were driving a car you're holding that steering wheel you're gripping it so tightly. That's not the way you drive now. Almost every student that you have almost anyone that you're training is going through this phenomenon of not trusting themselves.
They don't know what step to take, they're always comparing themselves with others and this is why the learning is slow.
How do we overcome this?
The way that you can overcome pretty much anything is the same way as a kid learns A, B, C or whichever language they're learning, the alphabet. And that is to get control over whatever it is that they're doing.
Instead of madly rushing from A to B and B to C and C to D, you just make sure that they have a certain amount of control over A before you go to B. And when you have everybody doing more or less a good A, then you can move ahead.
So what we're saying here is you've got to design things so that code gets across, but also that they feel remarkably in control and yet not bored. And so this is this fine line.
Let's say you're teaching them about pricing, and we teach a concept of yes and yes pricing.
Now in that pricing module, you have this idea of bonuses. And people are like, I don't have any extra bonuses. How do I create a bonus? There is this, I don't trust myself to create a new bonus.
I don't have time to create a new bonus where I'm going to get a bonus from and you have to get them to get in some sort of control.
And the way you do that is to give them a concept, explain how, why, when all those questions that you normally need to answer, but then give them one or two examples, maybe three examples.
And that's when they start to feel in control. When you're training someone, say someone's on the cartoon course, then we start out on a Monday with a concept and then we go through Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday.
But on Friday we also get them to look at all the other forums, all the other groups that are doing exactly the same thing. And there's Friday activity, which looks like no activity at all, is extremely crucial because it helps them to get control just before we wrap up for the week.
What they're doing is they're looking at how everyone else has done the same project and they get all of these examples. Pretty much like you did in the book where you gave examples.
Well, these are examples in a workshop, inner training situation, this is when they get control. And this is when they start to trust themselves, just that tiny little bit. They're still gonna do the comparison. That's inevitable. But now they feel a little bit more in control. And that's when you're giving them instructions.
That's when you're imparting that code to these embryonic chicks. And that's when they're picking up what you're saying. And that's how the learning goes. It's very mental, not so much what you're saying in your system.
But this mental gap that they have, this mental blockage, this barrier, that's stopping them or at least slowing them down from learning.
And trusting themselves, that's an ongoing battle because this week they'll get it. And then the next week it's a whole new concept and then they have to get that. And there's this control bit by bit by bit.
I'll give you an example when I was learning how to use my camera.
There was so many buttons and so many things. It was not like an iPhone where you just click and you had to get control over one thing and the next thing and eventually now it's nothing.
You don't even think about it. So you have to learn how to trust yourself when you're learning, but as a trainer, you have to understand that it is the examples.
When they see other people's work, not when they are doing the work that they get most of that control. And that's when you've got the message across. That's when their learning speeds up just a little bit, but now we've got momentum.
2) This takes us a second reason why learning is so slow, and that is because they don't trust the teacher.
If you've been on YouTube and you said only have, you've run into dozens of videos that just seemed to waste your time. They're always, “Hi guys, what's a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you'll just get to the point. But they don't seem to get to the point.
So you to watch loads of videos by people who inherently haven't learned how to teach. They have a video camera, they have lights, they have a system, and to be fair, YouTube is never meant to do that. It was never meant to teach. But then you have other teaching systems.
You have all of these other classes and master classes, all of them out there, and we have the same problem. And that is, they're all imparting information, and they're inundating you with information. They're not giving you the small steps. They're not helping you get enough examples. They're not giving you enough control.
And that's why we don't trust teachers.
You probably know that I am a cartoonist, and I used to be a professional cartoonist back in Mumbai, and then in Auckland, New Zealand. And I've been drawing for well over 40 years.
If I told you to follow a system that has helped me, would you do that. And if you were part of the course or the training, you'd say, yeah, I do that. I mean, I've signed up for the course. I've paid several thousand dollars. I'm going to do whatever it is that you're saying. But no, inherently we don't trust the teachers.
I'll give you an example.
In drawing there are two things that all good artists do and that is that they trace and that they reference. Now, tracing is different from referencing. Tracing is literally, you know what it means, of course. You put a tracing paper or if you have an iPad you just take the picture and you draw over it.
Most of your peers, your parents, your teachers would have told you that's wrong. Copying is wrong. Copying where you take someone's work and you use it as your own. That is wrong. When you sell it, that's wrong. When you're learning, there's nothing wrong with it.
What you're learning to do is to see.
You haven't really seen a tree. If you ask most people to draw a tree, they can draw a tree. But they haven't seen a tree. They don't know that the bark of a tree is not brown. Look around you. Trees aren't brown. They don't have brown bucks. They don't know that the leaves of the tree aren't brown.
It doesn't look like a ball. Look around you. They look different. Now, that comes from tracing. When you trace, you're starting to see for the first time.
