We’ve all done it. Woken up one day and decided we need to change. We need to grow. We need to learn more.
High on the adrenaline of this new found realisation we embark on a hugely ambitious plan to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.
We delve in to the books. We read all of the articles and we attend all of the courses.
When I first become interested in the whole area of personal development I literally went bananas. I read a book a week. I couldn’t get enough. I loved it. And I learned very little.
Yes I acquired lots of knowledge and ideas, but I never took the time to put them in to action. The result? A more knowledgeable less learned person.
For those of you who are saying to yourself, I thought Ronan’s mantra was “in order to earn more you need to learn more”.
It still is.
But knowledge without real learning is futile. Learning for me is when you really implement the knowledge. And you make the changes.
So I believe in “learning slowly”. I believe that the emphasis is in the doing. And the doing part takes time. So slow down.
How many of you have gone on 1 day training programmes, only to lose 90% of the learnings the minute you leave the building. Then life takes over and those great ideas get shelved, until we have more time to implement them.
I have realised, I guess what I already knew. We change slowly. We adopt new habits slowly. Or to put it differently we change to better more productive habits slowly.
Sometimes less is more. And god knows we are being bombarded with information daily.
The reality is that we can never have enough knowledge but we can make the most of what we know.
So slow down.
Identify the major competency you want to develop in your business this year. Pick only one. Decide if it really is the major area to develop, that you will conquer it over the remainder of the year.
A great idea is to take a brilliant book (check out my recommended reading list just email rkilroy@focalpointcoaching.com) and take a chapter a month. Get all of the team to read it. Get them to present the ideas learned from this chapter. And agree to implement THE ONE key idea over the next month. Check weekly to ensure that this idea is actioned on. Focus your attention in embedding the learning and making sure that it really does effect change.
In short. Slow down. Embed the learning. Focus on the benefit of implementation. And slow down the idea generation without action.
Knowledge isn’t power. Real knowledge is achieved through execution.
