I, along with many colleagues in the profession often encourage coaching clients to start a learning diary. There is plenty of evidence out there that if we spend a few minutes every day sitting down reflecting on what has happened to us, trying to make sense of it and deciding how that is going to affect our future actions then we will become more effective in our lives generally. Strangely enough most clients do not actually do this, despite our exhortations, even though they will happily act on advice from other people on saving for a pension or what qualifications to study for next.

Then I started reflecting on what I had learned at school, that 2+2 = 4, that the French for The Sun is Le Soleil, that acids turn litmus paper red and lots of other facts. I do not recall ever once, in that alleged hotbed of learning, being asked to keep a learning diary. Yet there I was surrounded by teachers who, in principle, are familiar with the works of Piaget and Kolb yet don’t seem to want to pass that information on to the students. (There is a separate discussion about whether the teachers really understood these learning theories, or whether they regarded them purely as theory with no practical value!Perhaps that is the paradigm repeating itself?)

I recall someone asking me shortly after I completed my Masters degree what was the most important thing that I learned. Well, that masters degree was in change management and I learned loads and loads of change management theory but I remain convinced that the single most important thing I learned in two years was that when handling change one must start where one is. This very practical piece of advice came from trying to use the various management theories in my work as a change leader and realising that none of them actually recognise that the real world was not as pure as the theoretical world in which they had been formulated.

I recall a colleague on that masters course who was daunted by the reading list; he needed to sit down with one of the tutors and be taught that it was not necessary to read a text book from cover to cover, but that it was okay to work from the contents list and the first few paragraphs of each chapter to identify those parts of the book that might be particularly relevant. He, nor indeed I, had not been taught this at school and certainly for me the lack of instruction in learning how to learn led to a major disconnect when I went from the structured instructional environment of a grammar school to the unstructured find-your-own way environment at the University with the results that I failed my first year and subsequently the degree. My grammar school thought that all I needed to learn was a load of facts, not how to learn.

So to go back to school. My question to you is what do you think is the most important thing for young people to learn at school? You will no doubt have your own answer, mine is that every young person needs to learn how to learn and to acquire the habit of learning

In much of our lives we acquire learning passively and collect habits good and bad without really thinking about how those habits have developed. But how would it be if Boeing designed an aeroplane passively, or an engineer designed a bridge passively? No, they actively learn about how to be more effective at designing aeroplanes and bridges by studying the successes and failures of themselves and others.

So let’s apply this discipline more widely in our lives. Let’s take five or 10 min at the end of every day to reflect upon what happens to us that day, perhaps the most significant incidents or the unusual ones. Write it down and write down what actually happened and how you felt abou;t it think about how it was the same as or different from your previous experiences and feelings and write that down; work out how it fits with your current understanding of the world (or not) and whether it might be necessary to change your opinion or understanding in order to fit this real new experience into your world; then finally work out some way of testing this new world map and using this new knowledge

Your learning diary and the habit of learning may well turn out to be the most valuable 10 minutes you spend every day of your life. Actively acquire the habit of learning. Do let me know how you find your experience of writing a learning diary.