Ep067: Unstoppable you – the 7 practices of lifelong learning with Pat McLagan

/
Ep067 Unstoppable you the 7 practices of lifelong learning with Pat McLagan TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay
Psst... Join the The TalentGrowers Community on Facebook to be part of a community of listeners who support each other in becoming the kind of leader that people *want* to follow!
Download the 10 Mistakes Leaders Make and How to Avoid Them free tool -- it's good stuff!

In today’s stimulating episode of The TalentGrow Show, award-winning learning expert and author of Unstoppable You: Adopt The New 4.0 Mindset And Change Your Life Pat McLagan explains what the “learning 4.0” framework is all about and how you can use it to become a much better lifelong learner and leader. Listen to find out how learning 4.0 compares to 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 learning techniques, what’s something that managers and supervisors can no longer afford to do, and most importantly what are the 7 powerful practices of lifelong learning (which she says “apply whether you’re learning by yourself, learning in a team, helping someone learn, or being helped by someone to learn”). This episode is chock-full of insights and wisdom so take a listen now! Please remember to subscribe and share!

Listen to Stitcher

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • What does Pat say has become one of the main themes of her work? (8:13)
  • Something that Pat says we can’t really afford for managers and supervisors to do anymore? (8:27)
  • What’s the basic idea of “learning 4.0”? (11:13)
  • Pat believes artificial intelligence is going to take over __% of jobs out there (11:25)
  • How does Pat describe learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 techniques? (11:45)
  • What does Pat think is a big role of the supervisor and manager? (12:57)
  • What’s the first practice of effective lifelong learning? (13:22)
  • What Pat wants supervisors to help people be more tuned into (13:38)
  • An important fact about how our brains work that relates to the second practice (13:53)
  • The third practice: Searching (14:57)
  • “How do we find the information we need and the support we need for learning? We cannot do it all ourselves.” (15:11)
  • What are some of the other searching tools that are evolving for the 4.0 learner (beyond just search engines)? (15:21)
  • The fourth practice is something Pat calls Connect The Dots... (15:47)
  • The fifth practice: Mining for goals (16:55)
  • “The 4.0 learner understands how to go about pulling the goals out of the situations that they’re in.” (17:38)
  • The sixth practice: Learning To Last (18:28)
  • The seventh practice: Transferring Learning To Life (19:58)
  • In order to be able to transfer learning to real life, what two things do you need to be good at? (20:16)
  • What’s an example where applying the 7 practices can have a big payoff? (25:05)
  • Pat’s actionable tip that she wants you to do before you go to bed (32:23)
  • What’s the simple and free app that Pat recommends you get? (33:40)

 RESOURCES:

ABOUT PAT MCLAGAN:

Pat McLagan, CEO of McLagan International, is an international thought leader on implementing strategy by unleashing the learning and leadership capabilities of everyone in the business. Her books include Change Is Everybody’s Business, On-the-Level: Performance Communication at Work, The Age of Participation, The Shadow Side of Power: Lessons for Leaders, and the just released (ATD Press) Unstoppable You: Adopt the New Learning 4.0 Mindset and Change Your Life. She has received ATD’s highest award for thought leadership and service, is an elected member of the International Association for Adult and Continuing Education, and was recognized as an Inspiring Mind for a Century by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. She has worked globally, including living and working in South Africa before, during, and immediately after the end of apartheid. McLagan is a former ATD board member who also led two field-defining competency studies for ATD.

Transcript

Episode 67 Pat McLagan

Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Welcome back TalentGrowers. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and I’m looking forward to sharing today’s episode with you. I’ll prepare you – it’s very full of very interesting information for you to chew on. My guest is award-winning learning expert and author of Unstoppable You, adopt the new learning 4.0 mindset and change your life. Her name is Pat McLagan. Built on the success of her 40-year career, her very impressive 40-year career, you’ll hear her describe it, Pat explains what her learning 4.0 framework is all about and how you can use it to become a much better learner and a much better leader. She describes how learning 4.0 compares to 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 learning techniques. She talks about what managers and supervisors no longer can afford to do, and the seven powerful practices of lifelong learning, which she says apply whether you’re learning by yourself, learning in a team, helping someone else learn or being helped by someone to learn. This episode is so chalk-full of insights and wisdom you’ll probably want to hear it twice just to squeeze all the juice out of it. Strap on your seatbelt and get ready for it. Here we go.

