An important step in your life is when you realize you don’t need teachers or schools to learn, moreover it is when you realize how you learn best. Schools, dojo’s, scouts, certify you as having completed a certain number of accomplishments. But, they do not necessarily prove that you know how to learn, how to own your learning. Being your own teacher involves 4 basic steps, and the self-awareness of your involvement in those steps, and self-awareness of specific skills that make those steps more efficient.

• Focus
• Goal setting
  • Short term
  • Mid term
  • Long term

• Owning the Material
• Self-evaluation

My short-hand for “focus” is “paying attention to what is going on around you”. There are many ways to practice focus. Meditations, kata, reading a book, listening to a lecture are some examples. Much in our society is about distracting us and developing mental diffusion, multi-tasking is rather like being nibbled to death by ducks – it doesn’t really hurt along the way but in the end you are dead. So teaching yourself to learn involves intentionally doing things that require you to develop an attention span and focus. We admire observant people, or rather the stories of observant people, like Sherlock Holmes, Colombo, Albert Einstein, Shakyamuni for examples. Yet, to admire them isn’t enough — how do we develop or own attention to detail?

Goal setting: it is important to break time into boxes; I suggest, 4 boxes, less than a year, 1-5 years, and 5–10years, and someday. One of the reasons it is important is so that you can figure out which things are really important, or, said differently, so that you can focus your attention. If you say, “I want to earn a college degree”. Then obviously parts of that goal overlap several time frames. You can’t get into college until you finish high school, you can’t finish high school till you complete biology, and you can’t complete biology until you pass this test. Waiting for others to give you goals is letting others live your life. Don’t go to the grave having not lived, spit in death’s eye by living a full life. Set goals for yourself that will define yourself for yourself, not just certify yourself for others. 3 rules for goal setting, 1) write them down, 2) break them into pieces, and 3) put the pieces in the right boxes.

Owning the material: this is several skills twined together. One is positive self-talk. It is easy to be overwhelmed when you start to learn something new particularly as you get older. If you say, “I can’t do this, I’m a big dummy” the first time you encounter a challenge you will eventually live your life avoiding challenges, avoiding fear, and you will be a big dummy. If instead you say the truth: “I’m afraid of looking like a newbie” or, “This is really hard.” It is possible to turn the truth into positive self talk “I’m afraid of looking like a fool – but, everybody looked goofy when they started – so, I’m in good company.” Or; “This is hard – I love the challenge – I’m going to just have to work harder than hard.” Owning the material is also about making associations, sometimes these associations are between ideas – for example when I say Chocolate (the movie) is Mary Poppins for adults, I own the material. Sometimes, it is physical, squatting and lunging to pick-up a ground ball and squatting and lunging exercise are the same motion; hence, I own the motion and the way to get better at it. Owning the material is taking it and saying it or doing it in our own way and this is how we take it from outside us to inside of us.

Self-evaluation: sometimes positive self talk is a rationalization for doing a bullshit job, for being lazy. Sometimes, however, we are our own worst critiques and we never even get started because we set impossible goals. Part of self-evaluation is setting our goals in such a way so that we can test ourselves along the way. Part of self-evaluation is testing whether we got it right when we took it from the outside and put it inside – because sometimes we screw that process up. If you don’t test yourself, whether that is traveling around and climbing different boulders, or going to tournaments and sparring or whatever, how can you mark progress on your goals? If your skills won’t stand real world tests you have not learned them. Too, if you don’t test yourself how do you know when you taught yourself wrong?

To be successful at this you have to be aware of yourself. What techniques work best for getting stuff into your long term memory? What tricks have you developed for owning the material and for testing whether you really do own it? The tests will tell you, too, if you got it right when you owned it or if you need to start over. Obviously if you test early and often you will waste less time with re-learning stuff you taught yourself wrong. Although I can write about these skills in several sentences they are perhaps the most important and difficult to master – what does it mean to be self-self-aware, that is, to watch yourself learning so that next time it is easier?Once you realize these skills for being your own teacher you will recognize the value that teachers do have. Sometimes that value is negative, for example, they are a doofus and you learn by doing the opposite of what they say and do. Sometimes you will simply meet very wise and mature people and they will have a lot to offer you if you are ready to take it. Being ready to take it, to not waste their time, is a lot of what I mean by being your own teacher. A good teacher saves you time, i.e. helps you complete your goals quicker so that you have time to set new goals and do it all again.