#183 - The curse of adult learning
My struggle with learning as an adult and what you can learn from it
There’s something I’ve learned about learning, especially as an adult, in the last few months. What happened to me recently has happened to me in the past when I’ve tried to pick up a skill, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. What makes my experience important for you to understand, I think, is that for an adult learner, as I assume, dear reader, you are, coming face to face with what I encountered can make them abandon learning altogether.
I’m currently in training to be a professional coach. In a typical week I clock about ten hours, give or take, of effort in this pursuit. About an hour or two of this outlay goes into receiving feedback from both other learners and professional coaches in my cohort.
Something strange started happening to me after the first month of my apprenticeship. I started doing worse. I began losing my confidence. My drive to continue learning suffered.
I call this strange because for years when I made little effort to develop a new talent, I do not remember having this feeling of inadequacy. And here I was investing myself into developing the craft of coaching, getting real-time feedback, only to find myself hitting the skids.
To explain to you what was happening to me and how I overcame it, so that you can benefit from my experience, I’ll introduce a concept in this piece. Perhaps you know it already, and even if you do, I think there may be an insight in the connection I make here.
Levels of Knowing
There are four levels of knowing in psychology, illustrated by this 2X2 matrix.
This is a typical learner’s path to mastery:
1️⃣ They begin with a false confidence because they don’t know what they don’t know (Unconscious Incompetence),
2️⃣ come to a deeper awareness of what they don’t know (Conscious Incompetence),
3️⃣ go on to purposely acquire new skills through deliberate practice (Conscious Competence), and
4️⃣ finally reach a level of competence marked by a deep intuition and the absence of conscious thought (Unconscious Competence).
The learner’s path moves anticlockwise from the top left to the top right. Only I was discovering that my learning path was different. I was slipping back clockwise. I was regressing.
Let’s look at learning how to drive a car through these four stages.
-You start off convinced that driving can’t be all that hard because every Tom, Dick, and Harry around you knows how to drive.
-Then, once you get to it, you learn about the gears, the gas pedal, the brake, the clutch. For a bit, it all feels too much to keep at one time in your head.
-But, little by little, you do. You learn the correct sequence of actions: put the key in the ignition, start the car, press the clutch, put it into gear, press on the pedal, drive. You practice the set of actions, perhaps one by one and then all together. And as you do so, you get feedback from the traffic you’re trying to navigate and/or from your driving instructor sitting shotgun with you.
-You keep repeating the process until one day you’re drifting on corners at a 100 miles an hour.
Coaching must be the same, right? Wrong.
Unlike learning how to drive a car, which most of us know nothing about when we begin, we are deeply aware of certain things about coaching just by virtue of being humans. We have some natural skills that are called to action when we coach that we may not even be aware of.
A coach understands their client’s inner reality (their beliefs, thought patterns, values) by exploring their language and emotions. My teacher was awfully good at exploring language. He had the skill to pick out three words from the hundred that the client said and unpack an entire world of beliefs and values using those words as a gateway. I tried emulating him, but I sucked at it.
I would start sweating the longer a client spoke, wondering what words I would winnow for further examination. In trying (and failing) to pick out the key words, I also failed to capture the essence of what the client was saying. I was left with neither essence nor emotion. I was missing not just the submerged block of ice but also the tip that was floating in the water.
Couple my situation with the fact that prior to undergoing coach training, for more than a year I had been mentoring, both my reports and peers at work and paid clients outside. I had enjoyed that experience enough to believe that coaching would be an expansion of the things that made me feel alive. I had followed the recommended steps to lifestyle design only to find myself struggling.
Why was this happening?
I was—am—naturally comfortable at sensing emotion. I was better at picking out the feelings behind words than at picking words. But when I saw my instructor do it a different way, I forgot I had instincts. I simply followed his path. I abandoned what I naturally had some competence in.
Venkatesh Rao explains it:
When you bring up any habit for conscious inspection with a tool, you regress from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence (see shu-ha-ri). This happens because most of your later mastery is unconscious, and paying conscious attention to what you’re doing suspends the unconscious parts.
Note: The Japanese martial art concept of Shu Ha Ri maps the learner's thinking to stages of learning. We start at the Shu stage (stage of emulation). We model our behavior on those more experienced than us, like a teacher or instructor, and learn from the book. As we gain skills, we break with traditional wisdom (stage of separation). Finally, as we approach mastery, we invent our own way and add it to the body of knowledge on the craft (stage of transcendence).
When we learn we are trying to consciously imitate what we see our teacher do and in doing so we suspend what we may already unconsciously know. This leads to a backslide, as it did with me—I was all of a sudden unsure of my reading of the client’s emotion as I tried to follow the book. I slipped back from unconscious competence (where I had a good intuition) to conscious incompetence (where I could see I was doing poorly).
Much of the feedback I got from other coaches was that I was missing opportunities to explore what the client was going through. But they could not point me to specific actions I could take to correct the situation–except for listening actively. To listen actively, it turns out, is incredibly hard if you’ve set out with the explicit intention of doing so. You listen actively when you suspend the consciousness of your self, but here I was acutely aware that I needed to listen actively. The more I tried to listen the worse I got at it. You know how they say things get worse before they get better. Well, I know exactly how that feels.
Rao offers an apt description of this:
When the habit is a creative habit, there is an additional factor. For an uncreative habit, feedback of error via inspection or monitoring triggers dumb corrective actions. If you’re drifting out of your lane and your fancy new car beeps, you just steer back in. But if your monitoring is telling you that your “hit rate” for successful blog posts as a fraction of all blog posts is falling, there is no obvious action you can take to fix it. So being sensitized to the gap just increases anxiety, which makes performance worse.
Listening actively is a creative habit. As I began to dread feedback from professional coaches in the cohort, anxious that I was regressing as a learner, I felt I had to do something to stop this slide. I switched tracks. I decided to not follow my teacher. I also asked that I be excused from being given detailed feedback. I went, what Venkatesh Rao calls, “open loop.” It means trusting your instincts to come unstuck.
I don’t know if my strategy is replicable or reliable. But the point I want to make here is that adult learners are already burdened with self-consciousness. Throw a learning regression into the orbit of their efforts and it’s no surprise that adults find it so challenging to hone a new craft. They give up and to an observer it may seem like complacency. Sometimes, that may be the case but at other times it is not. It is not laziness; it is exhaustion. Adult learners tire themselves out trying to go by the book and seeing themselves fail at the very thing they’re working hard to get better at.
It’s been a month that I’ve been on this path and early signs are encouraging. My confidence is back and the feedback I’m getting is more palatable. I’m back to enjoying the process of learning to coach.
What has been your experience with learning as an adult? Have you found yourself getting worse even after directed practice? If so, what helped you get out of the rut? Tell me about your experience.
👋Hi, I’m Satyajit. Thank you for your time. I’m a decision-making trainer and coach. I write about better thinking at the intersection of business, career, and life.