I LEARN BY WRITING

Of all the reasons that I write and love to write the primary one is this: I learn by writing. I don’t know when I discovered that I could learn by writing, perhaps it was in grade-school. Yet if so, I have no memory of that. It wasn’t until some point in my adult life that I began to consciously realize that there were times when attempting to write something I found myself actually learning new things. Amazing! How does that work? I found it incredible that sometimes when I sat down to put an idea into words, the very process of searching for words, of playing around with different sets of words and different metaphors, I would from time to time discover something new that I had not thought of or realized before. And when I discovered that, I really had my big why for writing.

Now I don’t know how many times that happened before I became conscious of it. Yet once conscious of it, I began noticing. And isn’t it funny that once you start noticing something, it’s amazing how often you see it. What had been invisible suddenly becomes visible and you can see it in many places.

For me this happened with writing. I began noticing and experiencing more and more often that while in the activity of writing, I would learn something that I had not known before. Sometimes in putting one thought with another, an understanding or conclusion would suddenly arise that enabled me to explain a concept. And not infrequently, that new understanding was something that a teacher had said, but had never made sense—until now.

Writing, as a neuro-muscular activity, whether in long-hand or on a keyboard, is a process that translates ideas into words. What I discovered was that that very process offered me a learning strategy. That is, I use writing not only to record ideas, but also to discover ideas. Today what I know about writing is this: If I can put an idea in words, if I can find those words, say those words, write those words, then they are mine! If I can’t, then do I really know something? If I don’t have the words, have I actually learned something?

This is especially true in the first two stages of writing of getting an idea and free-writing. When I’m at these stages I set my intention for the purpose of discovery and learning, not expressing. I write to see what I know and what I don’t know. I may write many pages trying to articulate some thought and if I happen upon it, I may then be able to express that thought in a single sentence. There have been times when it took three or four pages to get a thought. At that point I then delete all of those pages and keep the short sentence of seven words that encapsulates the thought. I suppose it is like mining for gold in a mountain creek. It may take many, many pans of river gravel to get a small chunk of gold.

When I’m in those stages if you were to ask, “So what are you writing?” my answer would be, “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I find it.” If you were to ask, “What is the idea that you’re

working on?” I also might answer, “I don’t know, I have not found it yet. I’ll let you know when I do.”

Now this also occurs for me in the auditory channel. It happens frequently in the Q&A (Question and Answer) period at trainings and workshops. Sometimes in the inter-play between a question and trying to provide an answer verbally, I hear myself saying things that I didn’t know that I knew. And not infrequently, I didn’t know the answer until I uttered a set of words. Amazing! But I’m not unique in this. From what I hear from other speakers, this is actually a pretty common phenomenon ... and often an experience that makes the interaction with an audience so compelling.

Now to learn in this way is not easy for some people and there’s several reasons for this. One is that to learn in this way requires that you give up the need to be right, to be sure, and to be confident in what you know. And some people just won’t do that. They have a need to be right and sure and confident. So to embrace uncertainty, to welcome ambiguity, to spin around in a not-knowing state—for them—is just too disorienting. Yet as the literature on creativity has suggested for decades, this is one of those prerequisites of creativity. New and unexpected ideas will not come to you if you don’t create an inner openness and emptiness. If you are fill up with your own knowledge, or worse, filled up with your self-importance and ego, new creative ideas have no entrance.

To use writing (as well as speaking) as a context for learning then, take a moment to let go of the need to be right, to be sure, to have things figured out. Go for a learning adventure of discovery. Play with ideas and thoughts and words and phrases and let them all get mixed up, even to the point of becoming disoriented and confused. Let them all fuse together (con-fused) so that later when you pull things apart and re-arrange them, you have a doorway to new learnings.

I wrote my first NLP book (The Spirit of NLP, 1996) from the notes which I took at my Master Practitioner course with Richard Bandler (1990). My sole purpose in writing was to learn. Each day I wrote down what I could from the presentations. When I missed things, I would ask fellow participants to fill in details that I had missed. I would even track down some of the presenters and ask them questions. In writing, I first wrote for myself and then as others discovered that I had extensive notes on the Master Prac. Training, they wanted copies. Ah, the dawning of a business! And with that I had my second reason for writing— I began writing for others as well.