Stuck in a Learning Cycle?
First of all, let me explain what I mean by the learning trap.
I'm talking about a cycle that we get stuck in usually by accident. A cycle of learning and personal development. Perhaps there are courses we think we need to go on before we can do X, Y, and Z. Or maybe we need to listen to the latest podcasts by whoever is the leader in your industry. Some of us might believe we have to join masterminds, or we need to read more books. However you choose to develop and learn might be one or all of these things.
We do these things, to move forward and to move our business forward. I myself like to dip my toe in and out of all of these things at different times and have done different elements of these in my business journey. However, the most important thing I'm going to share with you is that when we are stuck in a learning trap, doing these things, we think we're getting somewhere but in reality, we're not.
What's normally happening here is we're masking other issues going on and keeping ourselves busy believing that we're doing something to move our business forward, rather than actually taking a minute to step back and ask ourselves what is going on here. Why am I choosing to do this? What is the intention behind this? How does this feed into the bigger purpose and vision of my business?
What tends to happen is get stuck in this cycle of the learning trap, and we go round and round and round, perhaps signing up for more classes, signing up for more freebies and signing up to go and do things that will get us more certificates or qualifications.
We find ourselves going from one to the other to the other but in reality, all we're doing is kidding ourselves that we're doing something that moves our business forward. Right. Don't get me wrong, there is an absolute need at certain times when we have a knowledge gap, to go and join masterminds and programs and courses and listen to podcasts to open our perspective and stretch our thinking. Sometimes we really do need to work on our personal development.
However, sometimes that is mixed up and can be our saboteur in stealth mode. A voice in our head is saying, “you need to do that to enable you to do this. You can't do that unless you listen to this. If you're not listening to that podcast all the time you're going to be lacking in knowledge.” We need to be careful of the connotation behind what we tell ourselves, and what we really need.
Are You Doing Anything With Your Collected Knowledge?
The biggest thing we tend to do is collect knowledge and information, but do nothing with it.
We're doing all these courses and programmes, and sometimes we might even be signing up for things and not completing them. I can give you information till it's coming out of your ears, but until you do something with it there's not going to be any transformation, and therefore, no impact on your business. Today, I want to share with you three times when I found myself stuck in the learning cycle and how I got myself out of them. Hopefully, this will help you identify if this is something that you have found yourself in, or looking back maybe you will identify that actually, you were also stuck in a learning trap at one time. It’s time to help you spot the triggers to enable you to get yourself out of that rut and back into taking actual actions because that is what's actually going to make the difference.
These occasions I'm going to share happened at very, very different and very distinct times during my business journey. They played out in different ways, but they can happen at any point and it is an underlying belief that triggers them. A belief you need to be aware of.
Trying to Plug the Unfulfillment Gap
The first time I got stuck in the learning cycle was when I was searching for that thing, the passion for figuring out what I wanted to. This happened a number of years ago before I started my own business. I was still very much in the depths of corporate unhappiness, feeling unfulfilled and constantly looking for an exit strategy. I was in crisis, asking myself questions like, what do I actually want to do with my life? I've been in this career for 15 years feeling really unfulfilled and I couldn’t see a way out. So the first time that I found myself in the learning trap, I had no idea I was in one, I didn't even know what I was doing.
I always knew I wanted a business but was never really sure what I wanted to do. I felt very lost in what I was doing but I didn't know what my passion was. I was what you would call a seeker, someone who was constantly looking for that something, I was searching so hard to find my passion I didn’t realise I was completely stuck in that masculine energy of “if I just do everything, something surely will stick, right”? I was so desperate to find out what really made me tick but the only place I was getting was overwhelmed, burnt out, and frustrated.
At the time I was in my corporate job which was incredibly and I was also looking after a very, very small child at that point and working more than full-time hours. I was reading any kind of business development book, and listening to any self-development podcast, looking for any kind of business advice that I could get my hands on. Every spare minute of the day, whether it was driving to work, on my lunch break, or walking to the next meeting, I was just absorbing stuff all the time. I was constantly signing up for programmes, free downloads, and searching for people that I could go and work alongside. I wanted to join their groups and join their networks in the hope that something could just land in my head and I would finally find my place in the world.
Whilst I felt like I was doing something because I was physically doing something, my mind was 1000 miles an hour constantly What about this? What about that? In reality, I was genuinely getting nowhere.