Welcome back TalentGrowers. I’m so excited to share with you my guest this week, who is Pat McLagan. Pat’s life and work focus on institutional transition and transformation, and she has been a key player in the midst of decades of institutional change. Her speaking and consulting focus is on strategy and goal execution and on the successful implementation of major changes, especially changes focused on transcending traditional boundaries across levels and organizational siloes and other boundaries. We’re going to talk most specifically about Pat’s latest book titled Unstoppable You, adopt the new learning 4.0 mindset and change your life. Pat, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.

Pat: Thanks Halelly. I’m really delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me. And hello to everyone out there in podcast land.

Halelly: It’s my pleasure and thank you for joining us. I’m looking forward to talking with you about this topic, but before we go there, you’ve had an illustrious and an interesting career, and so the challenge for you will be how can you encapsulate your overall professional journey in just a couple of minutes for us, just so we get a sense of where you started and how you got to where you are today.

Pat: Okay. It’s always easy to look back on your career, because I certainly didn’t expect to do the things that I am doing, or end up where I’ve ended up. But when I look back, I think my work and my life have always been about learning and it’s always been about taking on your personal power and about helping other people be able to take on theirs. I know that your audience is very interested in that. I’ve started out, actually 40 years ago, teaching learning skills at the University of Minnesota, to people who were coming back from the Vietnam War, and I thought I had a problem of teaching them skills for learning and being able to succeed in the college environment. What I discovered was the real issues related to their own sense of personal power and self-confidence. That pretty much shaped how I approached, really, the rest of my work in my life.

After the university, I found my way into organizations, and I was working with 3M and Honeywell and General Mills. I grew up in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and I brought the learning program to these companies and actually it was mostly managers, supervisors and executives that came to these programs, because they wanted to learn how to handle information better. They wanted to learn how to learn better. They felt that things were changing around them and they weren’t able to keep up. I brought that learning perspective initially to the people who were doing the learning, but then I found myself meeting people in the training and development departments. Back then, training and development was just an embryonic field. There was very little going on, even in major corporations. I found myself talking with the people who were starting these learning and development programs for supervisors, managers, technical people. I found myself talking with them about learning, and how they can design programs so that the learner learns better.

I had apparently very a unique perspective on this, because some of my clients referred me to General Electric, and as a young, starting out consultant, I was brought into GE to their Crotonville leadership development operation. I have to tell you, I didn't realize what a big deal that was. I did a program for all of their Crotonville staff that focused on how do you design learning experiences where people get more out of them and the learner is more active? GE really liked it, and they hired me to do a lot of program redesign so that their supervisory program could be more action-focused, so that their leadership programs could be more action-focused. I had written a book that they bought 10,000 copies of, so I thought I was pretty much in consultant heaven.

Then they referred me to NASA and I ended up helping NASA develop their first agency-wide leadership program. Again, trying to get the learners, the leaders and supervisors and managers, to have more of an application-focus for the things they were learning. That pretty much set my career off. I found myself, then working globally, with organizations that were primarily going through big changes. Big changes in technology. I worked with the telecoms during the breakup of the telecommunication industry. I worked with financial services, and lately, I’ve been very interested in supply chain, because I think supply chain thinking is breaking down the barriers between companies and it’s putting a lot more pressure on people who are doing the work and the people who are supervising the people doing the work to actually have a more strategic kind of mindset. So I’ve been working primarily in the transition sort of arena, and I built a company back in the 80’s and into the early 90’s that focused mostly on these new kinds of approaches to managing change that were very focused on getting learning ramped up, and much more of an action focused and fast kind of track of learning into real action.

At the time, I was also helping to develop the learning and development field. I was very active in the American Society for Training and Development and we did a couple of big studies of what it was going to take to really develop people for the future. I got invited to speak globally, and I ended up in South Africa. That became a very important part of my life and career, because South Africa, this was before the end of apartheid and ultimately during the end of apartheid, and was going through massive changes, and they needed to develop their people to be able to deal with these changes. In particular, they had a big supervisor problem because trade unions had just been legalized and the managers and supervisors didn’t know how to deal with the challenges that that was creating. Of course, you had a vast workforce that wasn’t prepared to work in corporations, and we had to get them skilled up.

