If at first you don’t succeed, learn something from it!

by Jul 18, 2019Challenges, Coaching, Discussions, Goals, Reflective Practice0 comments

If at first you don’t succeed, learn something from it!

Here on Day 4 of our Summer Learn-a-thon, it may be the perfect time to check in and see if our personal learning goals have turned into something . . . perhaps . . . different than what we expected.

Counter to expectations.

Morphed from our original intentions.

This is what happened to me while I have been thinking about how learning is really so simple, yet those of us who work in education sometimes shroud it in complexity. In mystery. In specialized language. While we use formal objectives and accreditations and credentials and such, in the end learning fundamentally involves a change in something we know, can do, or now believe about something.

While this can happen in a myriad of ways, the fact is that we are constantly learning something new . . . a new piece of world happenings in the News, what a character did in a new book we are reading, what our favorite character did on that new episode of this or that show.

Did you notice that?

Learning involves bringing something NEW into our lives. Somehow dealing with it. Then hopefully DOING something . . . ready for it(!) . . . NEW in our lives.

Learning is useless if we do not act on it.

Reminds me of the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Come to think about it, that is really missing something central, as trying again in the same way will likely get the same result. That is what we learn in organizational behavior!

If anything, failing the first time (in anything) means we need to do something new, in other words we need to learn from it and change or develop something, and then do it again. Again, that is, informed by something we learned.

Perhaps we should really say, “If at first you don’t succeed, learn something from it!”

So, what will you learn from something that did not work for you this week?

This challenge is cross-posted on both my website https://jeffreykeefer.com/blog and on Facebook https://facebook.com/groups/primalaccountability to try to make this as accessible as possible.

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About Me

Jeffrey M. Keefer, Ph.D., is an educational consultant, institutional researcher and accreditation officer in higher education, professor of research methodology, nonprofit capacity building and strategic planning consultant, talent development coach, spiritual life advisor (chaplain) at New York University, spiritual director, and Wikipedian.

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