The first month of the new year is about to slip by.  Sit up, take notice & look back before looking forward.  If you didn’t catch all the posts this month simply usher yourself down to the well & click as you wish.

Learn well in the training & development learning well.

Dive deep into the learning well or take a small sip. Shower yourself in training & development or just get your big toe wet.

Refresh & refreshing.

As you wish.

• Freedom for creativity? Freedom from creativity? Is this a playground or a jail?

• The Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is out:
• Resources related to Emmanuel Jal, former child soldier
• What a former child solider has to say about forgiveness & more

• A ludicrously easy, perspective changing way to better tie your shoes

• What is culture? 5 ways people from different countries learn differently (& 5 ways we all learn the same)

• Fresh perspective = creativity + words that dance

• Learning enhancing yogurt

• It’s IS (not) my job & other reasons (not) TO change (or learn)

• We all have n.u.t.s (nagging, underlying to’dos) but don’t let them drive you nuts

• Spontaneous heartfelt Jen Louden shoots from the hip AND the heart

• It’s not my job & other reasons not to change (or learn)

• Training & development interests, skills & opportunities a la Scott Belsky

Learning.  It’s possible to do it even in the wee hours of the morning.

Before a ridiculously self-imposed early morning flight from New York to Vancouver this past fall I found myself grabbing the above yogurt for the plane ride.  When I pulled it out to eat I was greeted with a delightful surprise.  (Note the early morning reference; it had to be good to have me delightfully surprised.)

Here’s what I saw when I opened the lid:

Firmly putting aside all dour thoughts of a seductively crafted, sneakily placed marketing message, I chose to be delighted.

Delighted at the surprise.  Delighted at the unexpectedness of it.  Delighted at the story.  Delighted at the thought provoking learning.

See below for a closer look at the story.  I just had to share it with you so I cleared away said yogurt as much as I could for this snap.

And it was.  Ambrosia that is.  It tasted TERRIFIC!

There I sat, winging my way home, entranced by a story, taste buds dancing, soaking up an opportunity for an early morning feast of learning.

The Carrot Life Lens™ in me loved the detail.  The Journey Life Lens™ loved the process of discovery.  The Heart Life Lens™ in me loved the way it made me feel.  The Go Life Lens™ loved the spontaneity.

And you?  What’s your story?  What have you learned lately?

~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~

I come across a lot of resistant folk in my line of work (training & development).  This graphic, which I found on Doug Ragan’s facebook page, encapsulates resistance perfectly.

I call resistance the ‘yes but, no but, rabbit’.  As in:

• yes, but marketing will never go for it
• no, we don’t have enough time for that
• that’s all well & good but … (the but negates everything that comes before it)

Acknowledging resistance is key to overcoming it.

I appreciate that it’s not everyone’s first choice to be in a workshop.  Acknowledging that to the group is key to getting people onside for learning.  Because to learn is to make oneself vulnerable, and allowing oneself to be vulnerable takes guts.

What stands in your way of learning?  Of changing?

October has come and gone with goblins galore.  If you didn’t catch all the posts this month simply cast a spell and click below.

Here they are – laid out like a well carved pumpkin for your perusing – here’s the Rock.Paper.Scissors’ monthly training & development round up. You’ll find all the blog posts for the month of October below.

Learn well in the training & development learning well.

Dive deep into the learning well or take a small sip. Shower yourself in training & development or just get your big toe wet.

Refresh & refreshing.

As you wish.

• The Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is out:
  
• Resources for transforming workplace learning through Social Media
• Four Ways Social Media is Transforming Workplace Learning (or how to be a space cowboy)

• How about a bedtime story a million miles away?

• You can make a difference. Will you?

• How far away is the moon?  It’s not what you think

• Learning curve: how do you know when you’ve ‘got it’? When your participants have got it?

• Perspective and mamahood; how does your perspective affect your training?

• What type of change are you trying to effect? Does it line up with your core purpose & power relationships?