So, I found myself spending a whole decade primarily in South Africa, working with people all the way from the top to the bottom, at the board level with managers, with supervisors and with the workers themselves, trying to help them become more able to deal in this very competitive environment. As part of that, I did a lot of work on redesigning the performance management systems to ensure that the relationship between the supervisor and the worker was a much more of a participative, two-way communication relationship. That has become really one of the themes of my work, is how do we really install participation and a participative leadership style in a business? It’s very important that we do that, because we can’t afford anymore to have mangers and supervisors being in more of a top-down way of thinking. They can move fast enough and the organization can’t move fast enough if every time a person on the job has to look to the boss for approval. So I’ve been finding that supervisors and managers are in a much bigger sort of challenging position of helping their employees become much more self-managing, within the framework of getting the business done.

Throughout all of this, I think fundamentally I’ve been focused on the human side of the business, helping build organizations and ways of managing that are more participative, helping develop the communication skills that are more two-way, hoping people be able to learn faster and better so that the organization can move and be agile and innovative like most of the organizations are saying they want to be. I’m very interested in everything that has to do with transformation and supporting everybody to be able to work in an environment where people take on the roles that they need to take on are empowered and are getting coaching type of support from those people that are in formal leadership roles. It’s been quite a journey. Lately, I’ve worked also with public enterprise organizations and it also applies there.

Halelly: Wow. So impressive and we feel fortunate – I think I speak for the listeners – we’re fortunate to have you share some of your experience with us today. I’ve known you I think for a few years because we belong to a couple of different professional associations and I just saw you speak about this new book recently at a conference we both spoke at. I can tell you, TalentGrowers, that Pat is so full of passion about this topic and I thought, “We want to learn from knowledgeable people, but we definitely want to learn from passionate people.” This idea of the learning 4.0 mindset that you’ve written about in this latest book, you describe that everyone needs to become an effective lifelong learner, and that there are seven practices in the book. Of course everybody should go get a copy because we can’t possibly do it justice in this 30-minute format, but I want to bring some of that value to listeners. So seven practices, and I’d love for you to just highlight the seven practices. Don’t go into all of them, in detail, but then maybe we can just think in terms of how can leaders really best use this insight in their leadership practice, both as a learner themselves, but also as a developer of others?

Pat: Just a quick way of introducing this, this whole idea of learning 4.0, is that we need a way of learning, an approach to learning and ways of thinking about learning that are appropriate to today. We live in a world where artificial intelligence is going to take over, they say, 40 percent of all the jobs that are out there. I believe this is probably going to happen. And it’s going to change a lot of the jobs that people have. So there is a massive shift going on that everybody out there knows in the world of work, and our learning processes are in some cases in the dark ages. We’re still using what I call 1.0, which is the techniques that we were born with – trial and error and imitation. Or some of us use a lot of school techniques, if we know that we’re learning. So study skills and memory skills and concentration techniques that may or may not be all that relevant. Others are using what I might call 3.0 techniques, which are more the thing, the skills and learning processes we make up when we meet real, adult problems.

But we need to go beyond this and upgrade ourselves. It’s like a big software upgrade in our brain to bring us to learning 4.0. It’s within that context of learning 4.0, which is a very imaginative way of learning. It uses all this new knowledge that we have about our brain. It uses our body and how our body actually helps us with our learning. It uses sleep. It enables us to get into learning materials that never existed before. We have a massive new learning challenge. It’s in that context that I want to introduce these seven practices. And I think for supervisors and managers, as I’m going through this list, think about yourself in a coaching relationship with somebody and imagine yourself instead of coming up with a solution to a problem or telling them what to do in learning. Imagine you’re helping them use these practices so that while you’re helping them learn something, you’re helping them learn how to learn. I think that is a big role of the supervisor and manager. First practice.

A 4.0 learner is very sensitive to calls to learn. If you’re a 4.0 learner, you’ll go throughout your day and notice, “Oh, that meeting, I can learn something in that meeting.” Or, “Here’s a person that’s just walking by my office. I think I have something to learn from that person.” You’re tuned in a very much more sensitive level to the learning opportunities around you, and I think supervisors can help the people that they support to be more tuned into the learning opportunities that happen for them everyday. We’ve got to start grabbing those.

