Learning from Mr. Li

Many years ago, when I was a student in Accountancy, I went on a month-long revision course to give me the boost to get over the intermediate qualifying line in my chosen profession. It was, for me, something of a last chance saloon - “Pass and move on; Fail and you cannot take this exam again.” Passing was my only ticket to becoming a fully-fledged Accountant.

There were around sixty of us on this classroom-based course, representing a cross-section of working students in our field. Some worked in London, in the City, for the well-known firms; others from further afield, but still in big practices in the provinces. I was a rarity – for I came from a very small firm out in the sticks. While others worked mostly in big audit teams, I worked alone on accounts of small businesses, with incomplete records. I did my fledgling accountancy work from the start to the finished article – which I then handed over to one of the partners for them to liaise with the client.

The course was run by two Indian gentlemen who were as different as chalk and cheese. One was a wise old bird, nearing retirement and who talked with a very thick accent. He was the course principal. The other was in his late twenties, spoke with an Oxford accent and had passed his Accountancy Finals with honours as a national winner for his year. Their teaching styles were also chalk and cheese – and most of us realised after the first day that the principal would ask a question and choose someone from the sea of hands that went up, whilst the young tutor had the names of all the students always to hand. He would ask the question and then say who he wanted to answer.

These differing class-tutoring styles elicited equally different levels of concentrated engagement from Us. With the young guy’s questioning style, we ALL had to have an answer ready – whereas with the principal, if we weren’t keen to answer then we just didn’t put our hands up.  

We had a fellow student of oriental extraction – called Mr. Li. We never knew his first name. Mr. Li liked questions because, it seemed to the rest of us, he knew all the answers. No matter which tutor’s class it was, his hand went up at every question asked. And if the tutor paused, to either pick or say a student’s name, Mr. Li would wave his hand vigorously, begging attention.
“Me, sir, me sir! Please pick me!” he seemed to say.
Needless to say to the rest of us – long since out of school – this was more than a shade comical. Yet we were polite young professionals, so Mr. Li’s classroom demeanour continued right across the four weeks of the course.

After the two examination days, we all met up in class for our final get together with each other and the tutors. There was light hearted conversation and plenty of banter throughout the room, and then our tutors wished us well.
Just before we dispersed and went our separate ways, one of our fellow students went to the front. He thanked the tutors on our behalf and then announced a special award for the student who had made the biggest impression upon the rest of us. It was a bit like a “mini-Oscar’s”.
He mentioned a couple of his city colleagues as nominees and then announced the winner – it was Mr. Li.
We all laughed, shouted and cheered as Mr. Li went up to collect his award … a Wooden Spoon.

Wherever we go, ‘e goes with us

One of the dangers in all learning is to assume that we have arrived. Or in other words, that we know it all and there is nothing more to learn. Believing “I can do it now,” is one of those times when life bites us in the butt.

A young lad came to his first cricket club session with us and I admired his considerable, yet raw, talent as a bowler. It was his first encounter with my coaching style, and I gave him some technical advice which he applied well, and we both saw an improvement in the outcomes of every ball he bowled.

After about fifteen minutes I spoke to him with a high degree of praise, for I really was well impressed. I wanted to make an impression on him – as he had done on me. The next ball he bowled was so wide it hit the side of the nets and never even reached the batsman.
“Oh No!” I called out as I went to give him the ball back. “I shouldn’t have said all those things I’ve just said!” We both laughed and he went back and carried on bowling impressively.

Part of my lifelong learning as a coach is that I have seen this happen so often and with players of all ages. I knew that the praise would be a distraction; and the distraction plays out because of the EGO. The EGO, his ego was awakened by my praise and all of sudden his mental state as he went back to bowl the next ball was more focussed on my words than the next piece of action. In the lapse of time between hearing my words and letting go of the next ball he bowled, his ego was saying to himself “I can do it now – I know it all – There is nothing more to learn.” In reality, he had discovered the complete opposite.

