Your success as a leader or the different roles you play in the society, depends on your learning abilities as well. Unless we keep learning, we will not be able to evolve and become better from what we are today. This will definitely have an impact on our ability to succeed.

There are different learning styles for different people, and most of the learning programs try to take care of that. What also needs to be taken care of is the concept of “Enemies of Learning”. By Enemies of learning, we mean, those tendencies, habits, beliefs, etc that makes learning difficult for that person. They are not able to get the most out of the learning because they have strong belief systems around the topic or about themselves. How many times we have heard: “Dont ask me to change… I am like that”, from people around us and from us as well. This by default tells us that we are not willing to change and hence we would not listen to any learning coming towards us.

A learner myself, I keep on reflecting on what comes in my way of learning:

• I am not able to learn till I experience or experiment what I need to learn.
• I read a concept and I start thinking I know it now. Then I will go ahead with experimenting it. This could sometimes lead to not enough knowledge and not correct results.
• Once I have made a decision in my mind about what a concept is, I go by my gut feeling around it and keep working with it. It takes a decent intervention to change my thought process then.
• I need to respect my teacher/mentor/trainer to get learning from them. Else I would just not listen.

I am sure this is not an exhaustive list and there would be many other enemies of learning for me. I keep trying to work on myself and it is very exhausting!!! There is no end to such things :). My invitation to you is to try and sit down and write down a list of your own about your enemies of learning. It would be a great start to having a much more powerful learning experience the next time.