The second one, the practice I call create future pull. We know that our brain has a massive, massive imaginative capability, and when we imagine how we want our lives to be, and we make that imagining a very whole bodied, almost immersive virtual reality experience in our brain, that that image creates a motivational pull that will help us notice things that we want, that will help us learn, that will motivate us to do things that are much more difficult than we might have thought. We have this massive imaginative power, and I think we’ve lost some of it because we have so much media around us. But we need to now start activating that, and I think another thing supervisors can say to people, “What are you imagining? What does that future look like? If you could build this skill, how would you use it? Where would you use it? How would it make your life better?” Getting people and doing this yourself, to activate that imagination, that’s the second one.

The third relates to searching. The 4.0 learner has to find the best information. We know, we are overloaded, inundated with information. It is increasing by the billions of megabytes everyday. So how do we find the information we need and the support we need for learning? We cannot do it all ourselves. The 4.0 learner is really good at searching. All of us use search engines, but there are a lot more tools that are evolving for the 4.0 learner. There are aggregators. We can go to experts. There are ways of asking questions of experts to find the best information. But unfortunately, most people settle for whatever comes to them easily, and so they end up with learning material and with learning programs and with information that isn’t the best for them. So the 4.0 learner, number three, is a really good searcher.

Number four, the 4.0 learner does something I call connect the dots, which is kind of another way of saying has plans that enable them to achieve their bigger learning goals. Maybe you want to learn a language. Maybe you want to get ready for that middle management job. All of us have some form of more complex learning goal. We’re learning everyday, just by being in the moment, but we also have these longer-term goals. So we need to be able to set ourselves up to be able to achieve those goals. It involves things like setting up your environment. It involves picking the best learning experiences. It involves changing course when you learn something that calls you off into another direction. So being able to continually connect and reconnect the learning dots and see that you’re on a path, that’s really how to think about it. It’s like you’re an adventurer going onto a big journey in the forest, and you know you have this plan, but the path isn’t there, so you kind of cut the path and the path doesn’t exactly go exactly where you wanted it to go, but it’s maybe a better path when you’re finished. You’ve got to be aware of that and connect these dots and manage that process.

The fifth is something I call mining for gold. Five and six, actually, are what most people think about when they link about learning. When you’re mining for gold, you’re sitting there in your course, or you’re in a meeting, or you’re having a conversation or you’re listening to a presentation or you’re doing a more formal thing like a case study, or you’re reading an article or reading a book. You’re in that situation. You’ve got to get the information that you need out of it, but every learning resource is structured differently. You don’t do the same thing when you’re listening to a talk as you do when you’re reading an article. You don’t do the same thing when you’re learning from experience or looking back at a past experience that you do when you’re learning in a game. So, the 4.0 learner understands how to go about pulling the gold out of the situations that they’re in, and they’re really good at it. I used to teach reading, and most people don't know how to read a book. They don’t know how to get things out of a book, so they feel intimidated rather than in control and empowered.

So mining for gold also includes how we concentrate. Knowing how to concentrate and use your brain and your body. Most people do not know how to use their physical resources. They don’t know when to stop. They don’t know how to use brakes. They don’t know how to use sleep. They don’t know when to focus their deeper learning in the day. We know about the brain, and a lot of the new brain knowledge tells us very new and dramatically different things about when we want to concentrate on good information and remember it.

The sixth practice is learning to last. This one is where it gets probably a little bit more interesting, because when you think about wanting to learn something – let’s say you have a goal to become, to learn some communication skills. Probably there are some things you want to remember, like there might be a set of steps about what to do when you’re in a performance conversation. Step one, step two, step three. So you want to remember that. That’s a memory problem. Then you probably have a skill that you want to develop, like being able to communicate in a particular way when you feel under stress and under attack. That might be a skill. That’s different. You do something different when you’re developing that skill than if you are trying to remember something. Most people don’t know how to approach skill development in a way that will build a skill that’s different from how you approach a memory problem when you want to remember something. So the 4.0 learner knows the techniques to use to get particular learning results. And they are able, therefore, to be a lot more effective, remember things better, they’re more successful in changing habits, they’re more successful in changing skills, and if you’re a supervisor, it’s important to know when you’re coaching people, whether you’re coaching something to remember or coaching a skill to develop, or maybe you’re coaching an attitude to change, that’s a whole other can of worms. So, there are different techniques there.

