In this article, the very first published on Seven Learning, we dig back into your past a little bit. Let’s go back to high school. Okay, don’t get carried away, I don’t have a Dolorian! Nevertheless, we're going to examine your past from afar.

Emptying Your Past

Take a moment to sit quietly so that you have a few minutes to think. I want you to think back to your high school days, particularly your learning experiences. Think about the subjects you took, the exams you did, the teachers, the things you learned (or didn’t!).

Get in touch with the overall feeling and emotional tone you attach to these experiences. Perhaps you felt dread, or inspiration, or pressure, or motivation, or a complex blend of many emotions. Maybe you can even relive the experience of being that sad child who felt limited, unmotivated, and frustrated.

Now you have a good overall picture of your experiences, I want you to imagine you’re like Dumbledore in Harry Potter.

Take an imaginary wand in your hand, and pull out all of those memories, everything you can remember, into a fine glowing silver thread. It’s dangling from the end of the wand. Now imagine you have a jar next to you. Carefully put in into the jar. Now, leave all those memories and emotions there for the rest of the video. We’ll come back to them.

How School Disempowers You

We all spend lots of years learning in the sense of book learning and formal curricula (assuming you’re from a country with a school system), perhaps even 20 years. But I suspect most of us are never shown how to learn properly, all the barriers that stand in the way of learning, and the mindsets required to be successful with it. We leave school and university with a very skewed idea of what learning is.

We also get used to being forced to learn ideas and subjects that we never use in our lives. How much of what you learned in school interested you? How much of it do you use every day?

This bothers me because I look around and see that because of their early experiences most people have a completely skewed idea of what learning is. I see that they lack the tools they need. I see wasted potential, negative self-fulfilling prophecies and depressed adults.

The New Paradigm

Learning isn't limited to school, or formal settings, or books and formal courses.

Learning is the ability to expand yourself, acquire new knowledge, skills, hobbies, develop new intelligences.

It’s the ability to transform yourself through sustained effort. This can be in art, cooking, music, writing, spirituality, self-awareness, doing makeup, sports: whatever you want to expand in your life. 

Our articles are excellent for book knowledge and traditional learning. They'll give you the tools you may be lacking right now. If you’re studying a highly structured curriculum already, this will help you. 

But it gives way beyond that. Whenever you learn, you change. There are neurological changes that coincide with the new information or skills or behaviour. It’s a process of changing yourself.

You can apply the principles we teach to your career to become more valuable to your organisation or your clients. You can apply them to your hobbies to take them to the next level and even develop them into a career. You can use them to follow your nascent passions and inklings.

In short, you can use them to improve your skills in any area in life. Skills are immensely valuable for yourself and others, and you can’t acquire them without learning and transformation.

If you feel small, weak, contracted, or incapable it might be because you haven’t learned enough about life and how you fit into life. There are many other factors of course, but learning expands and changes you, by definition. It gives you confidence, empowers you, and opens up possibilities for your life.

The principles that we’ll cover in this course apply to all forms of learning. They’re broad. So while I can’t help you become a better swimmer, because I’m not a pro swimmer, we’ll cover the tools and mindsets you need to permanently improve yourself in any way.

Stick With the Past or Move On?

Now, take a look at that fine, glowing silver thread in the jar, filled with all your memories of learning. How do you feel about it? What do you want to do with it? I hope you realise now that you were fed a very limited version of what learning is, and that the real version of learning is way beyond all of the drudgery and manufactured pressure and obligation you experienced back then.

If you feel good about having cleaned your mind of all this, just let that cup with the silver thread disappear from your imagination, and tell yourself you’re moving on.