How to learn is a very important skill as many of us during school time had to figure out by ourselves how to learn stuff in order to pass the test. Later in life, after finishing formal education, we realized that the learning didn’t stop but the majority lacked efficient structure for learning something new as we never learned how to learn.

On the other side, being a trainer, it is important that we know the structure of learning as it will be easier for us to deliver sessions and focus on specific aspects that might help us deliver the knowledge in a way people could understand and learn it better.

To summarize, if you know how to learn, you can teach people in a more efficient way. So let’s jump in into 9 key elements of learning.

#1 – Metalearning

The term metalearning first occurred in the area of educational psychology. One of the most cited researchers in this field, John Biggs, described metalearning as being aware of and taking control of one’s own learning.

So how do we do it? There are three steps:

• What?
• Why?
• How?

Let’s go into each one of them. Metalearning is the crucial step and the foundation so stick with me on this one, I will keep it short and simple.

Why refers to your personal motivation for learning about a subject. It can be external goal (learn something so you get a job in that field or a raise) or intrinsic (you want to learn it because it makes you fulfilled, happier, giving a sense of purpose).

What is a very important step that almost everyone skips and because of that, their learning is taking so long that they give up. Once you clarify why you are learning, you need to define the structure of knowledge in that topic. Here we have three key elements:

1. Concepts – the structure you need to understand, principles, systems
2. Facts – specific information that you just need to memorize
3. Procedures – actions you need to do, practice and execute

Let me give you an example, let’s say you are learning a new language, Spanish. Concepts would be, for example, the order of words, in Spanish the verb comes before the subject whereas in English the verb comes after the subject. So that is a structure you need to be aware of. Facts would in this case be the translation of the words, and conjugations, you just need to memorize them. Procedures would be speaking the language.

How refers to the way you are going to learn what you need to learn. Take a look at the existing examples and how they teach on a subject. The first approach here is to benchmark how schools or universities teach that topic. Look at the curriculum schools use. You can also get details about the textbooks these courses use. That will signal where you can find state-of-the-art information and resources for learning.

#2 – Focus

There are many reasons why we fail to focus but the main two are procrastination and distractions. Let me explain each one of them and immediately provide real solutions you can apply.

Procrastination is when you struggle to start focusing at the time you have scheduled this for. You know you should be spending time on your learning project but other tasks keep cropping up which soak up your time and attention.

Whenever you recognize that you are avoiding what you should be doing, you can and should:

1. Make a promise that you’ll work for 5-10 minutes on your project and then if you still feel the same way, you can do something else. You’ll often find yourself ending up doing much more.
2. Promise yourself that you can take a five-minute break once you’ve gone twenty-five minutes on your project.
3. Make it a rule that you can only quit once you achieve some milestone – like memorizing something important.

Distractions happen when your phone rings or someone comes to the door just when you’re settling in to work on your learning project. Here is what you can do:

1. Look at your environment in advance and get rid of the most obvious distractions like music, TV going in the background, etc.
2. Choose a learning tool that always sparks your focus, and put that first on your list of tasks to do today.
3. Acknowledge when you have negative emotions bubbling away in your life, and make a conscious decision to put that to one side for now and start learning.

#3 – Directness

The best way to learn pretty much anything is to plunge in and try doing it. Be direct. Learn in a situation that is closely tied to how you want to use what you learn in the future. Most schools don’t do this but you can and should because it will enhance your learning.

Scott Young once said: “We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation.We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.”

Schools typically use indirect learning. You study facts and look at skills from a distance at school. A self-directed learning project can be the opposite. Instead of learning things in the abstract, you make direct connections to the settings in which you eventually want to apply new skills and competencies.

#4 – Drill

Break complex skills into their component parts and then be ruthless about improving your weakest points. Master the component parts and then reassemble them.

The main idea is that you discover one element of the skill or whatever you are trying to learn that you are bad at, that you suck at. Then, focus on improving only that specific element by doing actions that support the development and then, with a brand new improved set of knowledge and skills, get back to the main learning.

There are a couple of approaches you can use:

1. Use a magnifying glass approach and deliberately spend more time on one component of the skill than you normally would. For example, to improve your writing, spend ten hours on the headline and first paragraph. Get really good at specific components one by one.
2. Try and copy the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill so you can focus. For example, if you’re learning how to draw, start with a line drawing someone else has done rather than with a photo. That allows you to draw on their framing of the scene and decisions about what details to include and what to leave out. You can practice improving your rendering skills.
3. Look at what the prerequisites are for the skill you want to learn and invest the time to learn those foundational steps. Progressively go back and fill in the gaps in your skills.

#5 – Test

Use the testing process to learn more as you go along. Always test yourself before you feel confident and push yourself to recall information, not just review it. Here are some strategies you can use to test yourself:

1. Free recall – take a piece of paper and write down everything you can remember after sitting through a lecture or reading a chapter in a book.
2. Questions – rephrase what you’re studying as questions that must be answered later on
3. Closed-book learning – force yourself to draw a concept map of what you’re learning without being able to access your textbook.
4. Explain it to someone – try to explain it to someone who has no idea about the topic

#6 – Feedback

Put aside your ego and look for the harshest feedback you can find. Extract the signal from the noise and pay attention to what that feedback highlights you need to learn. I could write a separate article about the skill of giving and receiving feedback, but let’s leave it for now.

Feedback on your performance is an essential component to reaching expert levels of performance. You have to know how you’re doing at present if you aspire to improve in the

Future. 