Now my little ruse, the trick I’d played, had worked a treat for him.
Why?
Because he had both laughed at himself and then returned 100% to bowling as well as he had done before the praise. In that moment, he had conquered his Ego. If he had not laughed, let’s say, then Ego would have held sway, and would have continued to distract the rest of his action.

And I see this all the time too. We utter words of disappointment, we breathe deep sighs, we get cross with ourselves, we beat ourselves up verbally, we blame it on something or someone. These are all examples of Ego holding sway. Keeping us from what we should REALLY be doing.

Conclusion

So, what are the parallels here between my young cricketer and Mr. Li?

Mr. Li is Ego by another name.
In order for you to get the point here, you need to forget the real person in Mr. Li.

All the character Mr. Li wanted to do was to let the tutors AND everyone else know that he knew the answer AND it was imperative that he was recognised as knowing so. His hand waved at every question – “Me, Me – Ask Me for I Know!”

Of course, Mr. Li’s only true reward was the Wooden Spoon. And thus it is, also with us, as we play out the various actions in our lives, whether at our sport, our work, our social interactions, our relationships, and with our selves. We have the propensity to garner a lot of wooden spoons.

As Ryan Holiday says in his book, “Ego is the Enemy” when our attention is distracted –
“Do I need this? Or is it really about ego? Am I ready to make the right decision? Or do the prizes (the praises) still glitter off in the distance?
To BE or to DO – Life is a constant roll call.”

The "Frameless Frame"

There is a frame of the infinitely possible, a bottomless pool of endless outcomes, an unbounded ceiling of capabilities. 

This is what I call “The Frameless Frame.”

There is a Frameless Frame to what is possible in the world, and a Frameless Frame to our capabilities and potentiality. Fundamentally this is the same for all of us, and applies to all of us.

Within the Frameless Frame there are blocks – an infinite number of blocks that represent the power of thought. Now how we use these blocks is entirely up to us. We can either use them as Building Blocks to help our Understanding of how things work best, or we can use them to construct Stumbling Blocks to our progress towards our Understanding of how things work best.

So let’s say we might ask ourselves, “What am I capable of? Is there nothing I cannot do?” If we apply the context of the Frameless Frame to our questions then the answer is “Yes, I can do anything.” And for as long as we continue to apply the Frameless Frame then we will use those blocks in the way they were meant to be used. We might still construct the odd Stumbling Block and discover that something doesn’t work so well – yet provided we remain with the Frameless Frame, then we can deconstruct the Stumbling Block and assemble something else, something more useful with the blocks.

If we become unsure, however – if we question our security – then we have constructed the limitation, the stumbling block, of insecurity. We have stepped into the finite and shrinking area of possibilities. We are no longer capable of “anything”, but have now constructed a reduced number of our capabilities. We are stumbling along life’s path; our route is restricted by large boulder-like stumbling blocks.  

“So how easy is it to use the Frameless Frame – of viewing life from that perspective?
Can I try it out first or do I have to go ‘all-in’?”

Well, let’s go back to using our toothbrush in the other hand. What are we going to notice about how it feels and how we feel? What are we going to be saying to ourselves as we do this? HOW are we going to Notice and Listen?
Are we noticing or hearing limitations? Are we colliding with constructed Stumbling Blocks? If so we need to ask ourselves “How might I deconstruct these Stumbling Blocks and use them differently, perhaps as Building Blocks?”

IF we needed a reminder just consider the number of times Thomas Edison invented a light bulb that didn’t work until he eventually stumbled across a constructed light bulb that DID. He never bumped up against the walls of “this will never work” or “I just can’t do this”. He was working within the Frameless Frame, and as such he knew it would work it was just a matter of HOW and (since this was always and only ever Work in Progress) and WHEN.

Conclusion

The blocks are just blocks – blocks of thoughts if you like. How we use them and what we construct with them is entirely of our own making. Life is just full of blocks – in some people’s perspectives there are building blocks and in others’ there are stumbling blocks. How we experience the blocks is entirely up to us as well.

