Here’s to new learning and knowledge in 2014!

End of year holidays – a time to rest and renew our energy for new beginnings

The end of year holidays and the beginning of the New Year are a good opportunity to rest and renew our energy for whatever our chosen direction in life!

They’ve worked their usual magic with me and my enthusiasm for gaining new knowledge has been especially stimulated by two recent BBC productions that I caught through the combined powers of my iPAD (my new toy earlier in 2013) and BBC iPlayer.

Kirsty Young’s “Desert Island Discs” guest Ray Mears on the 5th January was a real inspiration.  He seems to have such a clear and apparently simple direction in life in his career as a ‘woodsman’.  The presenter and no doubt many listeners like myself were delighted by his phrase: “deassimilate from the cyber hive”. (We’ll ignore the fact that that’s how I heard the recording!).

Being a student of or for life?

I also appreciated Ray Mears’ approach as a “student of life”: how he seeks out the very best people to learn from about different aspects of surviving in the wild; his philosophy of deconstructing knowledge to understand all of its elements before putting it together again; and his enthusiastic perseverance in order to thoroughly understand a new area.

Learning from dolphins

I was also fascinated by the BBC’s two-part “Dolphins – Spy in the Pod“, the second part of which was on the 9th January.  The team used cameras hidden in mechanical squids, dolphins, turtles and puffer fish to film and learn about aspects of dolphin behaviour.  Some of the ways in which dolphins learn were especially interesting:

• Young male bottle-nosed dolphins stay with their mothers, in an otherwise all female pod for about two years during which they are learning about different aspects of life all of the time.
• When they are old enough to leave, they seek out a male pod to join, bringing their knowledge with them, and gaining new knowledge from their new companions.

It was evident from watching the programme that dolphins have great curiosity and a diverse way of communicating with each other by sound, touch and behavioural or body language.

Learning from each other

Learning from others is of course very powerful.  I’m looking forward to doing so in a seven-day NLP practitioners’ course that I’ll be attending in March, and also to learning about something called ‘Emergenetics‘ that I first heard about in December.  I want to explore the range of tools available to help us understand ourselves and each other – something that I’ll be writing about in the second book in my series of “The Effective Team’s” workbooks. (The first was on Change Management, this one will be on High Performance teams.)

I’m also looking forward to continuing my work on enhancing team effectiveness with my associates and clients in 2014.  Interacting with associates and clients is a great way to develop and shape new ideas – both for creating new programmes of work, and for stimulating the rich learning that takes place during workshops and other interventions.

Continuous professional development (CPD) and social media

Nor will I be ‘deassimilating from the cyber hive”!  Although it is good to take a break from it now and then: my idea for this blog came whilst I was on a four-hour walk on a crisp sunny morning in Cambridgeshire.  However, the increasing trend to make social media content rich is certainly a stimulant for one curiosity and one I’ll be looking to support as I gain more knowledge in 2014.

I often tweet (@ecgoodman) about what I’m hearing during APM (Association for Project Management), One Nucleus, Cambridge Network and CILIP events.  And what I learn also sometimes finds its way into my blogs and postings on Facebook, LinkedIn and, more recently, Google+ (I’m currently disentangling my duplicate accounts so make sure you access the right one if interested).

So, here’s to new learning and knowledge in 2014.  What areas of knowledge will you be learning about?

Note

Elisabeth Goodman is the Owner and Principal Consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, a consultancy that helps business teams to enhance their effectiveness for greater productivity and improved team morale (and using coaching as well as training, mentoring and consulting).  Elisabeth has 25+ years’ experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry where she has held line management and internal training and consultancy roles supporting Information Management and other business teams on a global basis.  Elisabeth is accredited in Change Management, in MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) and in Lean Sigma, is a member of CILIP (Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals), and APM (Association for Project Management) and a registered Growth Coach and trainer with the GrowthAccelerator programme.