I gathered a lot of knowledge during that time, which is a positive. However, I wasn't doing anything with that knowledge. I was no further forward. I genuinely got so sick of asking myself what my passion was, or what I was good at, that it was time to take some form of real action. I felt incredibly frustrated, and incredibly overwhelmed. That's what led me to hire my first coach. I went off to a networking event in Newcastle, which is about 45 minutes from where I live, I had never before come across it, but I thought I'm just going to go. At that time, having a business coach or career coach or any kind of coach wasn't really the done thing where I lived and most definitely wasn't the done thing around my circle of friends or my family.
I came across it online, and I was like I just need somebody that's going to help me get out of my own head. I didn't know I needed a coach, I would never have articulated it probably in that term. But I remember driving to this networking event with my friend who I had dragged along and who probably didn't want to go. I was saying I just need someone to help me, I need someone who is going to just stop all this worrying and frustration and help me get clarity.
I walked into this networking event, and literally, the first person that introduced themselves to me was a coach, a career coach, a business coach, a life coach, actually, I’m not sure what they termed themselves as at that time but I literally signed straight up. I went along to a session and they were literally just like, stop! They put a ban on me for a few weeks of doing any podcast listening, or reading. They told me to stop because what it was doing was driving me crazy. It was removing any kind of creative space to think in my mind.
So I listened and I stopped doing any of that stuff. We started to do some inner work and discover what it was that I actually wanted to do rather than trying to fit into a box that someone else had created. Sometimes, we think we've got to do what's already available out there especially when you come from the generation that I do. When I was at school you would go along to your careers events or your careers teacher and there would be a few boxes that you had to pick from. I appreciate it’s probably not like that now. Now, we live in a generation where there are no back boundaries, a very different era but it also brings its own challenges. When I was at school you picked your career and you fit into that box and you definitely didn’t go outside that box. The problem was, none of those boxes felt really good to me.
I always felt like I was not really destined to be in those boxes. I just kind of resigned myself to feeling unfulfilled forever. Yes, I've had a successful corporate job, but I didn’t really want it. The coaching was the intervention that I absolutely needed. It have me a different perspective and got me out of my own head, allowing me to do the inner work and find the self-reflection I needed. It helped me to become aware that there were other opportunities, there were other choices. I realised whilst I was constantly in that learning trap, I was never going to identify those opportunities.
I wasn't open to any other way than what I could find on the internet. The Coaching at that time did exactly what I needed it to do, to discover what it was that I wanted. When you've worked in corporate for a long time, you are so programmed to climb the corporate ladder, jobs are already created for you, the boxes have already been put in place. You’re taught to find one you want and get in it.
By hiring a coach, my mind was open to possibilities and options. I could see the self-restricted path that I was on, and I was constantly learning and looking for the Golden Nugget to save me when in reality I just needed to stop it all and get a different perspective. I would advise anyone stuck in this learning trap to just stop, and get a different perspective. Maybe go speak to a coach, mentor a colleague or peer or, whomever, but just get somebody else's perspective. Create some space and time to reflect and to think and believe there's another way, you don’t have to fit in other people's boxes.
2. The Limiting Belief Learning Trap
The second time I found myself in this situation, I did have a business but it was in the very, very early days and I wasn't yet full-time in my business. I still had one foot in each boat which is never an easy balance to make work anyway. This learning trap came about due to a limiting belief of fear, because I couldn't spend as much time working on my business as I would have liked. I constantly felt like I was being left behind and this literally created panic.
I had finally found what I was passionate about, I had never felt so aligned with anything that I've ever done in my life but now I had. I was really keen to create this amazing business that I'd had a vision for, for so long. However, I also had a very young child and a very demanding job at that time that required me to work way more than full time. To make matters worse, I was also traveling. I was getting up at 5am to work on my business before then getting my daughter ready, and getting to work. I was doing the normal day-to-day and then the first lockdown hit.
Suddenly, everything got so much harder.
My energy and what I really wanted to do was put on the back burner because life just got a little crazy, as it did for everybody at that time. However at this point, because I was constantly thinking that I was running out of time, and comparing myself to other people and their businesses I panicked and joined expensive coaching programmes. I became part of masterminds, and I signed up for an intensive self-study program, all of which I had to do between 5am and 7am or once I'd finished work at god knows what time.
I was putting my child to bed and then doing some work which meant starting again at 9:30pm at night. Before I knew it, I was back in that learning cycle, believing all I needed to do was complete all these programs and gain all this knowledge. Underneath all of this was that fear of comparison, that fear of running out of time when in reality, all I needed to do was stop comparing myself to others. I needed to get intentional about what I was doing and what I wanted to create and I needed to create the life that allowed me to work on my business in the right amount of time.