So, maybe if you encounter a stumbling block, you need to take a different perspective – perhaps take a trip around the block – and then you’ll see it for what it really is, as well as the easiest way to deconstruct it for Good!

[This article is taken from my lengthy article "Blocks" - also on this blog. http://pjwhypno.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/blocks.html
 ]

Piling it all on The Learning Curve

Everyone talks about the learning curve …

“So where are you at on the learning curve with this subject matter?”
“This is going to be a steep learning curve for me!”
“I’m not making any more progress with this – my learning curve has flattened out.”
And so on.

Now I’ve written before about the learning cycle – illustrated thus:

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE      →	CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE  ↓
UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE	CONSCIOUS ←   COMPETENCE

This is a cycle, however, and there is no plotting of our progress from Unconscious Incompetence to Unconscious Competence, against either Time or Numbers of Attempts at mastering any particular thing.

Then someone, at some point plotted a graph of proficiency against time and called it a Learning Curve.

They perceived that graphically it was not a straight line, but rather more a line with a shallow gradient at the beginning, a steeper middle section and a final levelling off into a plateau.

Then, like all constructs, a number of things began to happen. Derivative graphs emerged, plotting points against different axes. 

However, for me, the most important emergence was the idea that this entire graphic representation of the progression of human expertise became an accepted NORM. It took on a life of its own and became the benchmark of TRUTH for everyone.

Practice

As we know, there are many ways we might get better at something – and for some of us, the number of attempts, or the length of time we have been doing something has nothing whatsoever to do with our progress. Once again, part of that accepted NORM that society, educators and other people judge us by, is underpinned by the spoken myth of Practice Makes Perfect.

Here’s the thing about Practice Makes Perfect – NO it doesn’t! Some of us attempt to do things for many years and still seem to portray the same level of incompetence we started out with. WHY?

The judges would have us believe that we just aren’t cut out for this; or that we are poor learners; or that we are inadequate in some way; right down to that “street-est” of judgements – we’re just plain thick. The “World” writes us off.

Yet, what if we knew that only “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect?”
That’s a bit of a gamechanger isn’t it? This doesn’t write us off – this falls in line with the idea that we are all capable of everything doesn’t it. All we now need to do is to find ways of bringing Perfection to our approaches to Practising. With this approach to practice we can now bring a higher level of Quality to our gaining of proficiency.

Yet – when all is said and done – we still find ourselves just tinkering with the Learning Curve; perhaps changing some of the gradients; perhaps arriving at Unconscious Competence sooner than we might have previously done.

However, the whole idea of bundling all our perceptions of getting better at something takes on a new lease of life when we adjust our perspectives, our ideas, around the gaining of experience, of learning, of practice and of Performance.

I’ve found, in the ways I work with clients of all ages, that we’ll only ever be working at any time on ONE of three areas –

Learning, Conditioning and Performance.

Now here’s the thing - when we deal with one of these in isolation it is a whole lot different from dealing with them even in tandem – let alone ALL THREE AT ONCE. I have found that this is a far better way of coaching – because of how we ATTEND; how we manage our ATTENTION.

It is probably down to the whole Multi-Attentional thing which we, as humans, seem to believe we can do and yet we fail at dismally. 

“Oh, but I CAN multi-task, Pete. Watch me!”
And I watch, and yes, he can multi-task!
However, he – like the rest of us - CANNOT do multi-attention.

Multi-Tasking and Multi-Attention

Grandma, knitting whilst listening to music on the radio and talking to her grandchildren is a very competent multi-tasker. Her hands, while knitting, are on auto-pilot; she is looking at the children whilst her ears are listening to the music. She is visually attending to the children and the rest of her focus is diffuse. When she comes to a bit of complex knitting technique she attends to that and not the children. She perhaps listens more to them in that moment than she does to the music. She is MANAGING her multi-tasking.

In any ONE moment in time, we can only attend to ONE thing. If our attention is elsewhere, then we are dividing our attention.