• A pirate’s guide to engaging training & development workshops

• Borrowed husbands = more money, more wine

• What ironing underwear can teach you about learning

• How NOT to teach someone to swim (mis-match your learning domains)

Rising up and gracefully meeting the challenges that today’s ever increasingly fast paced world presents can’t be done with the thinking of yesteryear.

Changing perspective means breaking out of the bonds that tie our brains down.

Encumbered with false assumptions (we’ve gotta do it this way, any other way won’t work, we tried before, it failed), we tend to trundle along well laid paths, head down, focused.

Until, something makes us look up … and … out.  Towards possibilities.  Towards breaking the ties that bind.

Here’s an example.  Whether you have young kids in your life or not, it’s a great example of reinvigorated thinking.

Do you and I have to be with each other to read a book together?  Not the way A Story Before Bed envisions it.  Once signed up, you and your loved one can read the same book and see each other and yet be many continents and time zones apart.

Creative?  You bet.

Endearing?  Of course.

Go get your book on.

As a trainer our perspectives changes – depending on who we’re working with, what subject matter we’re teaching, how we’re feeling that day, our energy level and a million other things.

We think we’re neutral and objective but we’re not. We’re biased.  Way biased.

We see things as only we see them.  We see things based on our culture, our perspective, our history.  We see things uniquely.

The trick is teasing out our perspective.  Making the lenses that we see the world through visible.

Here’s a perspective on mamahood.  It caught my eye because I have an almost 10 year old and 14 year old.  It made me chuckle.  I hope it does for you as well.

It’s all about perspective.

3 yrs old: “Mommy, I love you”

10 yrs old: “Mom whatever!”

16 yrs old: “My Mom is so annoying!”

18 yrs old: “I wanna leave this house.”

25 yrs old: “Mom, you were right.”

30 yrs old: “I wanna go back to my Mom’s house.”

50 yrs old: “I don’t wanna lose my Mom.”

70 yrs old: “I would give up EVERYTHING for my Mom to be here ……with me.”

(Despite being all over the internet I couldn’t find an attribution for this perspective.  Thanks, whoever you are.)

How does your perspective affect your training?

If you’re a regular ready you’ll know that I’ve recently moved to Africa.  My learning curve is wonderfully curly and curious.

Take ironing underwear for instance.  I am fortunate enough to have house help.  My clothes are washed, dried and ironed for me.  Even my underwear.  Ironed.

Back home, my ‘ironing’ would consist of hanging said wrinkled piece of clothing on a hanger, putting it in the shower, batting some water on it, smoothing it down and leaving it be.  When I came back it would be relatively wrinkle free.

And that’s the perspective I brought here.  With my eyebrows reaching skyscraper heights in incredulity, who needs to have all their clothes ironed I thought, especially underwear ?  I thought it was a waste of time.  Not efficient.  Decidedly odd.

That was then.  This is now.

Turns out clothes are mostly hung outside to dry here.  Turns out flies like to hang about.  Turns out flies like to lay their eggs, especially on underwear.

Here’s the perspective altering fact; ironing kills the eggs.

Bring on the iron!

What perspective have you tried to transport from one situation to another with decided gaps and gaffs?

I wholeheartedly identify with the little goldfish above.  It was time for adventure, for embracing something bigger.  So what did I do?

I moved to Kenya naturally, to continue and expand on my training and development work.  This is the third in series of posts, with four more things I’ve been learning since I touched down.

See the other 2 posts for more things I’ve been learning: ‘There’s a 6 foot long green snake living in my banana tree’ and ‘I’ve unlocked a universal truth: shoes take up as much space as you allow them (or 4 more learnings about life in Kenya)’.

9. Aim high

Just like the goldfish above it makes sense to aim high, sometimes ludicrously high.  As we walked the dogs in a nearby forest yesterday, a harsh squawking filled the air.  The dogs were off like a shot, barking up some nearby trees at the monkeys.

I wanted to say ‘Really?! Do you really think you’re going to catch those nimble monkeys?,’ but then I thought, ‘who am I to tell a critter to aim lower.’

Be unreasonable.  Aim really high.