I needed to accept the time I had and use that time wisely. I needed to do things right so I finished working with all the groups and all the programmes and all the coaches again, I just stopped. I reassessed the situation and made an intentional shift to create my business, because whilst I was thinking I was taking all this action, what I was really doing was drowning in information. I knew this was my default reaction when I felt a little bit out of control. I would kill myself with information and detail. However, I realised I didn't need any more information, I needed to implement the information I already knew.
I needed to become really intentional about what I was doing. So, I cleared my mind and started building small intentional actionable steps into my time that created boundaries. I started to create my business in a way that felt healthy and in a way that felt good. Now, I was actually taking action, rather than thinking to do that I needed to join all these group programmes, coaching groups, and masterminds. I am still actively part of all these things right now, continuously in some elements across my business because it's so powerful, but it needs to be done with intention and purpose and with the knowledge of how to fit it into building your business and moving it forward. Not a scattergun effect.
When you're being intentional, and have told yourself you want to go and join a powerful mastermind and be surrounded and inspired by incredible women, that's different to having a scattergun approach.
3. Knowing Who You Want To Work With
During the very early days, I was not 100% Sure who I wanted to work with. I was going backwards and forwards with a couple of ideal clients and niches. I felt like I should be working with certain types of clients due to my previous knowledge, but I didn't know if I really wanted to.
I didn't really want to support corporates, I wanted to support the small, medium businesses, but there was this constant pull of feeling like I had to work with corporates because that was my background. It would of course, be easier to fit in. So there was lots of pushing and pulling between these two mindsets. I ended up taking on projects that I wasn't sure about and again, went into the learning trap of looking externally for the information and the answers. I joined a group program and started researching all the different options but I stayed in learning trap for a much, much shorter period of time, because I was no able to identify it.
I knew what was going on and I just stopped everything and gave myself some time off. I realised my vision and what I was doing were not aligned which meant I was constantly seeking ways in which I could create my vision into my reality. However, the methods I was using to do that weren't really aligned with the vision. I kind of knew it didn't feel right. I was attracting clients but I needed to take a step back.
I needed to ask myself,what is it that I really, really want to do? I decided I didn’t have to have this all figured out right away. I took that pressure off and came back with a clearer mind. I asked myself what do I really need to help me through this? Was it the support of a network around me for supporters? Was it a one-on-one mentor? Did I need to learn something? Was there a knowledge gap? I allowed myself to reflect and I ended up hiring a one-on-one coach.
Obviously, as a coach myself, I'm a huge believer in the support and mentorship that coaching, yields, but it has to be the right kind of support and at the right kind of time in your business.
At that time for me, it was by far the best thing that I could have done. I was only really early on in my business and it was a heavy investment for me at that time. It was the most I've ever invested in a coach and I was only a few months into my business but I knew I would be stuck in that trap and lack of clarity if I didn't get that independent perspective I needed at the time.
Making that decision absolutely developed and catapulted my business because it allowed me to see how I could bring my vision into my reality. This is what I do with my clients now, because we can't always do it for ourselves. Sometimes we need that independent perspective, right?
If you read this, and it sounds like you, you've been reading all the books, you've listened to all the podcasts, you do the programmes, watch the videos and just feel so overwhelmed with it all, I want to say I hear you loud and bloody clear. It’s time to just stop for a minute. Take breath, right? Give yourself time to actually think rather than running from one thing to the other.
Just give yourself some space whether that's time off social media, time off listening to all the podcasts, time off reading books, and time out from everything you signed up for. Instead, ask yourself what is it that you really need right now. What do you need right now to move your business forward? If you could do or have one thing that would make all the difference, what would it be?
It might be it may be time to get an independent perspective. It might be time to speak to somebody else, a coach, a mentor or, someone else in your network. Staying stuck in the learning trap can stop you progressing and actually taking action in your business. Each time I've experienced this situation, there has always been an underlying issue I just wasn't ready for or wasn't aware of. I didn't know what I needed to overcome it. It was like that next level I needed to work on but I wasn't really sure what I needed to work on. To know, you need to actually do some inner work.
You need to be able to explore and think about what is it you want to create. It might be about having a difficult conversation with people, your employee, or your partner, to say this isn't actually what I want anymore. It might be the fear that if you pick one thing, that's it, you're stuck with it. It might be the fear of fear and it might be a fear of judgment. It might be a fear of all kinds of things, right? There's a lot of things at play, infact, I could talk all day about it, but I just hope by sharing my experiences in some way that's helped you.
Come and hang out with me on LinkedIn, please say Hi! I would love to hear from you!