"If you can be happy now..."

For the past 23 years I have been a fan of Peter Honey and Alan Mumford's LSQ, an instrument that purports to identify preferences of learning style. It has a chequered history of independent appraisals and evaluations, both those focussed on it alone and also as part of wider studies such as the masterly work by Coffield et al. (2004). Yet despite mixed reviews, it has had personal and professional value to me. If nothing else it has helped me demonstrate to trainee managers that there is no one approach to learning that will work for all their staff. Instead they actually have to get to know people [shudder!] and understand individual abilities, motivations, values and needs.

I've taken the LSQ probably once a year during that time. Reinterpreting my scores as population percentiles I score approximately (from memory) 95% Activist, 7% Reflector, 15% Theorist and 50% Pragmatist. Conscious and sustained efforts to adjust that skew have only ever ended with the feeling of inauthenticity. It doesn't mean I am relatively bad at non-activist learning. I've found that as a polymath I seem to be least as good as many other people at these. It's simply that I have a strong preference for Activist styles of learning.

Why is this? I only identified the answer in recent years. It stems from something someone said to me 35 years ago: "If you can be happy now, you can always be happy." That simple sentence has shaped the rest of my life. I feel as though most of the time (except when writing reflective things such as this blog entry) I live in the Now. And guess what? I love it!

And guess how that has affected my learning style scores. Activists learn by doing something new. When does the new occur? Right now. What happens if I attempt to reflect on past events? I lose consciousness, to some extent, of now. And although Now is always, that now will never come again.

Do I still learn under those circumstances? Or am I drowned in a flood of sensory perception? Yes I learn. But it is by a process that is not obvious to some, nor is it linear or even necessarily rational. It is a process I have simply come to trust that happens - because I know it happens - and that as it happens, it happens well. The prow of the boat, that is my conscious perception, forges ahead and experiences. The whole of the rest of the boat sifts and absorbs and structures and learns.

So if you see someone wandering around Real Life or Second Life in a state of childlike wonder, feeling every instant and enjoying every fleeting impression of what some call reality, that might be me. Say "Hi," but don't ask me to recount something from the past! :))