CHALLENGE SEVEN

Adopting the Radical Learning Stance

Shifting Evolutionary Gears

A From-To Prologue

From waiting for life to shove you in the right direction to choosing your direction before the shove arrives
From the fixed mindset (“I’m just not good at this”) to the radical learning stance (“I haven’t learned this yet — and I’m going to”)
From criticizing yourself for not being a better communicator to recognizing that no one criticizes a baby for weighing five pounds
From hiding your mistakes to embracing them as the raw material of learning
From thinking your habits are the enemy to realizing they are the instrument
From imagining that one good conversation proves you’ve arrived to understanding that ten thousand conversations are the journey
From hoping things will work out to building the skills that make things work out
From the new-at-life person you have been to the more deeply developing person you are becoming

7.1 Why This Chapter Exists

If you have been working through the Challenges in this workbook, you have been doing something both practical and courageous. You’ve been learning to listen more carefully, to explain your conversational intentions, to express yourself more completely, to translate complaints into requests, to ask more open-ended questions, and to express more appreciation. Each of these is a genuine skill, and each one takes real effort to develop.

I hope you’ve had some successes. I also hope you’ve had some failures — because if you haven’t failed at anything, you probably haven’t been stretching far enough.

Now I want to talk to you about something that most books on communication don’t address — and that most books on learning address too cheerfully. I want to talk about why continuous learning is so difficult, why it matters anyway, and what it actually takes to keep going. Not for a week. For a lifetime.

I’m going to be more direct in this chapter than in the ones that came before, because the topic demands it. The earlier Challenges gave you skills. This one asks you to decide what kind of learner — and what kind of person — you intend to be.

Along the way, I’m going to share with you something that changed my own understanding of what learning is and how it works — something about the design of your own brain that I believe most people have never been told. It is, in a word, good news. But it is good news of the adult variety: complex, demanding, and deeply hopeful.

7.2 The Evolutionary Situation: Why Growth Doesn’t Come Naturally

Across the vast range of the tree of life, living creatures generally do not choose to grow. They are pushed into it by force of circumstances. Life is conservative in that way. It doesn’t know which particular challenges any individual creature will meet, or which skills that creature will need, so it allows all critters to try last-minute learning. Those with a particular knack for the task at hand survive, and many pass that knack on to their offspring. Those without any such knack don’t make it. It’s not pretty.

That is the default setting: wait for the crisis, then scramble. It has worked well enough, over billions of years, to produce the astonishing diversity of life on this planet. But it works at enormous cost — the cost of all the creatures who didn’t make it, who encountered the challenge five minutes before they were ready for it.

Human beings changed the equation. By developing culture, language, and the ability to learn from each other’s experience, we made it possible to prepare for challenges before they arrived. We could watch someone else get bitten by a snake and learn to avoid that snake without getting bitten ourselves. We could listen to an elder describe a drought and start storing water before the rain stopped.

In human beings — and perhaps in other highly intelligent fellow creatures of ours — evolution itself appears to be evolving. Learning during the lifetime of a single organism has become a major feature in the development of life. It is a much more efficient use of life’s resources than simply destroying the momentarily unprepared.

This is not a small shift. This is a change in how life itself operates. And it places a new kind of responsibility on each of us.

Why? Because even though we can learn before the crisis arrives, our deep biological programming, with its save-your-calories bias, still nudges us toward waiting. Most of the time, we don’t learn new skills until we absolutely have to. We wait until the marriage is in trouble before we learn to listen. We wait until we’ve been fired before we learn to handle conflict. We wait until we’ve lost a friend before we learn to express appreciation.

The question this chapter poses is: Can you override that ancient programming? Can you choose to learn before the emergency?

That choice is what I am going to call the radical learning stance. And to explain what I mean by that term, I need to tell you about two debts — one to a psychologist, and one to biology itself.

