While learning how to make an Instagram reel I started googling “how to improve my learning agility”. This sentence is a hall-of-famer in terms of summing up my overall personality as well as a specific season in my career.
I like learning new facts, but I do not particularly like learning how to do new things. I especially do not like learning how to do new things in front of others. It makes me feel my least-favorite combination of feelings: frustrated and vulnerable, together.
And yet… my life has been full of moments where my ultimate happiness will be measured by my ability to show up feeling frustrated and vulnerable and move through it gracefully. Aren’t most of our lives characterized this way? Oh, goodness, I thought I’d love this career forever but I seem to have outgrown it, and as loathe as I am to start over without a map, the alternative is feeling like this for 25 more years.
You know. For example.
Which brings us to this morning: knowing that if I’m going to “master Instagram” in 2022, I need to learn to make reels, and decidedly not wanting to learn how to make reels… and then realizing that I was doing all this in service of wanting to share helpful content with career pivoters.
Don’t lead where you won’t follow, right? For the record, I’m making the GD reels. I’m not saying that making reels when you don’t want to is anywhere near the same level of discomfort as putting a resume together in hopes of starting a new career… but it’s what got me thinking about this idea of “learning agility” in the first place today.
What is learning agility?
Learning agility describes a person’s ability to learn to do something new. This could be anything:
- Snapping your fingers
- Incorporating Excel shortcuts into your daily routine
- Retiring an old, unhelpful belief and replacing it with a new one
- Playing an instrument
People (hiring managers) take this “learning agility” stuff pretty seriously: the Harvard Business Review has been writing for years on improving one’s ability to learn new things. The opening anecdote to that link describes two managers thrust into a new situation – one who succeeds in the face of a new challenge, and one who earns a promotion and quickly fails after many years of “doing what he knew and operating rather conservatively in his domain”.
As career pivoters, that latter situation is pretty much our number one fear, right? So we really have to lean into this idea of “learning agility”: embrace it for ourselves, and then talk about it to hiring managers.
How I get out of my own head and learn how to do new things anyway
Everything hard I do is in service of a broader goal or I’m not going to do it. After almost 33 years in this body I have learned that this is how I’m wired. I have spent a long time trying to fight it and it’s not worth it. (Marcus Aurelius here would remind us of the importance of loving one’s own nature, rather than fighting it.) In order to do this I have found that I need to articulate two things:
- The big goal. In my dumb reels example this might look like “I want to impact X number of people with content around pivoting into project management.” For you this might look like “I want to get a job as a project or product manager at a Fortune 500 company in the next year. This will help me support my family and help me achieve my professional goals.”
- The periodic behaviors that support the big goal. “I want to make 3 reels and 2 blog posts per week, every week.” “I want to apply for 50 jobs per month.”
The absolute key here is that #1 is important to you – so important to you that you see it when you close your eyes and imagine what your life would look like if you lived it well – and #2 is completely within your control, based in your own behavior. If you want to apply to 50 jobs per month, no one can stop you.
What I’ve learned is that when I’m blocked from learning something new, it’s usually because I’m afraid of the external response that will come from my behaviors. What if people don’t like it? What if it sounds/looks bad? In my reels example: what if no one likes them? In your applying for jobs example: what if no one hires me?
This model says: worry about that tomorrow. Today, just focus on executing.
Have you heard the phrase “the mind is a wonderful servant and a terrible master”? To me, this is what it means. I cannot trust my mind to worry about whether I’m going to get the job or whether the reel is going to get lots of likes. If I live there, I’m just not going to apply for the job or make the reel.
But – if I tell my mind that its job is to apply for the jobs, or make the reels… well, that I can do.
Obviously, we will come back and iterate. If we put out 50 job applications and don’t hear anything, the next step is asking colleagues to review job application materials – or even hiring a career coach. If I make 50 reels and my insights tab plummets, it’s time for me to find someone that knows what they’re doing and say please teach me.
But that’s the key to learning agility – we can’t ask for feedback until we’ve got a product to hold up to the light and say: what do you think about this?
I have learned that for me, it is always more productive to ask for feedback on my work than it is to ask for feedback on an idea.
So, for me, this has been the key to learning agility: make the metrics process-oriented behaviors that I can control. I have been playing the piano for almost 30 years and I can tell you that this has not translated to 30 years of beautiful practicing. If my goal were “practice until I sound nice” I might never practice again. The goal just has to be “practice for 3 hours per week, every week, and see what happens”.
And that is how learning agility ultimately turns into something lovely – because what lovelier, or more promising, words could there be than “and see what happens”?
Leave a Reply