Learning, Legos & Zen Theory
Sometimes, it’s hard to learn new things. We all have a passion or pastime that we wish we were better at - whether it’s at school, work, home, or in your free time. And with all this free time, it’s easy to beat ourselves up for not accomplishing the extra few things that we could be doing to get ahead. All this to say, I’m writing this to share some principles from the Zen Theory of Learning, a proprietary method for self-growth that combines ICF Gold-Standard Leadership Coaching methods with modern Educational Psychology principles to provide a way of maximizing your time, mental capacity, and creative productivity.
This post covers the following topics: #learning #informationprocessing #zentheory
I think of learning like building a Lego set. Whereas most people might follow instructions for building a Lego set, the real world usually doesn’t come with instructions to learn new things - at least not ones that are as simple as step by step ones. If this were the case, anyone could learn anything easily!
In real life, information is presented in many different ways, and it is our job to piece together this information. Naturally, we think of this information as blocks of a larger structure, and in order to truly understand information we aim to connect it to other information. The biggest challenge that arises is that people tend to take any form of instruction as the “step-by-step” instructions.
In reality, the materials we receive come in many forms and in no particular order. As a student, you are given a textbook and chapters to follow along with - but is the structure that the book demonstrates the only way to understand this information? Of course not. The core principle of Zen Theory is being able to know oneself well enough to take any information, in any form, and use the information to build out a full model. This can be accomplished through mapping and asking questions.
In Zen Theory, we are no longer concerned with any form of instruction, and are more concerned about how to connect a new “lego” (a piece of knowledge) to some other lego that aids us in meaning-making and helps us determine our next steps (even if the next step is to take two steps back!) Of course, when it comes to physical engineering, some steps must be completed in a particular order - but I’m referring to cases when the metaphorical “lego set” is understanding the stock market, or learning how to play the guitar. In these cases, there is no set manual - the ultimate goal is mastery of the subject or act, and the methods by which someone upskills to become proficient in that subject or act no longer matters.
In conclusion, Zen Theory is concerned with building enough self-awareness to recognize one’s own learning style, and then having the self-management skills to be able to design a learning system for themselves. The same learning system will not necessarily apply from subject to subject, so mastery of self-awareness is a very crucial part to developing strong learning skills. However, once you’ve gotten the hang of designing your own personal learning systems, everything will eventually look like a lego set!