Before you just noticed, now you're starting to see. But the tracing force is you to follow a pathway. And when you follow that pathway, it feels like copying it feels wrong, because you've been told it's wrong.
And so what you do is you go, “Oh, let's not do that. Let me just keep that picture to the side and let me reference it.” Now, referencing is great because all artists do that. They look at something and they draw it. They don't necessarily draw from their memory.
That's just a myth.
Most artists look at something. They have a reference and they draw from it. So you think, well, let me jump that copying stage. And let me go to the referencing. But you don't have enough memory working memory of how a tree looks like. And just looking at that tree is not enough.
So you have to go through a copying stage and a reference stage, and they don't want to do it. They don't trust the teacher. Because inherently, we have run into teachers that have led us down apart, and then we've had to backtrack, and it's just such a waste of time.
And as kids, we inherently trust the teacher. The kid is sitting in front of you, you're teaching them, maybe see, they don't know they're supposed to learn goga, which is Hindi, they are learning ABC because that's what you're teaching them.
And so they just trust the teacher. That's one of the reasons why kids pick up things so much faster than you because they don't know that they parents are hopeless language learners or language teachers.
They just trust the teacher.
And when you trust the teacher, you follow through and then of course you start to get that code, somewhat of a code. But when you're the teacher, you're thinking, why are they not listening to me.
And they're not listening to you because inherently, as we grow up, we run into so many bad teachers and so many Youtube videos and then so many master classes which are supposed to teach you, but they don't.
And so there's this psychological barrier and it becomes the second block first, they're comparing themselves with others, They don't have enough control, they don't have enough examples. And then they have to deal with you, the teacher who they say they trust and want to trust, but they don't trust the teacher. Not enough.
Clients will do several courses with us.
They will do the articulating course, the storytelling course, pricing loads of courses and you think, okay, they did that course and they struggled because they didn't trust you that much. Maybe in this one. But every time you do a different course, every time you're teaching something different, the students own thought patterns comes into play.
And they think, well, if I didn't my way, it would be better, not the teachers way. And as the teacher, as the trainer, you've got to be patient give them enough examples and just build that trust one step at a time. And that's when the learning picks up.
And this takes us to the third part. In the first part we looked at how they don't trust themselves. They don't trust the teacher.
3) But here's the third one and they don't trust the system.
When I was growing up there was this movie called “Karate Kid.” Walk on a road. Walk right side. See. Walk left side. See. What middle sooner or later. What. Get the squish just like grip. Here Karate same thing. Either you Karate do yes, or Karate do no. You Karate do get so just like grip. Understand. Yeah, understand. Now, ready.
Now that's a funny scene because he says I understand and he says he's ready and then the first task he has to do is to wax on and wax off which is to do something that the kid is not expecting.
He's expecting to do karate. He's expecting to kick and hit do all that kind of stuff. And instead, he's polishing cars, since he's sending the floor, and he's painting the fence. And he goes, “I don't want to do any of this.” He quits.
And that's because of the system.
He feels that whatever system that trainer has is not right for him, that he should be doing something else instead. And Farina, if there are not a lot of good teachers, but when you get to a good teacher, it is very likely that they will have a crazy system. And that crazy system is called crazy because it drives you crazy.
It's not going in the pattern that you've learned, which is ABC. It's starting with J. It's going to H. It's jumping all the way to L. And then it says Z and not Z. And you're going, this is rubbish. No. This is the reason why a lot of people don't learn is because the good teachers usually don't follow the system.
Why aren’t they following the system?
It's not because they're not following the system. It's because everybody follows the system. That is the slowest system. They have had to read you everything. Fix things, remove bits that don't work. And their system looked broken. It looks like your painting walls instead of learning karate.
This is not something that sits well with us. And so we rebel. And this is what you have to do as a trainer. Have to break your system to find the fastest, most efficient, most interesting, if possible, root so that they can learn that code.
Yes, the code is not easy, it is difficult, but it is what's going to help them become better at writing, dancing, it's singing, it cooking, whatever it is that you're teaching, it's that code. You have to teach them that code so that they end up strong and better at what they do. And they're not going to trust themselves.
We're doing a summary here.
They're not going to trust themselves. They don't feel in control. You have to make them feel in control by giving them enough examples, showing them what other people are doing at the very same time.
The second thing is they're not going to trust the teacher and fair enough. There aren't that many teachers that are good because most teachers just give you information. They don't have a system and when they do have the system, well, that system seems or crazy. And that's why people struggle so much when they're learning. And that brings us to the end of this podcast.
What's the one thing that you can do today?
As a trainer, you want to give them examples. You want to show them examples that you have, but also examples of people who are doing the same thing at the same time as they are doing it.
That's when they learn the fastest, that's when they learn to compare with other people and say, oh, they are better, but they also learn a system of their own. That's when they feel more in control. You wanna give them control, that's when they relax and that's when they start to learn.
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