Feedback comes in three varieties:

1. Outcome feedback is where you’re told how well you’re doing (pass/fail, A, B, or C) but there is no detail about what you’re doing better or worse. This feedback is easy to get but offers no clues on how and where to improve.
2. Informational feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong but doesn’t tell you how to fix it. The reaction of an audience to a joke is informational feedback.
3. Corrective feedback is the best kind of feedback to get. Here you’re told not only what you’re doing wrong but also how to fix it. This is the type of feedback a good coach, a trusted mentor, or an effective teacher will give.

#7 – Retention

Be aware and understand what you’re consistently forgetting and do something about it. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. Working as a facilitator and trainer, it happens to me many times that when I am creating sessions, I tend to forget which method I used in the past.

It is happening as facts and details decay quickly, many memories overlap and we forget the cues that are linked to our memories and actions. Here are some mechanisms on how to try to stop this:

1. Have a system where you methodically revisit what you have learned and refresh it in your mind. Allow enough time to absorb what you’re learning.
2. Embed what you learn into procedures – so as you follow your regular routines you’re refreshing what you’ve learned. Touch typists start out memorizing the positions of keys on a keyboard but then get to the stage where they can type without looking down. Eventually, they start thinking in words rather than individual letters. If you can procedurize core skills, then you can pay more attention to what you want to learn rather than obsessing over the mechanics.
3. Do some overlearning – where you do additional practice even when you can do something perfectly. Overlearning key facts will enhance your ability to recall them in the future. Repeat what you want to learn and retain again and again. Never forget what Bruce Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

#8 – Intuition

Play and explore to develop your intuition and work to understand what you learn. Don’t resort to memorization tricks but get to know your subject deeply.

You go from memorizing various components to being able to see the big-picture connections. Simply spending a lot of time studying a subject isn’t going to help you develop intuition. To achieve that, there are four rules you need to apply:

1. Don’t give up on hard problems too easily. When you feel like you’ve struggled with a problem for too long, force yourself to spend another ten minutes trying to come up with a solution. As you push further than others, you may find some creative ideas come to you. This is how intuition grows and can be sharpened.
2. Prove things to understand them. Don’t just settle for reading someone else’s results. When you see something, review in your mind how you would prove that. Doing this will help you understand systems much better (remember the Concepts part from Metalearning)
3. Always start with a concrete example. Visualize principles or problems as a working example. Then you can visualize how the ideas being proposed will impact your mental model. Doing this forces you to pay attention.
4. Don’t fool yourself. Never fall into the trap of assuming you know more about a subject than the specialists in that field. You don’t. You have not uncovered something new and novel. Be prepared to ask the “dumb” questions everyone else is afraid to ask.

#9 – Experiment

Don’t lose sight of the fact you can’t become a true master of your subject by following the paths trodden by others. Explore possibilities others have not imagined, try new things no one has tried before, and see how they fit your style, your personality, and your energy.

Vincent van Gough didn’t start painting until he was twenty-six years old. The usual route to becoming a painter was to attend art school or to apprentice in a studio to an established painter, but van Gough had a prickly personality so those options were off the table. Therefore, he became a self-educated learner.

There is a comment I read on his biography: “He knew that before tackle painting he needed to improve his drawing -that really sucks at the time-, so he just focused intensively on drawing for some years, doing live drawing mostly. If you see his drawings chronologically the difference in quality is really notorious. Then later he started to focus on painting.”

Having this in mind, you have to:

1. Experiment with new learning methods, materials, and resources. Find new ways to expand your skills and competencies in your field. For every youth exchange or training course I work on, I give myself at least three workshops where I will try something completely new. This is how I see myself growing faster than usual.
2. Experiment with different techniques in your field. Find your strengths.
3. Experiment with different styles, and eventually come up with your own signature style.

To run some worthwhile experiments around learning styles, some ideas are:

Copy what others are doing – and then go in your preferred direction. Find your voice. Copy first, then start creating your own stuff. Austin Kleon wrote an amazing book “Steal Like An Artist” which is a must-read for everyone who felt uncomfortable when reading the first five words of this paragraph.

Compare other methods side-by-side – to give you information quickly about what works best for your personal style. You might then come up with a hybrid style that combines and integrates the best features of many different styles.

Introduce some new constraints – ideally which make doing things the traditional way impossible. Force yourself to develop new capabilities by adding some constraints.

Come up with a new superpower – by making a hybrid combination of two skills that ordinarily would not overlap. A great example of this was Scott Adams who combined his background as an engineer with skills as a cartoonist to come up with the highly acclaimed Dilbert series.

Explore the extremes – and see if that throws up some interesting possibilities. There’s no magic in sticking to the middle and being average. Most painters worked in thin layers of glaze but Van Gough used thick applications of bold colors. Pick some aspect of the skill you’re trying to cultivate and push it out to an extreme. You can always pull back to something more moderate later on.

Conclusion and final words

Let me tell you a little secret.

I wrote this article to help myself better understand the book “Ultralearning” written by Scott Young. This article is a combination of my reflection, notes, highlights and summary of the book. As you can see, I used method number 4 from the Test section which says that you should explain it to someone else, so I chose to explain it to you.

We have evidence that you can always learn something new in the form of neuroplasticity – the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. It is when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned.

It means that you can always learn something new, no matter what. I hope this guide (I stopped calling this article after around 40 minutes of typing) is going to help you to better understand the process of learning and apply it when delivering sessions for your participants in workshops and guiding their learning.