Frontiers Friday #71. The Nuts and Bolts of Becoming a Deep Learner (Part I)
Frontiers Friday #71. The Nuts and Bolts of Becoming a Deep Learner (Part I)
Happy New Year!
The ability to learn deeply is one of the top skills one can develop.
To kick of the first month of 2022, I will be providing fresh ideas about how you leverage your personal learnings, use technology to help you, and how to employ learning principles to improve your ability as a therapist.
Finally, please see below for a special Invitation for a project that I'm inviting members of the Frontiers to be part of.
✍️ NEW FROM MY DESK: Parameters and Samples for Capturing Weekly Therapy Learnings
Maybe I'm biased, but this new post is important. My hopes is that you too will be capturing your weekly therapy learnings from this new year.
In this blogpost, I provided a guideline on how to do this consistently, as well as samples of my own learnings straight from my note-taking vault in Obsidian.
Sidenote: I've found so much joy in the use of this open-source app. Many have asked me about this. I will be doing a video series on the use of Obsidian this month)
📜 Web-Read: Time is personal. Your Year Changes When Your Life Changes
Derek Sivers is a master of brevity.
I keep returning to his writings. This is one of them."Your year really begins when you move to a new home, start school, quit a job, have a big breakup, have a baby, quit a bad habit, start a new project, or whatever else. Those are the real memorable turning points — where one day is very different than the day before. Those are the meaningful markers of time. Those are your real new years."
👓 Watch: The Fourth Turning Visual Summary
I highly recommend William Strauss and Neil Howe's seminal book, The Fourth Turning.
The authors describe the following:"Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
i. The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
ii. The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime
iii. The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
iv. The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise."If each saeculum (i.e., cycle) is about 20 years, it does beg the question of what season are we in as a collective culture.
By these estimates, we are in the Fourth Turning. If this is the case, that we are in a season of Crisis--which may come as no surprise--we must prepare ourselves and the next generation for the First Turning. We cannot ignore the common good as we walk through this pandemic and political climate.
Just to be clear, I don't see this idea as a sort of crystal ball into the future. Rather, it's a framework of conceiving our history and how we might learn not from the linearity of time, but the cyclical nature of reality.
For a good visual summary, I highly recommend you check out this video. There's something about seeing the four cycles being visually represented in this video that makes the idea of the wheels of time pop out.
This also made me think a lot about how books can be better written with the aid of visual maps, especially if the content is dense.
Here are some of the screen grabs:
👓 Web-Read: Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead
Tim Ferriss provides a useful idea around "Past Year's Review" (PYR). This ties in with the Highlights in Weeks that I use. See2018
Private Thoughts (Part I)
Personal Learnings (Part II)
2019
Personal Mistakes (Part I)
Personal Learnings (Part II)
2020
Looking Back at 2020
5. ⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
"The things we see every day are the things we never see at all." ~ G.K. Chesterton.
Reflection:
If learning = transfer, what are the top 3 things you've learned last year that you'd want to take with you to this year?
A Special Invitation to Contribute
This year, I am committing to not just providing useful content, but to also bring people together to form a community. This sounds lofty, but my intention is simply to allow people a space to "circle round" and share stories of learnings, blunders, and significant moments.
As such, I would like to invite you to consider the following:
1. Start capturing your weekly therapy learnings. If you are already doing so, I encourage you to continue in 2022.
2. Whenever you are ready, share your learnings but emailing them to me.
Depending on the responses, I am considering either to conduct a podcast interview with you about your ideas, create an online community to spread the learnings, and/or develop the ideas into an edited book with each person being the author of each chapter.
Let me know if you are keen, even if you have yet to embark on the project of capturing your weekly therapy learnings. As I write this, I'm tingling with anticipation to hear from you and see what we can create together.
p/s: Learning to learn deeply is one of high leverage skills one can develop. The Deep Learner course is specifically designed for this. Deep Learner is now open and we have an exclusive January discount of 29%! Only for folks on the Frontiers list, the savings from AUD$485 to $344.35 is embedded in this special link (The promo code FrontiersJan is already keyed in for you; you'd save $140.65. This special rate ends on 31st of Jan 2022.)
BIG HUGS TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS WHO WANT TO BE AT THEIR FRONTIER!
If you've just joined us, I'm glad you can join us at the "bleeding edge." Feel free to check out the back catalogue of Frontiers of Psychotherapists Development (FPD). You might also want to go into specific topics in the FPD Archives like
And if you want to see past newsletters, click here.
In case you missed it, see the most recent missives
(3 Parts)
(3 Parts)
(4 Parts)
Unintended Consequences (2 Parts)
(4 Parts)
(3 Parts)
(5 Parts)
(6 Parts)
(2 Parts)
My other blog site is called FullCircles: Reflections on Living
By the way, don't feel bad if you want to unsubscribe to this newsletter. This might not be for you. The last thing I want is to add to the anxious clutter of our inboxes.