Enlist A Co-Conspirator

There are two fantastic levers to pull as you prioritize learning as a legitimate work objective: one is your calendar. (A calendar event dedicated to learning is a fantastic example of a “Love-Note-to-Self.”) The other is your collaborators. Enlisting a co-conspirator in your learning objective is a fantastic way to create accountability.

It’s easy to neglect learning, or allow it to be pushed off the plate in the midst of a busy week, especially when you’re not accountable to anyone else for achieving the objective. Even if you’ve blocked time for learning on your calendar, how easy is it to let another task eat into the next calendar event, when you’re only stealing time from yourself?

Simple hack: invite someone else to the learning moment! Another learner is MUCH harder for me to blow off than I am. I blow myself off all the time (in the form of allowing things to go beyond the time I had allotted them), but someone else? Much harder.

An important nuance to consider is who you choose. Every working relationship has dynamics and identity. I’ve noticed fundamentally some relationships are about knowing. “Together, we know xyz. If we are in a room or a meeting, we talk about xyz.” That’s great, when your job is to talk or teach. But when your job is to listen or learn, it’s important to leverage relationships that are about not-knowing.

And inviting someone into a learning mission, to be a co-conspirator on a learning journey, is an invitation into not-knowing. Consider who you want to not-know with. I’ve been blown away to discover how fun it is to use not-knowing as a way to develop collaborative relationships.

Related: Rally A Learning Cohort

Related: Benjamin Franklin’s Junto

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