Learning From Each Other

Jessica Beckendorf: Setting goals that focus on what we can learn from each other not only builds our own personal and collective knowledge, but we can also build community through it and leave space for collaboration. Hi, everyone. This is Jessica, and welcome to this week’s Practicing Connection practicast, where we highlight a specific practice you can use in your life and work. Today’s practice will help us set a learning goal and start taking steps toward it through our relationships with others. My Practicing Connection co-host Bob Bertsch will be guiding us through the practice in a few minutes, but let’s first learn a little bit more about it.

Bob, this month we’re talking about connecting with others, but aren’t goals a solo activity? I guess I’ve always seen them that way. What kind of a goal are we talking about when we say a learning goal, and how is it different from other types of goals?

Bob Bertsch: Well, I don’t think goals are a solo activity. Even if we are seemingly achieving a goal all on our own, research has shown that social support is critical to the resilience we need to keep working toward that goal. Achieving it, even if it is a personal goal, is really a collective effort. Learning goals are great examples of that kind of collective effort. Learning is a social activity. We learn behaviors and skills from observing other people. We learn from the knowledge of others and build on that knowledge ourselves, and we construct meaning together in our cultures. We do that collectively as well.

A learning goal often leans into this social aspect of learning. Although a personal goal like losing 10 pounds in the next six weeks is going to be influenced by others, so it is kind of collective, it’s not really focused on learning from others. We could take the goal of losing weight and add a learning goal to it or make it a learning goal by saying something like, “I want to lose 10 pounds in the next six weeks,” and learn how to stay at that target weight or learn how to keep it off. Learning how to maintain your weight involves learning from the knowledge and experience of others, which makes it a learning goal specifically rather than just a personal goal.

Jessica: Yes, thank you for sharing it that way. Because what I really like about this perspective, the perspective that goals are not a solo activity but a social one, is that it takes goal setting one step further. Rather than setting a goal and doing everything you can to achieve it on your own, it also allows for some support when you fail and for a potentially bigger celebration for when you succeed. I think it really emphasizes the point that we need each other.

I’m curious about what kind of commitment or mindset we need when we’re learning from each other. How does it benefit our work and lives?

Bob: I’m glad you asked about the mindset. Most of us have been conditioned to see formal settings as the primary way to learn because that’s our dominant experience, from kindergarten all the way through workplace training. Some of the ideas that this experience can put in our heads are the ideas that most knowledge is transmitted directly from one person to another, that usually that comes from an expert and goes to a novice, that the expert or teacher hold the only knowledge that’s worth sharing. That’s an idea that that puts in our head. We also learn that teachers and experts should be in control of the method of disseminating that knowledge, so they’re in charge of our learning.

Another idea that’s sort of pervasive from this experience is that learning is mostly passive, right? We’re sitting back and learning. That the main purpose of learning activities, quizzes and writing and other activities, is just to measure the student’s knowledge gain. All of those ideas are coming from this experience that most of us have all shared of being primarily in formal learning settings. In order to intentionally start learning from others, we’ve got to loosen the grip those ideas have on how we view learning.

The reality is that most of our learning is not the result of one-to-one transmission, from expert to novice in these formal settings. Albert Bandura, who created the Social Learning Theory, wrote in his book that most of our learning happens observationally, through modeling. We observe others as we form ideas and we learn how new behaviors are performed. On later occasions, that information becomes coded for us and it serves as a guide for our actions. We’re always modeling others and learning from others in our environment.

Although expertise is important, we can learn a lot from our own experiences and the experiences of others. It’s not just book learning, so to put it, right? That is important. It’s through our experiences that knowledge is put into practice and contextualized. Finally, learning just is not a passive activity. Through most of our schooling and even our professional training, we let institutions, teachers, organizations and supervisors direct our learning. To begin intentionally learning from each other, we need to take control and direct our own learning.

That’s a little bit about that mindset part of it. The benefits I think are multifold, especially when we do shift our mindset and start intentionally learning from others. When we let our organizations direct our learning, they’re going to focus on their goals, and primarily, those are going to be compliance and job performance. When we direct our own learning, we can focus on our own goals, whatever those might be. We can pursue learning that could help us reach goals that might enrich our personal lives or help our families or further develop not just our job performance, but our career and our career path.

Harold Jarche has written a lot about this, about social learning especially in organizations and workplaces. He believes the power of social learning lies in the fact that it can not only build knowledge, but also community and trust. Harold developed this framework called Seek-Sense-Share to help individuals take control of their professional development. In that framework, by intentionally seeking out information related to our own goals, especially through a network of colleagues, and then making sense of that information in our own context and finally sharing what we’ve learned back to our network, we start to build trusted relationships and those relationships have the potential to lead to collaborative work.

