Learning something new involves learning theory and becoming able to apply.

When we seek to teach something by inviting the participants to experience it, the learning experience usually is a more intense one. The learning involves existing experience and seeks to expand on it. It means to step out of the existing habit and try something different.

This means that the existing experience can feel to be at stake. And if this experience is linked to a project we are executing, then it is the project as well as the way we are handling it that can feel as being at stake.

To be able to transform the existing experience we have to do it in an iterative process. It usually takes a lot of small steps, i.e. practice, to be able to integrate the changing experience. In such a situation the learning is also a constant transformation we are making ourselves aware of.

When it becomes daily experimenting with new ideas adding to the existing, it also means, that there can be a constant feeling of challenging the existing achievement. It can feel like putting the results at stake. Even more so, as such a process is only possible if we emotionally involved.

But when the learning becomes too challenging for the existing work, our emotional involvement may trigger the need to protects us from being more challenged and thus from learning more.

That’s a moment when it becomes useful to step back and find a way to be less emotionally involved for that step. We actually have two simple ways to do so. One way to do this is by sharing the learning and work with others who are involved in the same learning we are involved in. Another way is by applying the methods we are trying to learn to an area we are interested in but which is independent from the project we have been developing so far.

Sometimes a step back is the fastest route.