Perhaps the worst example of dividing our attention is when we are on our mobile phones when driving. And if you believe anything to the contrary, then I would suggest that when you ARE dividing your attention between the road and reading or sending a text message, your Unconscious Competence as a GOOD driver is now delusional and, in all truth, you have reverted to being Unconsciously Incompetent! Or, in other words, you have no idea how bad you are driving!

The Conditioning Curve

One of the things about any Learning Curve is that it should ONLY be about our learning. However - we have this propensity to map onto our Learning Curves the co-ordinates of another entirely separate curve -

The "Conditioning Curve". 

In the "doing" sense, our learning is merely about discovering and doing something we have never done. Conditioning, on the other hand, is about getting BETTER at it through repetition.

Think about going to the gym and/or getting fit. We engage with a set of routine exercises that we work at to condition our bodies to becoming more able to deliver a level of consistent athleticism. Are we really learning anything?
We may occasionally start a new routine – and we will become familiar with it. This isn’t learning though, it is merely altering the parameters of our Conditioning. In terms of our fitness, we will also be able to plot our proficiency against time or number of attempts (visits to the gym.) 

This is our Conditioning Curve.

When we judge our progress along our Conditioning Curve, we have an entirely different perspective as to what is happening in terms of our competence. Shortcomings are down to fluctuations and changes in our health, our lifestyle, our ability to regularly attend – in fact a whole range of reasons that have no bearing upon our skills, competences and abilities to LEARN.

Do you GET what I am MEANING here?

The Conditioning Curve is much more about Practice Making Perfect than the Learning Curve – yet here, too, Perfect Practice is also a very key element. Plus, and we need to remember this, the Conditioning Curve falls away when we don’t attend over time – if we stop going to the gym and exercising, then our fitness falls away.

The Performance Curve

Oh, yes, and in case you wondered – there IS also a Performance Curve.

We can learn how to do something; we can condition ourselves to be able to consistently and repeatedly do something; and when we are then asked to go out and perform that something, we are then subjecting our ability and consistency to that thing called … Performance.
We may have reached Unconscious Competence on the Learning Curve, we may have reached a good level of fitness or consistency on the Conditioning Curve – and now we are on a Curve of a very different kind!

When I work with clients on their Performance, in an ideal world we would pay no attention to Learning or Conditioning. We look, instead, at the Relationship with our Thinking, and how that affects our Equilibrium and our Temperament. This in turn affects our ability to manage our Concentration (our Attention and Focus), and our Decision Making. All these, conclusively, become synthesized into something we might label as Experience.

Experience is a construct that becomes more tangible the better we use it. In that regard, it is very much like Confidence – which also becomes more tangible the better we use it. Neither of these two constructs can be bought over the counter, or put in a wheelbarrow.

When looking at our Performance Curve for any particular thing we will notice that it fluctuates.
Performances fluctuate. 

The curve does have a bottom line – and the over-riding factor that plays into that base or ground-level of performance is our level of applied Experience. This is the tangibility I talked about just now, when we use our Experience well. Some people might even describe this by saying – “We are Learning from Experience.”

We know, equally well, that if we do not learn from our Experiences, then our Performances will never get better – or we will never raise our level of consistency in performance.

How do we Learn from Experience?

Good question!
However, we need to be aware that now we have left the Performance Curve behind, and are back on a Learning Curve!

We know that Experience is a construct made from a synthesis of our Thought Relationship, Equilibrium, Temperament, Concentration and Decision Making.
And we will have a Curve that depicts how we are Learning from Experience.

We will LEARN from our every Experience from every Performance, by examining just and only those aforementioned 5 things! 

Our Thought Relationship, Equilibrium, Temperament, Concentration and Decision Making.

In fact, the more Grounded and Objective we are, the more we understand that the primary element (our Relationship with our Thinking) will provide all the answers for increasing our Learning From Experience.

