How to Learn?

This is a powerful idea by a famous author "the key to learn something new is to get comfortable, being uncomfortable during the process of learning."

The fear of failure and judgement is very strong in all of us. In fact fear is one of the most basic and strong emotions of humans. It must have something to do with evolution, where the species that was fearful or terried of something or someone, was able to flee from it and thus sustain its continuity. Ultimately what nature cares for is the survival of its species. But during evolutionary times it was the physical fear of being hurt which has gradually evolved into all our psychological fears of failure, judgement, loss etc.Hence fear literally incapacitates us when it grips us strongly.

Now learning something new means, one should be ready to fail, to get ridiculed and sometimes find oneself in really uncomfortable and funny situations.

I am recently going through a process where I am learning a new language of computer with children who are almost my son's age. Since this is an online class via Zoom, the students were not aware about each other in the beginning. That's when this funny incident happened. Secong day, when the course started I missed my class. My senile brain completely forgot that I have signed myself up for this herculean task. To catch-up for next day's session, I messaged a student if he could share his notes with me. He shared his notes and to further the correspondence asked "Do you also study in Lovely Professional University?' Thats when I thought of dragging down his hopes and told him "I am working in healthcare since ten years and I have a son who studies in ninth standard." He responded by thinking aloud "you are too old then, should we call you aunti?" and my response was"Yep sure...😂with a laughing emoji."

Our teacher is a well meaning person, who gives us homework and strictly reminds us to complete it during class. It has been more than twent five years since I left school, but this interaction makes me live all those feelings again where you don't want to get judged and ridicled amongst your peers. But this is the actual process of learning where all the mumbling and fumbling takes you to next stage. All you have to do is to survive this process, just hang on there for some more time and things start getting better unknowingly.