Then the seventh is transferring learning to life. I think this is sort of an amusing one, and yet it’s extremely difficult, because people can know how to do something, can have a skill. They can know the steps, but they don’t do it in real life. So you have to be able to transfer that learning into a real life situation. To do that, you have to be very good at two things – one is you have to know how to change a habit, because habits are one of our biggest barriers to personal change out in the real world. We have the intention. Think about diet, we have an intention to eat well, and then we get out in the real world and we can’t, our habits pull us in the same old direction. So managing habits. Then the other thing that you have to do to transfer learning to life is to be able to manage the environment, to get allies, to set up your environment so that you have a half of a chance of success in implementing things.

So those are the seven practices: hear the call, create future pull with a great imagination, search far and wide and be smart in your searching, connect the dots, mine for gold, pulling information out no matter what you’re using, learn to last and use the learning techniques that relate to the particular outcome you want, and be able to transfer your learning into life. Those apply whether you’re learning by yourself, they apply if you’re learning in a team, they apply if you’re helping somebody learn, and they apply if you’re being helped by somebody to learn. Those are my suggestions.

Halelly: And that’s so much information! You did a marvelous job of encapsulating all of it very quickly and maybe people will need to listen to this a couple of times to get all that down. Wow. I want to ask you a question. I didn’t want to interrupt you, but it came up for me. It sounded like that there’s this interesting tension between one and three? Because I hear that in the first practice –

Pat: Hear the call?

Halelly: Yeah, hear the call is this openness that allows you to kind of always be scanning for everything that’s always going on, because you never know what might present a learning opportunity. But, in number three, you have to be a curator so that you don’t become overwhelmed, and kind of know how to screen some things. You notice it, but you block it, and some of them you notice but you go towards it. I think that there are many tensions in what you’ve described that probably cause challenges for people, but that probably is one of the first ones. I certainly know it is one for me. Any tips on how to manage that tension?

Pat: You know, I think that the hear the call is more of an awareness thing. I think a lot of people go through their day on automatic. And they’re not just noticing the beauty of the trees or they’re not noticing the signals they’re getting inside of themselves when they’re in an uncomfortable or an exciting situation. Our bodies give us signals about learning, too. If we’re with certain people and we get that awful feeling our stomach, that’s a sign. It could be a sign to learn something. With that first one, I’m just saying, just be more conscious of the world inside of you and the world around you. It’s really part of this whole thing about meditation, too, is to become more aware of the flow of things around you. I think the learner of tomorrow has to get out of his or her shell, and that’s really what the call to learn is about. The search far and wide is a little bit further along. When you think you have a need, now you’re trying to find a resource, and where are you going to go to get it and what’s the best? You want to learn budgeting skills, you want to be able to budget better, so now you see this book on the shelf and you pull it out and that’s what you use. I’m saying wait, before you do that, ask somebody who knows or do a little bit of a search. So the time that you spend learning something is with the best resource you can find, not just the most convenient one. That’s really what that one is about.

Halelly: Great, thank you. That does clarify.

Pat: Good question though.

Halelly: Thank you. What do you think, given all of that, first of all it makes sense, and I think part of what people might feel is, “Oh, yeah, I knew that,” and then part of what they might feel hearing you describe all of those practices is overwhelm. Like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so much to do.” For leaders, what do you think is the biggest opportunity that they could have for maybe a big return on investment of time, or a big tick up in performance or maybe a big return in terms of team morale or whatever. Whatever kind of result you think that they could see, that is a really big opportunity, if they use these practices to unleash their teams performance?

Pat: What comes, there are so many things. Let me just highlight one that I think is really, I think there’s a very high payoff. Think about project teams, and you mentioned teams. Most project teams focus on their work as a performance problem. So we have to perform, we have to develop something, we have to complete this project and they go full boar into performing. Now here you have, let’s say, a group of six or seven people working on this project team that when they’re in a performance mode, people often get competitive. They often are afraid to talk about problems. There’s a culture of performance that can take over, that actually works against another set of goals you have on a project team. That is a goal for innovating, a goal for sharing information, a goal for fast recognition of problems. I think agile does this, but I still observe a lot of teams that approach their work more as performance and competitive situation, rather than a learning situation. That’s not an either/or.

In my book I have a whole chapter on 4.0 teams, and how you can, when you first set up your project team, how you can set up that project team as a learning team, and a very specific way, a very specific set of steps. I guarantee, if you set up your project team as a learning team – and one of the things for example, just to have the team talk about what it expects to learn in the process as a team, and just having individuals talk about what they hope to learn as an individual, given the other people that are in the team and given the nature of the project, and given the resources that the company is giving them – just having that conversation alone will open up some opportunities. Like you might tell me, “Pat, you know a lot about learning. I’m hoping I come out of this able to coach somebody better.” So, I then will probably share some information with you about that, as we’re going through our project. Because I know you’re interested in that. So just setting it up that way.

