Learn How you Learn!

If you ask me, nothing gives me a kick more than feeling that I am giving people what they need and more importantly when they need it not at my own luxury. Regardless of our roles and responsibilities and job descriptions, we need to remember that we have a responsibility to grow those around and make a difference in their lives, even if it is a small one.

In the middle of our fast paced industries often learning and development falls into the reactive trap, where it focuses solely on serving business priorities and strategic objectives which is indeed much needed yet it shouldn’t come at the expense of addressing employees' individual development needs. Refusing to fall into that trap, I often use informal learning channels in my organization as my exit, which is why I have organized the Learning Styles session as the first of many sessions to come to inspire our employees to own their own development journey and lift their eyes from the tactical development goals to a more strategic plan. My objective is to empower them to be well-rounded human beings, looking at their Skills, knowledge and abilities and more importantly applying them to every aspect of their lives, not only their job-related ones.

As the first step in this empowerment journey, we needed to pause and reflect why some people often think they do not have a passion for learning? Well, I tell you that is probably because they don’t know enough about their own learning styles, they are addressing their own brains with a learning language which their brain doesn’t prefer to speak.

Learning styles group common ways that people learn. Everyone has a mix of learning styles. Some people may find that they have a dominant style of learning, with far less use of the other styles. Others may find that they use different styles in different circumstances. There is no right mix. Nor are your styles fixed. While an Activist learns through experiential learning, a Theorist learns by digging through the theory and proof behind what he is learning and so on.

Today, I encourage you to own your development journey and as a first step know more about your learning style as well as the learning styles of your subordinates, it is going to help you while coaching them. Even your children, it will matter in how you parent them.

I am very grateful for Bassem Emad, CEO and Co-founder Aspire Experiential Consulting Solutions, being a subject matter expert on the topic, he has been our speaker for the session we ran in Ericsson Egypt office on learning Styles which everyone found insightful and inspiring