There's Something Different About You
How learning can change the way you see yourself in the workplace
You change your identity when you learn something new.
Learning something new shapes your worldview, but most fundamentally, it shapes your view of yourself.
Learning how to play tennis causes you to think of yourself as a tennis player.
Learning how to cook makes you the de facto family chef.
Learning to care for a new puppy makes you an Instagram dog account owner.
But here’s the problem in our world of learning at work:
In a sales team, for example, learning how to sell doesn’t fundamentally impact our identity because we don’t see ourselves as our work.
So it follows that to help people transform at work, we must help them transform their lives.
We must help them bring their full selves into a work context.
Here’s what we should be teaching people:
how to tell stories
how to solve complex, open-ended problems
how to be resilient in the face of constant change
Those are just three examples, but learning these three things can result in people seeing themselves differently:
as a storyteller
as creative
as anti-fragile
These three identity shifts will help people in sales roles sell more, which is the real trick!
We think about learning at work all wrong.
We see them as separate things.
We force people into having split identities.
What we should be doing is integrating them.
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