Learning does not have to be a tedious procedure. You know that is true because when you want to know something and you are going to use that information to your advantage the process generally is progressive and interesting – possibly totally different than any imposed learning you had done in school. Learning can be, and should be, enjoyable.

In school you were lumped into a classroom full of individuals. Depending on the material being taught you may have been struggling or bored. The thing is that you may have been bored because you were ready for the next piece of the puzzle, while the person next to you still didn’t get yesterday’s lesson. In another class your level of understanding may have been reversed with that person. That’s because we all have different aptitudes and ways of understanding. You may be mostly an auditory learner, while your buddy may learn best through visual stimulation. To maximize your self-driven learning as an adult, you need to identify your best learning methods and use them to become more efficient.

I am good at learning in a “live” classroom, whether it’s in person or through a Webinar (web-based training seminar.) For my best learning performance I need to be able to have visual stimulation and verbal feedback as I ask questions. Some people do better with audio tapes and a series of slide presentations, like a self paced power point show. Still others need a hands-on tactile instruction, like sculpting. (This isn’t to imply the training is artsy; just that some people need that hands-on approach.)

Whatever style works best for you, you need to mentally engaged with the material and the training. What does that mean? It means that you need to know how a lesson is going to be useful to you, and why you should be working to get the most out of the instruction you are receiving through whatever means. For example, I would likely be a poor candidate for learning how to paint. It’s not anything I have a desire to do, and I can’t see how it would be useful to my current career path. Digital image manipulation on the other hand, could be quite useful to my web site construction. The point there is that the general topic of art/media has multiple aspects and some of those I could see being useful to me, so those topics would most likely hold my attention.

The thing is that many people never get past the stigma of their classroom experiences. They don’t get past it, and so they never even bother to try. A second example: my youngest son told me he didn’t like to read, but when I pointed out that game manuals and ‘cheat guides’ were reading, it gave him a new perspective. The usefulness of the reading made the challenge of reading vanish. This is often how it is with adult learning.