My aim is to come full circle to three early passions of mine:

• fashion design: originally I wanted to be a fashion designer (I was even accepted to fashion design school)
• international development: I worked in international development and global education early on in my career
• literacy: years ago I took some in-depth training to be a literacy volunteer and have been fascinated with literacy ever since

Putting all 3 together, my BHAG (big, hairy audacious goal) is to work with local women to design, produce and sell re-useable shopping bags and turn the profits into literacy work.

10. Waiting 45 minutes for a hot shower

When I got sick last week, the reality of living in a developing country sank in, as with teeth chattering uncontrollably I realized it would be a 45 minute wait for hot water.  Grateful for running water period, living here is an adjustment.  The scale between the privileged and the poor is immense.

While grocery shopping the other day the electricity went out (a common occurrence).  Bathed in the dull, low light of a generator I stood there still, hanging onto my grocery cart, until the lights came on again.

As I walk my kid to school (good bye free public education, hello expensive, privileged private school) every morning we pass a small forested area where I watch a mom with two small children, tending her cooking fire.  She lives in the bush.  I wonder about approaching her.

11. Freaky commonalities

On school registration day we were ‘translating’ my kid’s prior courses to what’s available here.  The appropriate math class was proving problematic so the math teacher was called over.  It took mere minutes to discover that he not only taught with but is very good friends with my kid’s last year math teacher.  Did I mention we are 14,360 km away from that teacher?

It made me think of walking down the street in Calcutta one day years ago and running into someone I knew.

Freaky commonalities happen as the world goes mobile.

12. Deep dive into delight

Finally, I am here to take a deep dive into delight.  Into watching monkeys and eating mangoes.  Into international issues and impromptu gatherings.  Into custard apples and community.  Into a slower pace.

Won’t you join me in diving into a whole other kind of learning?

(Thanks to Stacey Sirelson for the goldfish picture.)

Reading glasses are a relatively new acquisition for me.  They’re never far from my side these days.  In fact I’m wearing them as I type this (that’s me above).

Given my focus on learning,  I figure my specs have taught me a few things about learning:

Lesson number 1: don’t reinvent the wheel (or frame), get help from someone in the know.

When I found myself holding reading materials further and further away I knew I needed some help (either that or longer arms).  A visit to my optometrist showed that it was time for reading glasses.  No fancy prescription was necessary just some drugstore reading glasses.

Lesson number 2: how you frame (pun intended) learning has a lot to do with learners’ receptivity.  Is it a problem, a challenge or a possibility?

Rather than bemoaning my fading 20/20 eyesight I was determined to accept this fact of aging gracefully.  In fact I set out to find some glasses that were fun, funky, smart and sexy.  That’s me above in my red pair.

Lesson number 3: talk to your friends and colleagues when you’re learning something new.  In addition to experts they can give you valuable insight (pun again intended).

I told my good friend Tara Fenwick about buying my first pair.  She said ‘What?  You bought only one?  You’ll need more than one.  You’ll need one for your purse, one for beside your bed, one for your desk etc.’  I thought at the time she was exaggerating but being able to see is a priority and searching for glasses is no fun.  I’ve lost track of how many pairs I’ve now bought.

Lesson number 4: learning isn’t a straight line.  Learning a particular thing often uncovers many other things to learn.

Once I got comfortable wearing glasses, which was no mean feat, I discovered new issues.  BEcause I don’t need my glasses all the time I frequently take them off.   But where to put them?  If I put them on my head they fall off when I bend over.  If I take them right off I tend to loose them.

Lesson number 5: learning leaps ahead when there’s a strategy.

I live in a townhouse with several levels.  Before I developed a strategy often several pairs of glasses would end up on one level which was inevitably not the level I was on.  Now my glasses don’t leave ‘their’ level.

Lesson number 6: learning always requires resources (even if it’s ‘just’ time).

I travel a fair bit and realized I needed some way to carry my glasses so they wouldn’t break.  Now I have a spiffy neoprene cover that’s light and coloruful.

Lesson number 7: learning happens best in community.  Find your learning tribe.

Who knew reading glasses would be such a conversation topic.  It’s something I now share with my in-laws when we commiserate about loosing a pair.