LEARNING BARRIERS

Curiosity and lifelong learning are seen as so fundamental to personal and professional success. that business gurus have coined the term “learning organisation”. We must become skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge. We can then modify our behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights.

Learning is an innate skill that gets contaminated by negative emotional experiences at school. Our body tenses up and our language becomes critical and our attitude dismissive.

The Newfield Group identified “The Enemies of Learning”. These are obstacles to our ability to learn and can be broken down into three broad groups – linguistic, emotional and generic.

• Linguistic obstacles involve the assessments that we make about ourselves and how we learn. “I already know”, “I cannot learn” and “Learning will make no difference to me”.
• Emotional obstacles are those that get in the way of our learning because of our feelings or mood state. This would include arrogance, confusion, resignation and fear.
• Generic obstacles are barriers such as cognitive blindness – “you don’t know that you don’t know”, or not allocating time to practice.

All of these obstacles can be overcome and awareness is the first step in that process. You must first remove the emotional and linguistic barriers that impair your learning. This is influenced by the context in which it takes place and the attitudes of those around you. You have to create a mood of ambition and trust.

An understanding of the connections between language, mood and body, will help you break through these obstacles and become a far more effective learner.