Dr Stephanie Burns talks about learning and how to do it effectively, in this exclusive article for Mr Vitamins One single motivation has driven my entire career:

'To help people get where they say they want to go'

Toward that aim my work has focused mainly on two areas.

1. The first being the development of more effective strategies for learning - as learning is a feature of all significant goals people have.
2. The second being persistence - as managing one’s motivation to take action is necessary for the achievement of all goals requiring a long time to develop.

There are two consequences regularly occurring when an individual lacks knowledge in these two areas.

1. First, when most people fail to achieve a highly desired goal they account for the failure by some lack within themselves; they are too slow, a poor learner, have a bad memory and so on. In essence, they blame themselves and not the lack of learning strategies. And, rarely if ever, is this attributed to the fact that these strategies are not taught during our years in school. We simply do not leave school knowing how to learn effectively as an adult with adult goals.

2. The second consequence, on from this, is that after repeated failures there is a loss of confidence. People stop choosing to pursue new goals.

Make it memorable

When an individual says to me, “I can’t remember what I read” I often reply, “What do you do to make the information memorable?” This is often met with a face that says, “What do you mean, what do I do to make the information memorable?” It doesn’t occur to the adult that the act of reading does nothing to make the information memorable and that making something memorable is a separate and active process without which information rightfully will be forgotten. It doesn’t occur to the adult that as children in school they “made information memorable not by reading it but by a group of activities called “studying”.

Learning To Learn: 3 Day Program with Dr Stephanie Burns

Learning strategies that work

There are hundreds of strategies that expand upon our notions of reading, memorizing, comprehending and utilizing information. These strategies are available from many sources and an investment in learning these strategies takes away the risk of failing in new goal pursuits.

Learning to Learn

I have recently been asked to reproduce the Learning To Learn program through which I taught these strategies to tens of thousands of adults and teenagers with goals that required learning effectiveness. Many people remember the profound effect of this program and still comment on its value in their lives today.

Stephanie interviewed about ‘Learning to Learn’

I was interviewed about this program in June of this year and I believe you will find many clues, in the video recording, as to how to go about improving your learning behaviour. When you know how to learn effectively and manage your motivation to take action toward your goals ANYTHING you want to do you will do! If you are looking to see the effect of this knowledge you might visit the FaceBook page StephanieBurnsHQ. There you will see the myriad of ways I have personally applied this knowledge. There too you will find a good number of articles and interviews and even a complete learning strategy course I produced for Cisco Systems. This is there for you to freely use and apply to whatever it is that YOU want to DO. Cheers Stephanie Find out more about Learning to Learn + another video where Stephanie is interviewed by Alan Parker:

Learning To Learn: 3 Day Program with Dr Stephanie Burns here

  Read more from Stephanie in her articles on Goal Setting

Why is it that Achieving Goals Related to your Health is so Bloody Hard?

Why is it that Taking Action Toward a Health Goal that YOU personally set is so Bloody Hard?