I was following my dreams.
I had enrolled in a very intense horsemanship course for the summer.
This was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.
It was a 16 hour a day experience with nothing but horses, horses, horses.
I couldn’t imagine anything more fabulous.
The first day they invited a guest speaker to talk to us as a group.
As an avid learner and teacher I was very interested in what she had to say.
The speaker was an expert in adult learning. Her name is Stephanie Burns, she has a PhD and has written several books on the subject.
What I discovered that day…….changed my life.
I love learning! Or so I thought.
Don’t we all love learning? It’s why we take lessons & go to clinics & read articles on the sitting trot at 3:00AM.
Ok….. maybe that’s just me.
Dr. Burns introduced herself with a small bio about her qualifications and research on the subject.
She started out by explaining that adults learn differently than children.
The skills that got us through 4th grade social studies are different than the ones we use to learn new things as adults.
Made sense.
She went on to talk about things like comfort zones, and how actual learning takes you out of that comfort zone……..yeah, yeah, yeah………..
and then the big revelation happened…….
Here it is.
When adults learn, if they are actually learning something……they have an emotional response.
This emotional response……… is often negative.
She said, “I know you’re all here for this ‘adventure of a life time’, and I’m here to tell you…… that you might just feel like crap for the next 3 weeks.”
Take Home Message……..
Actual Learning Feels Bad
And she was right.
On a daily basis, there were people crying in the restroom, vomiting during their lessons, refusing to leave their rooms in the morning………….. it was emotional chaos.
It was an amazing example of how adults deal with, or fail to deal with their response to learning.
The good news……..
If you feel like crap you may be enough out of your comfort zone to actually be learning something.
If you’re happy and everything is hunky dory………you could be wasting an opportunity.
Bad Eventer has been feeling pretty damn bad about her riding the past couple weeks.
I suppose that’s a good sign.
<to be continued>
How interesting! This give me hope that my current crap-ness in the saddle is leading to something good. Maybe I'll make it after all…
I just had a lessons where I was told all the things I thought we were getting good at sucked. And I actually did come away from that lessons thinking I learned something so I completely agree. If you're in your comfort zone, you're not getting better.
Interesting idea. I had never thought about it that way.
i definitely believe that progress is very often *not* comfortable… tho i'm not sure feeling satisfied with the status quo is necessarily a bad sign. we need a little good to keep pushing through the tough stuff, right?
Exactly what I needed to hear, thank you for sharing!