7.3 What Radical Learning Owes to Carol Dweck

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has spent decades studying a deceptively simple question: Why do some people keep developing throughout their lives while others plateau early and stay stuck? Her answer — the distinction between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset — has transformed how millions of people think about learning and personal change. It is one of the great contributions to popular psychology in our time.

People with a fixed mindset believe that their basic qualities — intelligence, personality, character — are carved in stone. Every situation becomes a test: Am I smart enough? Am I good enough? Every mistake feels like a verdict.

People with a growth mindset believe that their qualities can be developed through dedication and effort. Difficulties are not evidence of failure; they are the substance of learning. Mistakes are not verdicts; they are information.

You may remember the “born to learn” idea from the Introduction to this workbook: you were born with a brain magnificently wired for language but knowing zero words, wired for communication but knowing zero communication skills beyond crying out for attention and help. Everything you know about talking and listening, you learned. Since you learned it, you can learn to do it differently. Professor Dweck’s research gives us the science behind that empowering idea.

Professor Dweck took some of the most challenging insights explored by psychotherapy and humanistic psychology — insights about human flexibility, about the difference between being judged and being helped, about the possibility of deep personal change — and successfully translated them into a language that vastly more people could understand and use. She kept the narrative accessible and vivid, and her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, has rightly become a modern classic. I warmly recommend it.

But in this workbook, I am speaking to a somewhat different audience, and from a somewhat different place. Professor Dweck’s examples often involve students and athletes — people learning math or tennis or basketball. The stakes in those arenas are real, but they are bounded. You can fail a math test and take it again next semester. You can lose a tennis match and play again next week.

The stakes I am concerned with are less bounded. People get themselves into profound difficulties by not knowing how to talk or how to listen to each other. Marriages end. Friendships dissolve. Children grow up feeling unheard. Workplaces become places of chronic, low-grade emotional suffering. And on the other side of the ledger, people miss out on beautiful possibilities — the closeness they could have experienced, the collaborations that could have flourished, the requests they never learned to make — by not having developed the skills that would have opened those doors.

To honor the seriousness of these life issues, in this workbook I am going to call the growth mindset by a different name: radical learning. Not because Professor Dweck’s term is inadequate — it isn’t — but because “growth mindset” has become so familiar that many people file it away without feeling its force. And because the word radical captures something that “growth” does not.

“Radical” comes from the Latin word radix, meaning root. Radical learning is root-level learning. It goes to the foundations of how you relate to other people and how you understand yourself. And it is radical in the everyday sense too: it is a genuine departure from the way most human beings — and most living creatures — have operated for a very long time. Choosing to develop yourself before you are forced to is not the normal thing, even though the capacities are there, waiting to be put used.

But why the application gap? And what makes it possible to choose learning at all? To answer those questions, I need to tell you about the second debt — the one that radical learning owes to biology.

7.4 The Astonishing Truth About Your Brain’s Habit System

Here is something that most books on personal change don’t tell you, and it changes everything.

Your brain has an extraordinarily powerful system for forming habits. You already know this, because you use it every day. Walking, chewing, breathing, balancing, reaching for a cup, tying your shoes, reading these words — you formed habits about all of these things a long time ago, and they work beautifully for you. You don’t have to think about how to walk every time you stand up. The habit system handles it, freeing your conscious attention for other things.

Most books on personal change mention habits only to tell you that your bad habits are the problem — that you need to break them, fight them, overcome them. The message, sometimes stated and sometimes just woven into the structure of the argument, is that your habits are the enemy, your resistance is the obstacle, and change means struggling against your own nature.

I want to tell you something very different.

Your brain’s habit-formation system is not the obstacle to change. It is the instrument of change. It is, in fact, one of the most extraordinary pieces of biological engineering on this planet. It learned to walk for you. It learned to talk for you. It learned to catch a ball, ride a bike, read faces, parse grammar — all without you consciously directing much of the process. That system is not your enemy. It is your greatest ally.

The problem is not that you have a habit engine. The problem is that nobody ever told you that you could drive it.

