Self-paced courses and
self-learning:
are they the same?

And what if we get both
of these wrong?

Hey Daring Learners,

My work is all about helping people learn better. I know people are struggling.

If you find it hard to allocate enough time to learn online, I wrote this for you. ⬇️

*****
The message we get from online courses is simple & straightforward:“You can do this yourself”

The feedback we get from reality is different: “You can’t do this yourself.”

On one hand, learning with an online course is convenient. You don’t need to go anywhere or sit in traffic. On the other hand, it’s ineffective because you lack self-discipline.

In this email, I’ll do my best to explain how learning works, and why you shouldn’t blame yourself. Your reactions are normal.

You might be taking on too much responsibility that’s not yours, and believe me, you’re absolutely capable of learning.

As humans, we have an incredible learning potential, and a strong, innate ability to learn.

In psychology textbooks, learning is commonly understood as the long-term change in mental representations and behavior as a result of experience. (Omrod, J. E. Human Learning (Pearson, 2012).

To put it simply, to learn is to change your behavior. If behavior didn’t change, no learning happened.

Here are a few examples:

1.People who learn how to get to native-like fluency with me, change their speaking behaviors.

2.People who learn to eat healthy, change their eating behaviors.

3.When I workout, I change my range of motion, my posture, and my metabolism. All my organs behave differently as a result of consistent physical training.

These changes happen as a result of personal experience.

You can’t build muscle by watching athletes perform, i.e. by consuming videos of someone else’s experience. You won’t learn to speak better English by listening to other people speak correct English on YouTube. You can’t get rich by reading successful stories of rich people.

This seems logical, but online courses sell exactly the opposite of what’s logical. They sell you other people’s experiences.

Experience is necessary to learn, and it must be your personal experience.

Online courses suggest you buy 20 years of someone else’s experience packaged in 200 pages of a book or 20 short video lessons. Interacting with such content is entertainment. It satisfies your curiosity. It’s anything but learning.

Why?

Because watching or reading something does not create a change in behavior. These activities might inspire you to take action, but changing your behavior requires more than taking action when you feel motivated. To change something, you need to take action again and again, especially when you’re least motivated. Change requires a lot of repetition and occurs as the result of focused, deliberate practice.

Online courses give you access to information. However, learning is more than information or a temporary use of information. Rather, learning changes mental representations that manifest themselves in behavioral changes.

Let’s go back to the definition of learning.

It results from experience. How do we get experience? By interacting with the environment. Why do we interact with it? To adapt our personal needs to the external world.

The whole idea of learning “by myself”, which many people associate with “learning alone” collapses right here.

We are not supposed to learn alone because we can’t get experience without interacting with other people and the external world.

Online course creators know this. They know we need interaction with other people, and they give it to us in surplus for weeks on end until we click “buy.” Influencers shower you with attention, answer your questions, release useful videos, show up in Instagram stories, reply to your comments for as long as the marketing campaign is scheduled for.

And you fall for it. We all do. We think we’re going to get help here.

We need HELP from other people.

When we buy an online course, we get a digital product, not help. We're expected to know what to do with it, and how to use it. It’s jot terrible, it’s not bad. It’s just something to be aware of.

The reasons we need help are selfish, yet healthy. We have personal needs. We take from the external world to give to ourselves. We also adapt our needs to belong with the external world.

For example, the world today needs you to learn technology faster. The career you want requires better English skills. The house you want requires higher income. The girl you want demands better communication skills and better physical health.

From an evolutionary perspective, living beings are born into a world in which they are continuously expected to accomplish tasks (e.g., getting food, avoiding threats, mating) to survive as individuals and as species. (Kidd, C. & Hayden, B. Y. The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity (2015). The world is constantly asking us to adapt. That’s why we keep learning and looking for people who can help us adapt faster.


And of course, we choose online courses:

• We like the people who sell them and want to be associated with them
• We see them as an opportunity to adapt to new requirements fast and thus meet our personal needs

This is part 1.
I will share Part 2 in the next email.

I didn’t plan to write this much, but I found the missing puzzle pieces (quite unexpectedly) that are helping me to put my ideas into words. I need people who don’t have the experience that I have to understand what I mean when I speak about learning.

I’d love to hear back from you. Let me know if what you just read makes sense to you.

Simply reply to this email. I read all your replies.

I will speak to you soon,
Natalia

I know that someone here needs this training. It's not an online course. This program works your learning skills so you can apply them to improving any areas of your life.

And of course, your spontaneous speaking skills in English improve immensely!

By the way!

Now you can get the replays of the 2023 cohort and practice on your own time with individual feedback.


I recommend you use this opportunity if you can't join the LIVE training.

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