12/27/11

Dear Kayla,

I needed to learn how to learn. I personally could not restore my capacity to learn -- I never had much to begin with. In school, I could memorize information but not apply it. I could not concentrate enough to think through abstract concepts. I did well through high school, but had a great deal of trouble in college where simply memorizing information was not enough.

I am still working on that one now myself. But I know enough to give you some advice.

There are multiple pieces which I will need multiple letters to describe. One easy piece was some of the educational video and audio materials. I can personally recommend the Great Courses series. They are available but expensive at http://www.thegreatcourses.com/greatcourses.aspx; many of the courses are also available in libraries. The Great Courses series has university professors lecturing on a large variety of topics. Admittedly, there are other competing companies doing the same thing which might be worth looking into. But the Great Courses is the only one I can personally recommend.

There are no tests. All you need to do is watch television or listen to your ipod and absorb what you can. When you are just starting out, that is a good thing. Your brain can take in as much or as little as it can handle without pressure. Eventually, it will become more used to learning and processing more and more.

I would suggest you start with a topic you already know something about, i.e. a topic you studied in school or had a personal interest in in the past. You can recover some of your knowledge and skills from before and add to it. If you start with a totally new topic, it would probably be an overwhelming amount of information. Later on I found these courses a great way to learn about new subjects. But in the beginning I would have found it overwhelming.

As I mentioned, there were many strategies I used to improve my learning over time. But this was good for me when I was still starting out because it required no testing or follow-up. Later on these courses helped me expand my education as well as my learning skills.

12/13/11

Dear Kayla,

I was moving forward myself, then had a setback. Why did this happen?

I was pushing and doing great. I was growing more and more excited. I was steadily building skills. Then things started to fall apart.

I wasn't pushing too much. I wasn't moving beyond what I was capable of doing. What happened was that my external life changed. I became too busy preparing for the holidays and some other events. I wanted to keep building skills, so I kept working on them at the same rate. But the combination of the two became overwhelming.

Setbacks can be external or internal. They do not even need to be problems -- even good things can be stressful. It is easy to grow excited about building skills and push to continue. But you always need to keep an eye on external stress and see if you need to make accomodations. If I had made accomodations earlier, I could have gone back to work much more easily.

12/5/11

Dear Kayla,

One piece which I found invaluable to my growth and development is Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is a club designed to practice public speaking skills. The club is designed to make people better and more confident speakers. People can start with very basic activities such as telling a joke or introducing a new vocabulary word. When you are ready, you will give a 4-6 minute speech where you basically tell the club about yourself. After that, you do more speeches working on different points such as organizing your speech, body language, vocal variety, and using visual aids. You can go at your own pace and give speeches whenever you are ready. There is also the opportunity to practice speaking without preparation; an extremely important skill which many people are lacking.

There is another part of Toastmasters which is less known. Toastmasters also provides a manual to work on your leadership skills. Like the speeches, you can work on most of the skills one at a time while fulfilling club roles. You start out with very basic roles and gradually add more and more complex tasks. Some people don't like to work on their leadership skills, but I have found that to be extremely useful -- probably more important than the speeches. There were many essential pieces of leadership which I had never had the chance to practice before. I was able to accept feedback of my work, but at first I found giving good feedback to other people's work to be very difficult. When I started practicing that I became better. I also slowly learned to facilitate sections and keep people interested, to run meetings, to run special events, and to mentor other people. All those are skills I would never have had the opportunity to do otherwise.

I am writing about what worked for me. Toastmasters was incredibly helpful to me and to many other people.