Your habit system has two modes. In its default mode — the mode it has been running in for most of your life — it forms patterns from whatever you repeatedly do, without asking whether those patterns serve you well. If you repeatedly interrupt people, your habit system obligingly builds an interrupting habit. If you repeatedly go silent during conflict, your habit system builds a silence-during-conflict habit. It is not judging you. It is not trying to hurt you. It is simply doing what it was designed to do: turning repeated actions into automatic patterns, so that your conscious mind can attend to other things.

But there is a second mode. In this mode — the mode that radical learning activates — the same system can form patterns from what you choose to practice. If you deliberately practice listening without interrupting, your habit system will build a listening habit. If you deliberately practice expressing your needs during conflict instead of going silent, your habit system will build that pattern too. Same machinery. Different operator.

This is what makes radical learning possible at the biological level. You are not asking your brain to do something it has never done before. You are asking it to do something it has always done — form habits — but with you in the driver’s seat instead of running on autopilot.

And this, apparently, is how many of our most distinctively human capacities evolved in the first place. Evolution is an inveterate recycler. When human beings developed the capacity for speech, the brain did not build an entirely new system from scratch. It repurposed the fine-motor-control pathways that had already been developed for throwing — the precise, sequenced, rapid muscle movements that let you hurl a rock at a moving target got retooled to let you toss words to a listener across the room. Evolution reuses resources whenever it can, in order to find a way forward.

Our evolving ability to pick a skill and consciously learn it is another magnificent example of this reuse. The ancient habit-formation pathways — pathways that originally formed patterns without any conscious input — are now available for conscious direction. They were there all along, waiting to be used in a slightly different way. Waiting, if you will, for you to come to the party.

This is the shift in evolutionary gears that gives this chapter its title. It is a shift from forming habits through unexamined repetition to forming habits through conscious choice. And it changes the emotional landscape of learning in a fundamental way. Because if your habit system is not the enemy — if it is, in fact, the very thing that will build your new skills for you once you start directing it — then you don’t need to fight yourself. You need to show up for yourself. Consciously, repeatedly, patiently.

That is a very different feeling. And it leads to a very different kind of hope.

7.5 Hope for Adults

Most of us have been offered hope about personal change at various points in our lives. Some of it was the bright, effortless hope of childhood: believe in yourself and you can do anything. Some of it was the motivational hope of self-help culture: just adopt the right mindset and transformation follows. Some of it was religious hope, or therapeutic hope, or the quiet hope that comes from watching someone you admire handle a difficult situation gracefully.

I want to offer you a different kind of hope — one that starts by telling the truth about how hard change actually is, and then shows you why it is worth pursuing anyway.

Here is the truth. Your habit system is indeed your ally, but it is an ally with a complication: the default mode has had a head start of many years. The patterns it laid down — the ways you learned to handle conflict, express affection, respond to criticism, ask for what you want — were built through thousands of repetitions over the course of your childhood and adult life. Those patterns don’t politely step aside just because you’ve decided to learn something new. They persist. They compete. And they reassert themselves most forcefully under stress, which is exactly when you need your new skills the most.

So it’s not all rosy, and it’s not all awful. Human psychology is a complex mix of resources and limitations. And recognizing when something is a complex mix is a very adult attitude. Not blindly trusting that everything will work out. Not blindly fearful that nothing ever can. Instead of either of those: awake and alert.

That is the kind of hope I want to offer you in this chapter. I think of it as hope for adults.