So how does the baby learning to walk learn from experience – for he or she learns very well – AND – very fast!
Well, in terms of synthesizing Experience, baby is not weighed down with a relationship with his or her thinking, and temperament also plays little part in proceedings. Baby is in a state of Equilibrium of Performance, is concentrating and is acting intuitively; baby is awakening to something it intuitively knows how to do though has not yet got an awareness of. Baby is gaining that awareness through Experience – which is PURE Learning.

We learn from experience by gaining an awareness that leads us to understanding.

Conclusion

So, the next time you hear yourself – or someone else – use The Learning Curve as a label, check WHICH curve is actually being talked about!

For in my coaching experience, once we differentiate between Learning, Conditioning and Performance, then we can really start to get very much better at ALL THREE – by making sure that we are not trying to Multi-Attend all three at once.

"Hope you're feeling better?"

I was asked just now - "Hope you're feeling better?" And my reply rather summed up how my body (and mind) are dealing with this latest viral invasion of my own immune system, which probably happened around 12 days ago at the start of April.

I do have a rather un-unique view of "The World" that keeps me well and grounded.
It is as follows:

Wellbeing

Our "Ship of Wellbeing", our health, steers a course through a whole variety of physical and psychological waters for us. This is always happening and it is part of our "How it is To Be."
To put it another way - How We are Being.

We have a certain degree of control over our own wellbeing - in terms of both the physical and psychological - and even with our innate spiritual wellbeing which lies permanently in the background of our sentience. And I like to think that our personal Immune Systems are how those degrees of control are made aware to us.

Of course, those Immune Systems don't come with a "How to use" manual - except perhaps for the one we often ignore called "Common Sense."

And this is why, through varying degrees of human frailty, ignorance and dumb stupidity, we will sometimes ask things of our Immune Systems that stretch them beyond their normal elasticity. 

Now resilience is the ability of something to return to its normal shape and elasticity once stretched - and these days, especially in terms of stressful pressures, we have something of an understanding of our personal mental AND physical resilience.


Physical

In terms of our physical health, we all live in a "world" that will repeatedly throw things and circumstances at us in an unpredictable and almost random way. The accidents happen - the viruses and bacteria arrive unannounced on the breeze - and so on. And our bodies deal with how they impinge on us; our Immune Systems are called upon.

And I'll pause there - and return to the reply I gave to the kind question/remark

"Hope you're feeling better?"

"How I'm dealing with this particular virus is rather like this ..." I began. "It is like a series of battlegrounds, so there's a war going on. 

From the outset though it appeared that I was winning, the effects of the virus attack increasingly gained a hold, and I was going away from Wellness towards Sickness.

Then at a critical moment of one of the "battles" I found a severe depletion of energy - and this was like a tipping point. I found I was slipping at an accelerating rate towards an area of not being well. It got worse - very quickly!

It felt like I was fighting this and all ensuing battles from a position of zero energy. And all the means of replenishing the energy could not be undertaken - because I needed at least some energy to do the replenishing!"

In endeavouring to replenish the "energy banks" I did the following ...
Without further ado I went straight to bed. Actually, I had no option to override here as I could feel my body starting to shut down. Alarm bells were ringing!

Over the next few days, in addition to going very early to bed in order to rest and sleep as much as I could, I actually did some other useful lifestyle things as well. Well, useful and efficacious for me anyway!
I became minimally engaged on social media, drank more water, ate more fruit, and used electronic devices - phones, computer, TV - as little as possible. And it all worked, to the extent that it slowed down the slide. Which meant that I was getting worse - but at slower rate. 

And there was a point - a nadir - on the energy graph, which I saw after I had passed it in time.

There were two pieces of toast on the worktop, waiting to be spread and eaten - and I remembered putting them there thinking, "I'll just go and lie down for a bit. Because I'm too exhausted to eat them right now."


"Feeling better, implies we are back to wellbeing, or top health. Are you better now? Better is not a word I can use to answer your question," I said to my enquiring well-wisher.
"I have got my energy back - and this is allowing my body to make the journey from HERE to being properly better once again, a much shorter journey. 

I'm not there YET I am making good progress!"