There are a lot of other things you can do, but at the heart of everything, we will not create a learning organization if people aren’t learning. And we will not create a learning organization if teams aren’t learning teams. If we can solve the problem at that level and that’s where supervisors, that’s where your listeners are, that is the heart of culture. That is where it is. People at the top can say all they want about, “Oh, we have to be agile. We have to be innovative. We have to be fast-paced,” and all of that. The next year, when they do their engagement surveys, they’re going to get the same results. Because these things cannot be mandated from the top. They can only be implemented in life, in people’s day-to-day interactions. That’s where the supervisor, the middle managers, live. I think that is the big transformation challenge, is to bring a learning mindset into everything. And you know what is really cool? Performance benefits.

Halelly: Say more. What do you mean?

Pat: Performance benefits, because you’re going to get more innovation, you’re going to solve problems quicker, you’re going to have people more motivated because people want to be in a learning environment. It’s going to become more and more true. People are leaving companies, because they’re not getting the learning opportunities. And they have the wrong thing in mind. They think a learning opportunity is a course. Yes, that’s true. But a learning opportunity is in every moment of the day. If I’m in a team where I’m learning, that is learning. So, we can’t leave learning to the professionals to develop, because we’ll never be able to learn. They’ll never be able to keep up with the learning needs, ever. We know that project teams need, of course you need to deliver the project, but we want innovation, we want fast recognition of problems. Those are all things that are facilitated by a learning culture.

Halelly: Great advise. I love it. And I hope that people go out and check out your book, because there’s obviously so much more to this than what we’re able to share here. But, this is a great framework to use, and a lens to help people recognize that learning is everybody’s job, and as you said at the beginning, to empower everyone to be in charge of their own learning and of course leaders have that extra responsibility of helping with others. Well, good.

Pat: You know, 70 percent of all learning is self-managed. I mean, this is a common model. I think actually that’s not even, I think there’s more. 70 percent is self-managed. 20 percent is managed or directed by people who are not managers – they don’t know what they’re doing, basically. They’re your friends, your experts and they’re supervisors and managers. Only a few percent is really facilitated by formal professionals.

Halelly: The 70/20/10 rule.

Pat: That’s right, exactly.

Halelly: I have it in my book, too, because it’s all about employee development on a shoestring and outside the classroom environment, because that’s where learning happens anyway.

Pat: Absolutely. The learner is the only common denominator in all of it, so the learner actually is in charge of it 100 percent of the time.

Halelly: Well, I agree with that completely. Well, Pat, before you tell folks how to stay in touch with you and before you share one really actionable specific tip, can you give us a very, very top-level tidbit about what’s really exciting and new for you nowadays?

Pat: Well, everything that I’m doing now is to launch the learning 4.0 mindset. I want people to be smart, unstoppable learners. I believe that it’s important and critical to transform this world. We have got to get ourselves ahead of technology, and we have to be smarter than technology. We’re already talking about smart technology that does deep learning, and all of that. We should be smart and smarter than technology and be doing the deep learning too so we can stay in charge of the thing we’re creating. So I’m developing a program called Boost, which will boost people’s capabilities into a 4.0 level. I’m also working with some organizations to help develop their learning and development professionals, so that they become more of a force for 4.0 learning. That’s where I’m spending my time. I’ll be talking about this and writing about it, because I believe that one of the problems we have in this world today is people are not smart enough learners. They’re easily manipulated, they’re easily sort of overwhelmed and depressed by the state of all the changes going on. We have to do something about that.

Halelly: And you are a woman on a mission, Pat, so thank you for that. I love that energy. So what’s one really specific, very actionable tip you can leave our listeners with that they can put into place right away, as soon as they finish listening, to take themselves closer to a learning 4.0 style, whether as a person or as a leader?