Here is what the evidence actually shows. You can change deeply ingrained communication patterns. It takes longer than you want it to, and it requires more practice than seems fair. Here’s why: In this workbook we continually come back to the importance of what is called over-learning. We come back to this idea again and again because it may be the most important thing you will ever learn about learning. If you memorize something by repeating it just enough times to be able to recite it one time correctly, evidence shows you won’t remember it more than a day or two. So one of the central adult truths about learning is that our first impressions about how well we have learned something are not particularly reliable. Darn! I sure as heck wish it were otherwise! So it is time to shift gears. The difference between a bicycle and a sled is that a sled only goes downhill and you can’t steer it very much. Bicycles can go all sorts of places with your effort and attention making the difference. To adopt the radical learning approach is to shift from sled mode to bicycle mode. Looked at from the perspective of radical learning, the setbacks that you used to interpret as proof of your failure are radically revalued as the exact information you need in order to improve your performance. That is a giant shift.

And if you stay with it — if you keep practicing, keep forgiving yourself, keep paying attention — you will gradually become a person who handles conversations differently. Not perfectly. Differently. And “differently” is enough to change a relationship, a family, a workplace.

Remember: you are not fighting your own nature. You are redirecting it. The same system that built your old patterns, without your conscious input, can build new patterns with your conscious input. That is the source of a very adult sort of hope. It is not wishful thinking. It is biology.

7.6 Self-Forgiveness: The Necessary Partner of Radical Learning

If the radical learning stance is the engine of continuous development, self-forgiveness is the fuel. And now that we understand something about how habit systems work, we can see why self-forgiveness is not just a nice idea but a biological necessity.

As you practice new ways of listening and expressing yourself, you will make an important discovery: learning these skills involves trial and error, and learning to pay attention in new ways. You will make mistakes. You will fall back into old patterns. You will have moments when the carefully practiced new response vanishes and the old automatic one takes its place, especially when you are tired, stressed, or caught off guard.

This is not evidence that you are failing. This is evidence that your default-mode habits have had a long head start, and the new patterns you are building haven’t yet been practiced enough to compete under pressure. That’s all. It is a timing problem, not a character problem.

Consider learning to play basketball as an example. You go out on the court and throw the ball toward the basket. Sometimes the ball goes in; much of the time it does not. If you concluded, the first time the ball missed the basket, that you were a terrible basketball player and deserved to be punished for your badness, then I guarantee that you would never learn to make the ball go in. Focusing on your badness and your feelings of shame means that you are not watching the ball. It is only by carefully watching the ball — observing and accepting your own performance right this second — that you can learn to throw better. Did it go a little to the left? A little to the right? What did your arms and legs feel like when you threw? How could you throw differently?

Self-forgiveness matters because it allows us to calm down and pay attention to exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it. No human person is born with all the skills and knowledge they will need in life. No one can perfectly anticipate the thoughts, feelings, and needs of others. Life is one long process of exploratory trial and error, in which making mistakes is inevitable. We can learn an enormous amount from our mistakes, but only if we can face them and admit them.

Two of the greatest temptations in life involve avoiding embarrassment by either pretending that we never make mistakes or trying to justify actions that we ourselves know at some level were mistakes. But if we fall into either of those patterns, we risk becoming entangled in a web of rigid artificiality that makes learning nearly impossible.

Here is the radical learning way to think about this: a creature that learns through trial and error cannot afford to punish itself for the errors. The errors are not the problem. They are the information. They are how the habit system knows what to adjust. When you throw the basketball and it goes left, the error is a message: adjust right. When you try to listen and find yourself interrupting, the lapse is a message: notice the impulse earlier next time. Self-punishment doesn’t help this process. It interferes with it, because a mind consumed with shame is not a mind that can observe itself clearly.

So I suggest that you adopt an attitude of compassionate forgiveness toward yourself — and everybody else — for all the mistakes you have made and will make, and commit yourself deeply to learning what each mistake has to teach you. If we get in the habit of learning from our many small mistakes, by becoming more attentive and observant, we will probably make fewer big ones.

You can also announce to your important conversation partners that you are trying new ways of talking and listening, and may have to work at it for a while to get good at it. Most of the people around you are in the same situation: wanting to function more successfully in life but afraid of looking clumsy when they try something new. So, along with forgiving yourself, consider creating an atmosphere of patience and forgiveness at home and at work, so that both you and others can start over as often as needed.

