How to become a liberated learner: Desire, data and drive

By Emily Kwok

Sometimes feedback can be a painful thing. As a teacher, I can be disappointed or dismayed by a student’s reaction when I try to offer some helpful advice, but then I am reminded by how I’ve felt when people have tried to help me. When I think about some of my most embarrassing moments as a student, they’ve been rooted in my naivety around understanding what it takes to get better. I think of how much I held myself back because my ego couldn’t accept that I could improve faster by embracing critical data points in addition to being commended for what I got right in the first place. I was shortsighted to believe that getting better meant I could only accept positive feedback. I equated critical observations to a verbal slap in the face; an indication that I sucked at this sport and should probably quit.

Looking back, it was an extreme opinion to hold but I imagine I’m not the only person who has felt this way. I was raised in an entity minded household so I grew up believing that it was excellence or bust. Well-exercised effort that fell short of the mark was never acknowledged as good work, so it took me a long time to respect that greatness didn’t just happen, it could (and probably should) take conscious effort. Learning to appreciate what you’re willing to put in and seeing value in the process itself was something I didn’t learn until much later in life. Someone else had to open my eyes to what I didn’t know about growth. When I think of what I’ve achieved to date in comparison to how much unexercised potential I sat on, I wonder how much I sold myself short. Today, as a mother of three and a teacher to many, I think a lot about how to help shape their growth experience so that they can embrace what the path to success really looks like.

Liberating myself to learn required me to:

1. Acknowledge I wanted to get better and become more accountable for my behavior.
2. Open myself up to learning how to learn better.
3. Find my North Star. Decide on intrinsic goals and work towards achieving them, not appeasing others.
4. Invite, welcome and receive constructive critical feedback from trusted peers or respected influencers and teachers.
5. Collect, track and study data. Was I repeating my mistakes? Where was I seeing success vs. failure?
6. Be relentless in my pursuit of greatness. I chased down any opportunity I was given to work.
7. BE A DOER, not a talker. 

I gained so much from defining and acknowledging what I was doing because it helped me figure out what I needed to focus on next. We carry around so many thoughts in our head that are fleeting and impermanent. It’s difficult to build on something that isn’t really there, and I became so much better once I felt and saw the ground under my feet. I had to embrace that icky feeling of having to see what I didn’t like about my game or performance up close and take it less as a mark against me, and reframe it as a useful piece of feedback that would help me improve. Learning isn’t a one way passive street, we can’t just absorb information and not expose ourselves to the kinks when we test it. The more accountable we become, the more we stand to grow. The more we do, the more evidence we create for ourselves and the world around us that we are evolving.