Being an entrepreneur comes with its benefits – one big advantage being job satisfaction. This makes sense as business owners tend to start their companies around topics they enjoy. However, being successful in your role depends not only on how you handle situations but also on how you learn. Learning how to learn is important in every facet, whether it’s learning new marketing techniques, understanding product development methodologies, or honing negotiation skills. The more skills you master and the more you learn, the more confident you’ll become in handling inevitable problems.
Today, we’re going to walk you through the ways you might be hindering your full learning potential. We’ll dive into the common ‘learning illusion’ – the illusion of competence – and show you how to overcome it.
Contents
The Illusion of Repetition
Going over material multiple times doesn’t necessarily help learning as much as you might think. In fact, repetition can give you a false belief that you’ve learned something when you actually haven’t. So, how do you overcome this illusion?
The 2-minute Rule
Instead of re-reading information, take 2 minutes to regenerate that information. Pretend you need to explain the concept to a colleague in 2 minutes. By doing this, you’ll be forced to summarize the key findings and explain the information in a way that anyone can understand. This technique improves memory, comprehension, and problem-solving. It also works well if you have little background knowledge of the material you’re learning.
The Illusion of Confidence
The illusion of confidence occurs when we overestimate our abilities or the information we have recently learned. This can lead to a disconnect between our predicted learning and our actual learning. How do we help employees overcome this illusion?
Give More Feedback!
When providing feedback, start off with questions to encourage self-reflection. Ask employees about the skills they think are required to excel in their roles, and discuss steps they can take to improve. This approach helps employees understand your expectations without becoming defensive. Remember, when people overestimate their abilities, it’s often because they don’t know how to improve or what great performance looks like.
Help Yourself Overcome the Illusion of Confidence
To overcome this illusion, learn how to be more abstract. Focus on difficult material within a topic to enhance your learning. Ask yourself abstract questions and try to see how you can apply your knowledge to new situations. By becoming more abstract in your thinking, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of the material.
The Illusion of Simplicity
The illusion of simplicity occurs when we perceive something as easy because we’ve watched someone else do it. However, this cognitive fluency can lead to a false sense of understanding. How can you overcome this illusion?
Take a Step Back While Reading
After reading something for the first time, take a step back and think about the information as a whole. Ask yourself questions to ensure you’re truly grasping the concepts. By re-generating the information on your own, you’ll encode it better in your memory.
Solve Problems Yourself
When someone shows you the solution to a problem, you don’t encode the information as well as if you had solved it yourself. So, try to solve problems on your own before seeking help. Identify the problem, develop strategies, evaluate and refine solutions, and ask for guidance only as a last resort.
The Illusion of Difficulty
Learning something new, especially if it’s complex, can be overwhelming and uncomfortable. Our brains naturally try to avoid this negative feeling by shifting our attention to something more engaging. However, overcoming this illusion is crucial for effective learning.
Don’t Procrastinate
Procrastination only fuels the negative feelings associated with a task. By practicing and working through the discomfort, you’ll find that the initial “pain” signals to your brain disappear.
Practice Learning Hard and Abstract Things
The more abstract a problem, the more important it is to work through the information and make it concrete in your mind. Creating specific examples of abstract concepts helps solidify your understanding and improves memory retention.
By understanding and overcoming these illusions, you can become a more effective learner. Put these suggestions into action and watch how much more information you retain. Overcoming these illusions will set you on the path to becoming a confident and successful learner.
