Do you review and learn from your past actions?

In other words are you an active learner?

It has been my experience that if I make the time to review my past action, I learn from them. The review I am talking about is a written exercise to re-construct an experience that you’ve had, and then itemize what you’ve learned from it.

I can hear one of you saying ‘That is going to be a lot of work.’ Yes that is true, and if you want to grow as a person you need to do what successful people do. Successful people become successful by reviewing their past actions, so they don’t make the same mistakes again.

If you don’t like repeating your mistakes try this process;

1. Pick an experience you want to learn from.
2. Review in point form the key actions from the experience.
3. Draw some conclusions from your review.
4. Plan on how to use the conclusions in your life.

You want to become an active learner, don’t you?

When today can you take action on this?

What do you do when a bad situation occurs in your business?

Do you just put out the fire and let it go?

I hope not! I say that because if you just let it go, you will have shown that you haven’t learned from the situation. It is the learning from the situation that will make all the difference in the on-going growth of your business. Recently I came across this quote from author Brandon Mull; “Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”

So how can you learn from experiences in life?

I believe there is a 4 step process to learn effectively. The steps are as follows;

• Decide on the experience you want to learn from
• Review what happened in the experience
• Itemize the conclusions you’ve learned
• Create a plan from what you’ve learned.

When can you put this learning model into action?