(A note of caution: the attitude of forgiveness I am recommending here is central to the teaching of many great psychologists and spiritual teachers. However, if someone you are close to is violent or is abusing drugs or alcohol, please see a counselor right away to help you set appropriate boundaries and work out relationship agreements. Forgiveness and healthy boundaries are not opposites — they are partners.)

7.7 Why Practice Runs Deeper Than You Think

Self-forgiveness clears the emotional ground for practice. Now let’s look at what practice actually is — because if we understand it through the lens of habit formation, it turns out to be something deeper and more interesting than “doing more reps.”

In Challenge One, I reminded you that you have already mastered many extraordinary skills in the course of your life — standing, walking, running, learning a vocabulary of thousands of words. It just happened so long ago that you’ve forgotten both how difficult it was and how successful you were.

Now I want to add something to that picture. A statistical analysis of Olympic gold medal winners produced a result that is both startling and reassuring. The single most important factor in winning a gold medal was having practiced longer than one’s competitors. The winners had consistently started practicing earlier in life than everyone else. The evidence strongly suggests that gold medal winners are not necessarily more talented than everyone else. They work much harder and much longer. This is the radical learning stance in action — and it suggests that, with sustained practice, many more skills than we imagine could be within the reach of many more people, including you and me.

There is an important psychological principle at work here. It is called overlearning. If we learn something just well enough to do it once successfully, we will not remember how to do it for very long. To truly master a skill — to make it available under pressure, in unfamiliar situations, when you are tired and stressed — you have to practice it well beyond the point of initial competence. You have to keep going until the new pattern is strong enough to compete with the old automatic response.

Now you can see why this matters so much, in light of what we discussed about habit systems. When you practice a new communication skill, you are not just acquiring information or developing a technique. You are building a new habit — a new automatic pattern — strong enough to compete with the old one that your default-mode system laid down years ago. The old pattern had thousands of repetitions behind it. The new one has to accumulate enough repetitions of its own to hold its ground when the pressure is on.

That is why practice that works is practice that is sustained, varied, and patient. Practice your new skills in many different situations — not just in calm, low-stakes conversations, but in the messy, unpredictable, emotionally charged encounters where your old habits are strongest. Life is one improvisational skill performance after another, and the habit system that serves you best is one that has been trained across the full range of circumstances you actually encounter.

Being kind once, in a calm moment, is relatively easy. Being kind in the middle of a stressful conflict — when your pulse is racing and every instinct is pushing you toward defensiveness or attack — requires the kind of deep practice that has made kindness a reflex rather than an effort. That is what radical learning is for: not just to acquire the skills, but to practice them so deeply that they become part of your automatic repertoire, available to you precisely when you need them most.

A new groove. This is the moment when the conscious and the automatic come full circle. You begin by consciously choosing a new behavior — directing your habit system on purpose rather than leaving it on autopilot. You practice that behavior deliberately, again and again, in varied settings. And gradually, through overlearning, the new behavior becomes automatic. It becomes a habit. Not an unchosen habit imposed by circumstance, but a chosen habit built by intention. The habit system has done its ancient work — but this time, you were at the wheel.

The reward for this kind of practice is not just that you will feel better about yourself and your connections to the people around you, though you will. It is that you will be able to face conflict situations more confidently, because your best responses will be available to you even under pressure. And you will probably be able to get more of what you want — by being skillful enough to help your partners in living and working get more of what they want, too.

7.8 Building a Radical Learning Agenda

The radical learning strategy is to learn new life skills before life suddenly demands them of you. But how do you know what to learn? If the whole point is to prepare for challenges that haven’t arrived yet, how do you build a curriculum?

Two ways.

