You Learned Something This Week. Celebrate It!

by Jul 19, 2019Challenges, Coaching, Discussions, Goals, Reflective Practice2 comments

Profound or apparent, you learned something this week. Celebrate it.

That’s right, you learned. Something new that you did not have on Monday. Or Tuesday, or even yesterday. You now have more, enhanced, complex, or even clearer knowledge, skills, or beliefs than you started the week with.

You may not now be a brain surgeon or rocket scientist, but there has been some shift in where you are as a result of your experiences, reflection, work, studies, or self-care.

Perhaps you now have deeper questions, or are more unsettled about something, or even find yourself in an in-between (or liminal) space where you may be aware of something that shifted, but unable to clearly articulate or make sense of it.

Rather than trying to debrief or build upon it (at least for now!), let’s start off with merely recognizing that we learned something. How profound or complex or simple it is may not be as valuable as our recognizing that it happened. First step first.

Celebrate this learning. Celebrate your awareness of it. Be present to this shift, and we can make sense of it later, something that will be much easier once we admit it is there.

Simple. Value-free. Non-judgmental.

Do you see what we are doing, in merely stating the change? We are opening the door to new opportunities for us to grow, ones that may be more challenging without this initial self-awareness. It is otherwise so easy to say nothing changes, when in fact everything does.

So, whether your learning was profound or apparent, professional or personal, transformative or incremental, you learned something this week. Celebrate it.

This is the final day of a 5-day challenge that was 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.

2 Comments

  1. Adam Williams

    Jeffrey … Based upon your experiences, what do you find to be the primary causative factor to one’s learning processes becoming stunted? Intellectual laziness? Fear of the unknown? Complacency? Lack of experiential opportunities? I have my own theories with respect to the teenagers I work with, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts re: the adult demographic. Much to my chagrin, it appears that we (collectively) are rapidly becoming a society of dullards happily wallowing in ignorance. I laud you and your efforts to stem the tide of such ignorance.

    Reply
  2. Jeffrey Keefer

    I am not sure there is a single causative factor, yet when I nervously chuckled when you wrote, “Much to my chagrin, it appears that we (collectively) are rapidly becoming a society of dullards happily wallowing in ignorance. I laud you and your efforts to stem the tide of such ignorance” I thought about the foundational element in adult learning, namely “the need to know.”

    I am wondering if we replace “need” with want,” then we may have our answer. In other words, what about this or that am I interested in and want to know more about? Likewise, if something is not interesting, or otherwise stated does not have a perceived value, why should I waste my time with it?

    I think the notion of learning for some perception of value may play a role here…

    Reply

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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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