Jessica: I’m so glad that you brought up Harold’s work. I’m a big fan, as you know, as well. What that brings to mind for me is when we’re incubating our learning in this way, by seeking perspectives, ideas and knowledge from others and sharing our own in turn, it will sometimes involve connecting to new people or connecting with people you know in new ways. What advice do you have for reaching out to people you don’t know or for asking people you do know to connect about something that you’ve probably never asked them about before?

Bob: Yes. Well, I think it’s important to remember that we can get started learning from each other without connecting necessarily or making specific contact with anybody. You can find and follow people on social media, which is a way of giving them the universal gift of attention. As you find people that are providing the kind of information you’re seeking, you can see if they have a blog you can read or a newsletter or podcast you can subscribe to.

A next step could be to reach out with the universal gift of gratitude. A simple like, love or applaud reaction, or a short comment on a social media post can be a low-risk way of doing that. If you want to reach out for a deeper connection, which is what you asked about, Jessica, so I’ll get around to that, try not to just send the invite as like, “Hey, can we have coffee?” Or, “I’d like to pick your brain at a virtual meeting,” or something like that. I think when we reach out to people for that deeper bid for connection, we need to include why we’re reaching out to them specifically, cite where your interests overlap with the other person, be specific about what you want from them, and also include what potential benefit this could have for them. If you don’t get a response, don’t freak out, like I have in the past. Don’t make up stories about how they don’t want to connect with you. Just remember–

Jessica: Like I have in the past? [laughs]

Bob: Right. Just remember, these are people just like us; they may have intended to respond, but other things got in the way and they forgot about it. Maybe they’re just too busy right now. Continue to engage with them on social media if you’re doing that. Try to reach out again in a few months or, hey, just let serendipity take care of it and maybe the next time you think of them, maybe it’s 6 months or 12 months down the line, You can reach out again.

Jessica: All right. Well, let’s get started. I know you have a practice, you laid out a practice for us. Please walk us through it. You have the floor.

Bob: Thanks, Jessica. Yes, I’d love to. We talked a little bit about the mindset. Having this commitment to co-learning really is the first step, trying to let go a little bit of our preconceived notions of formal learning and commit to learning from others. The next step is to set a learning goal. We want to set a goal that connects with something you really care about. If you’re having trouble figuring out what that is, you can return to our What Lights You Up? practicast. We’ll put the link to that in the show notes for you, so you can go back and listen to that if you haven’t.

Make sure that when you set a learning goal, it’s something that you can benefit from the experience of others in pursuing, and you can make at least some progress toward in a month or two. You have a point at which you can evaluate how it’s going. If you are making progress, that’ll help you stay engaged with your goal in this process. Setting a goal can be hard. You might not be able to come up with your perfect goal on your first try. Don’t worry about that. You can always change your goal along the way.

All right, so now that you have your goal, the next step is to start to build your relationship list. Who are you going to learn from? One thing that we’ve done in the past with groups is to play a little internet detective if that’s needed. Maybe people pop to mind right away that are related to your goal who you’d like to learn from. If not, do some searching. Start a list of people who can help you with your learning goal, including people who have done something similar to what you’re trying to do, people whose interests are related to your goal, or people who have written about something related to your goal, either online or in a book. Check if those people have social media accounts, if you can find contact information, those kinds of things, so that you can consume the things that they’re sharing as part of your learning goal. Be sure to think about different aspects of your learning goal. Your learning goal might have distinct aspects, many do, and you might need to seek out people with particular experience or expertise in a particular area of that goal, particular aspect of that goal.

The next step is just start to reach out with people, either follow them or connect with them on social media. As we talked about before, reach out with the universal gifts of attention and gratitude. Then it’s important to check in with yourself periodically, just to make sure you’re getting what you need from your relationship list, and as we said before, that this is the goal that you really want to pursue. You might not have exactly the right learning goal. When you take a look at who you’re learning from, think about, is there something you’re missing? Some aspect of your goal that you’re not getting information about? Is there someone who’s not providing the kind of learning that you were seeking? Just adjust your list as needed, add or subtract as you need to.

Finally, make sure you give this a chance. There’s going to be no epiphany after 24 hours. It may take a month or two for you to find the right mix of people to learn from and to make progress toward your goal.

Jessica: Thank you so much for guiding us through that. That’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. We hope you’ll give this practice a try and share your experience in the Practicing Connection LinkedIn group, where people supporting military families practice the skills that empower us to work together so that we can positively impact our communities and help families thrive. You’ll find the link to the group on our website at oneop.org/practicingconnection. We’ll be back next week with our monthly longer-form episode called An Ecosystem of Military Family Support with Nicola Winkel. Until then, keep practicing.

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Voice-over: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award numbers 2019-48770-30366 and 2023-48770-41333.

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