First, pay attention to the people in your world who seem wise, kind, and happy. We are not the first people to walk down this rough road. Every community, every workplace, every family has people in it — or had people in it — who seemed to handle life’s difficulties with more grace than most. What did they do? How did they listen? How did they respond to conflict? How did they ask for what they wanted? You don’t need to invent radical learning from scratch. You can learn from the people who have gone before you and from what they discovered along the way.

Second, pay attention to your own recurring difficulties. Most of us have a small number of communication patterns that cause us trouble again and again. We keep having the same argument with our spouse. We keep avoiding the same conversation with our boss. We keep failing to say the thing we most need to say. These recurring patterns are your learning agenda. They are the places where a new skill would make the most difference — and where the absence of that skill is already exacting a cost.

Professor Stephen Covey makes a point in First Things First that speaks directly to this. There are many things in life that are deeply important but will never become an emergency until it is too late to do anything about them. You need to hug your kids every day. You need to take a walk and get some fresh air every day. You need to eat some green vegetables several times a week. There won’t ever be a single day when the world comes to an end because you didn’t do those things. But if you don’t do them most of the time, there will be consequences that accumulate slowly and become irreversible.

Communication skills are exactly like this. At home, it rarely seems like learning new communication skills is a crisis. Most of the time we can muddle through somehow. But that involves sacrificing a great deal of fulfillment along the way — the closeness we could experience with the people we love, the collaborations that could flourish at work, the conflicts that could be resolved instead of endured.

The radical learning stance says: Don’t wait for the crisis. Build the skills now. Your habit system could help you rather than getting in your way. It is ready to help you develop new skills every day of the week!

7.9 The Comparison That Matters

As you pursue this kind of continuous learning, you will be tempted to compare yourself to other people — to that friend who always seems to know exactly what to say, or to that colleague who handles conflict like a diplomat, or to the idealized communicator you imagine you should already be.

This comparison is natural, and it is almost always discouraging. It feeds the fixed mindset, because it frames every gap between where you are and where someone else is as evidence of your inadequacy.

There is a different comparison that is far more useful and far more honest: the comparison between who you were last month and who you are this month.

Can you listen a little longer before jumping in with your own thoughts? Can you notice the impulse to criticize and sometimes translate it into a request? Can you stay present during a disagreement a few seconds longer than you used to before your old defensive habits take over? If you can do any of these things even slightly more often than you could before, you are growing. You are, in the language of this chapter, building new habits — and those habits are getting a little stronger each time you practice them.

The radical learner measures progress against their own trajectory, not against some imagined ideal. Adult hope is not about becoming perfect. It is about becoming measurably, observably, tangibly better at the things that matter most to you — one conversation at a time.

7.10 How Radical Learning Connects the Challenges

In the Introduction, I invited you to see communication as a learnable skill domain — to shift from cultural autopilot to conscious choice. That was the first hint of what I am now calling the radical learning stance.

In the six Challenges that followed, you practiced specific communication skills. You got in the water and started swimming. Some of it felt natural. Some of it felt awkward. That’s exactly as it should be.

Now, in this Challenge, I’ve asked you to do something larger: to understand why this kind of learning doesn’t come naturally, to see the forces — evolutionary, psychological, habitual — that work against it, and to choose it anyway. Not because it’s easy. Because the alternative — waiting for life to shove you — is costlier than you think.

And I’ve tried to give you a reason for hope that goes beyond encouragement. You were born with a habit-formation system of astonishing power. For most of your life, that system has been running on autopilot, building patterns from whatever you happened to do repeatedly. Radical learning is the decision to take the wheel — to start choosing which patterns get built, and to keep choosing, deliberately and patiently, for the rest of your life.

You are not fighting your own nature. You are fulfilling it. Because the ability to consciously direct your own development is itself one of the great achievements of evolution — a capacity that was millions of years in the making and that only a handful of species on this planet have ever possessed. To use it is not to override your biology. It is to use your biology for its highest purpose.

7.11 The Open Horizon: A Glimpse of the Road Beyond

Before we close this chapter, I want to share a glimpse of something larger.