Pat: Well, this is pretty simple, but you know, sometimes simple is not easy to get into our schedule. It won’t take very long. I want you to think about yourself as a powerful learner. I want you to really, really see yourself as an evolving, development human being. Tonight before you go to bed, I want you to look back at your day and identify the situations that you were in that were learning opportunities. This is obviously one, hopefully. They could have been very information. Look at the situations you were in that are learning opportunities, and think about what you did. Did you ask questions or did you make statements? The questioning is more, or did you think questions or did you think resistance? So we want a learning attitude about those opportunities. It doesn’t mean we don’t express our opinion, but look at all of those. It could be a person that you met, or an article that came across your desk or a meeting you were at, or a conversation you had, but you didn’t really mine it, or a conversation with one of your kids where you didn’t really pull out a little more to learn what’s going on in their lives. Look back and make yourself more aware.

The second thing I want to also say, it relates to this, I have an app on iPhone. It’s free. And it’s called Brighter Every Day. Everyday you can get a tip like this that will help you step by step become a better learner. Unfortunately I don’t have it on Android yet, but it’s there free on the iPhone and it’s just a little thing that you can do, something new everyday that will build you in one of these areas. It won’t even tell you necessarily what the area is, but if you do it everyday, I guarantee that a year from now, you will have propelled yourself into the 4.0 learning stratosphere. That will affect your life in so many ways. Your life, your career, your confidence, your ability to help other people, your ability to work in teams. That’s what I want to see happen.

Halelly: Wonderful. And the Android is in the works? That’s going to come out on Android at some point?

Pat: It’s in the works, and I don’t know, I’ve just contacted to have that developed. It’s a real simple app. It just says, “Today do this, and here’s way.” And that’s it. It’s not a big deal.

Halelly: That’s what we need. Simple and actionable. Good. I appreciate it so much, Pat, and your time.

Pat: Can I just tell people that they can go to Learning4dot0.com?

Halelly: That was my next question, so yes please.

Pat: I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of you.

Halelly: That’s awesome. Go for it. Where can people stay in touch with you to learn more from you?

Pat: I have a website. There’s stuff on the website, book reviews. I’m trying to be, I really want to see something happen here for people to get better as learners and helpers. So, www.Learning4dot0.com. Or you can reach me at Pat@PatMcLagan.com. I just want to say, the whole idea is to have people have a better life and for us to have better organizations and I think if we do that, we’ll have a better world. I’m worried about some of the things going on in our world today, so it makes it even more important.

Halelly: Well, I think that that’s very commendable and inspiring. I think also very intellectually stimulating and I hope that you as a listener are stimulated enough to follow up in some way. Of course, take the action that Pat suggested, but go further and seek out those additional learning opportunities from her and others. But Pat, in the meantime, we really appreciate you coming on the TalentGrow Show and sharing your wisdom with the listeners. Thank you.

Pat: Thank you Halelly. And thanks, everybody, I hope there was one gem, at least, in this conversation.

Halelly: Well, there were many. And if you would like, maybe drop us a comment and let us know, what was the biggest a-ha for you? That would be a wonderful way for us to make this a double loop learning virtuous cycle. Pat, thank you again, take care.

Pat: Thanks Halelly. All the best to everybody.

Halelly: What did I tell you? A lot to consider, right? But I think it’s really fascinating. I hope you enjoyed it, TalentGrowers. I hope that you found it valuable and that you’ll check out Pat’s website and book and all the other links on the show notes page, at talentgrow.com/podcast/episode67. Of course, while you’re there, and if you haven’t yet, download my free guide called 10 Mistakes that Leaders Make and that will allow you to not make those mistakes! Also, it will put you on my mailing list for my short, actionable and fun and informal weekly newsletter. I hope that you will go and do that.

TalentGrow Show has been selected to be part of the C-Suite Radio network of high quality business podcasts, so you can check it out over there, C-SuiteRadio.com, and get lots of leadership advise and insights. That’s it for this episode. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and I hope until the next time, you make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.

Get my free guide, "10 Mistakes Leaders Make and How to Avoid Them" and receive my weekly newsletter full of actionable tips, links and ideas for taking your leadership and communication skills to the next level!

Don't forget to LEAVE A RATING/REVIEW ON iTUNES! It’s easy to do (here’s how to do it in 4 easy steps). Thank you!!

You Might Also Like These Posts:

Ep058: The 6 Roots of Healthy Leadership with Global CEO Advisor Bob Rosen

Ep052: Relentlessly Irrational – the Conditions for Great Leadership with Global Business Celebrity Jeffrey Hayzlett

Ep051: Leadership Advice from America’s Top Banker & CEO with John Allison