As you continue to practice your communication skills — listening more carefully, expressing yourself more fully, asking better questions, offering more appreciation — you may begin to notice that something is happening beyond skill development. The way you listen today is shaping the kind of listener you are becoming. The way you handle conflict this week is shaping the kind of person you will be next year. Over time, through thousands of conversations, the qualities you practice in conversation become the qualities you embody as a person.

This is not a small thing. Our conversations are not preparation for real life. They are real life, happening one interaction at a time. And the qualities we bring to those interactions, day after day, are the raw material out of which our character will emerge.

Over many years, drawing on the work of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and many other scholars and spiritual teachers, I have noticed that the directions of growth that emerge through better conversations are remarkably consistent across traditions and cultures. Here are a few of those directions — not as standards to be met, but as horizons to move toward:

Learning to communicate and to live…

… more awarely (of self, other, and context)

… more honestly and congruently (so that our inner experience and outer expression match)

… more caringly, compassionately, and forgivingly

… more courageously and hopefully

… more gratefully and appreciatively, open to delight and the gift of each moment

There is no finish line for any of these emerging strengths of character. No matter how much awareness or kindness or courage you have cultivated, there is always room for more. They are all steps on an infinite staircase. You can always take the next step.

I want to leave you with this thought. In the short run, our conversations express who we are. But in the long run, our continually repeated conversational styles create who we are, as we continually practice particular ways of relating to others. Each of us has it within our power to make each conversation an opportunity to become a more aware, more skillful, more compassionate person. Not a perfect person. A growing one.

And that is the most natural thing in the world. It is what we were born to do.

7.12 A Practice for This Challenge: Your Radical Learning Journal

As mentioned in the Introduction, one way to support your continuous learning is to keep a journal of your experiences as you try new ways of listening and expressing yourself, new ways of asking questions and expressing appreciation. You can think of your journal as a patient listener who is available to listen to you twenty-four hours a day.

Over the years I have found it to be a very helpful Pattern to write on the right hand page of my Open journal book, And at first to leave the left hand page blank. This leaves me room to come back later and shot down the new notes on the left hand page about the experience that I had at that moment in the past and what it means to me now in the present.

Please take some time to reflect on and write down your responses to these questions in your Learning Journal.

Reflection Questions

Look back at the six communication skills you’ve been practicing (Challenges One through Six). Which one has produced the most noticeable change in your conversations or relationships? What happened?
Think of a moment when you caught yourself falling back into an old communication pattern — and then chose differently. In the language of this chapter, you were taking the wheel from your autopilot. What did that feel like? What made it possible?
Can you identify a specific area of your communication life where you’ve been operating from a fixed mindset — telling yourself “I’m just not good at this”? What would it look like to shift toward the radical learning stance: “I haven’t learned this yet — and I’m going to”?
Think about your habit system as an ally rather than an enemy. What is one communication habit you would like to build — not a bad habit to break, but a good habit to create? What would it take to practice it often enough that it starts to become automatic?
What does self-forgiveness look like for you, specifically? Can you think of a recent communication mistake that you could revisit — not to judge yourself, but to learn from? What information does the mistake contain?
Think about a communication challenge you can see coming — not one that has already arrived, but one that is on the horizon of your life. A conversation you know you’ll need to have. A relationship that is slowly drifting. A workplace situation that is gradually getting worse. What skill would help you meet that challenge before it becomes a crisis? That is your radical learning agenda, and you can start working on it today.
Complete this sentence: “The kind of communicator and person I am becoming, one conversation at a time, is someone who…”

References

Bandura, Albert. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W. H. Freeman, 1997.

Covey, Stephen R. First Things First. Free Press, 1994.

Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006.

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2019.

Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. 2nd ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968.

Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Rogers, Carl R. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

Rivers, Dennis. “What Kind of Person Am I Becoming? What Kind of People Are We Becoming Together?” 1999. Available at communication-skills.net.

Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, 1983.