“I learn teaching from teachers. I learn golf from golfers. I learn winning from coaches.” — Harvey Penick

What you get from coaching is largely up to you. Whether it’s a teacher, a mentor, a sports coach, or a coach at work, making the most of a coach is a skill that you get better at with practice. If you can master your ability to leverage the coaches in your life, you can accelerate your success, drop bad habits like a hot potato, grow new skills and abilities, and make the most of what you’ve got.

“Life is a big canvas, throw all the paint on it you can.” — Danny Kaye

The Web is a fountain of knowledge, especially if you know where to drink from. This post is a quick tour of some of the main sites I use that make me think.

I collect success. From stories of heroes to gems of insight, I gather and organize principles, patterns, and practices for success. It’s like a living playbook for life with short-cuts, success patterns, and proven practices. It supplies me with insight and action that I can use for just about every situation. Whether it’s motivation or strategies or tactics, it’s my unfair advantage and how I get the edge in life. It’s truly how I “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

“The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it.” – Danniel Tammet

One of the most important skills I mastered early on at Microsoft, is information management. My ability to organize information directly impacts my success. For me, information management is the key to daily productivity from researching to learning faster to keeping my email inbox empty.

How do we “know” something? … I think you’ll like this as a simple model to help answer the question – how do you know something to be true? There are 3 main ways:
1. Experiential (empirical)
2. Cognitive (Rational)
3. Constructed (Creational)

Some books and authors change how we think.

I was catching up with an old friend and I was distilling some of my favorite books into one-liners to show the contributions of various authors. He suggested I share them as a post, so here it is …

One of the models that helps me cope with learning new skills is the 4 stages of competence. It helps remind me of the progression from the early awkward stage to the competent stage. According to the model, you move from unconscious competence to unconscious competence.

I’m a fan of using checklists to improve results. Checklists are powerful tools for jogging your memory, reducing stress, and sharing know how. Fighter pilots use checklist effectively to eliminate task saturation, take away workload, and avoid forgetting something critical. Many businesses use checklists to train new hires as well as run everyday operations.

When you name something it’s powerful. You have a way to reference it and share it with others. Patterns are named problem and solution pairs. They are a simple way to build and share a catalog of knowledge. You can use patterns to efficiently share strategies or principles. Rather than 100 words, you can use one word. Practices are methods or techniques. They are “how” you do something. By leveraging patterns and practices, you can improve your ability to get results. Basically, it’s a way to build a mental toolbox of insight and action to draw from.

“3 take aways” is one of my favorite ways to chop information down to size.  I also use it to make the most of a meeting or training session.  All I do, is ask myself, "what are 3 take aways?"   Does it sound simple?  That’s the idea.  It helps you avoid becoming overwhelmed.  It also forces you to focus and prioritize.  It’s a great way to turn insight into action.
For example, from my Crucial Conversations training, my 3 take aways were:

1) Master my stories.
2) Learn to look. …

One of the most effective ways I’ve found to save a lot of time and energy is using mentors. While nothing replaces experience, mentors can help guide you to the right experiences and avoid some unnecessary experiences. They can also help you make meaning from the experiences you have, by providing a new lens or vantage point.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning domains is a map of learning levels. Bloom chunked learning into 3 domains: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (or thinking, feeling, and doing.) If you think of Bloom’s Taxonomy as a map of learning domains and levels, you can use it to evaluate your expertise in a given topic. If you create or deliver training, you can also use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a checklist for helping you structure and organize your training material.

Learning a new problem space can be a challenge. Especially when there’s no map. While writing books for the past several years, I’ve learned a more effective approach for chunking up and solving problem spaces. Each new book is a new problem domain. I can’t afford to churn or be inefficient while ramping up. I’ve basically learned how to get myself and my teams up to speed faster by using a process. This process has served me well. I hope it does the same for you.

I find chunking my notes from lectures and training helps me turn insights into action. I chunk them into three categories: actions, insights, and notes. This simple refactoring helps me quickly find the actions or my “ah has” without having to fish through a laundry list of reference points. I bubble these to the top so I can find them at a glance. The act of refactoring my notes also helps remind me of the most valuable parts, which is usually the new distinctions …

Photo by lowjumpingfrog
Do you have to be great at everything?  If this stops you from doing things you want to try, then it’s a limiting belief.  Scott Berkun spells this out in Why You Should Be Bad at Something.   Life’s not static.  As Tony Robbins would say, you’re either growing or dying, climbing or sliding.
One of the things that can hold you back is a fixed mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, you attribute results to innate ability and you discount learning.  You think people are …

Wanna learn more effectively and be a better teacher?  Learn to match or bridge learning styles.  It’s one of those things you do everyday, but you might not be aware of.  It’s about how you sequence information and how you relate to it.  The key is to first know your own preferences, and then  understand others.
Concrete, Abstract, Random, Sequential Here’s the parts that make up the styles:

Concrete – You’re dealing with the here and now and processing information based on what you see, …

Want to have a place to put your lifetime of learning? Organize your mind with a personal memory house.   You effectively decorate your memory scenes with ideas and thoughts.  You can then remember anything simply by walking through your memory scenes.  In Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, Jay Heinrichs writes about how the ancients used these personal memory villas to deliver great speeches and store a lifetime of learning.
Key Take Aways Here’s my …

You can use your daily routines for learning and growth.  Rather than view habits as mechanical, you can view them as mastering your craft.  By focusing on improvement, your routines and habits become an opportunity for personal transformation.  You can use your routines as an exploration into who you are and how you express yourself with something larger. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about using routines and habits for joy and personal development. 
Habits Need a …

Working on your business, is working on your life.  Life if what business is about and your business should create more life for everyone.  In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about how going to work on your business, is going to work on your life.
Going to Work on the Business, is Going to Work on Your Life
Gerber writes that working on your business development is a metaphor for working on your life:
“On a more practical level, …

Do you get return on your reading investment?  Do you turn insights into action?
Well, I know I use reading to give me an edge in all areas of my life. I also share what I learn with others to give them an edge in life. That’s part of what this blog is all about.
In Little Guide To Your Well-Read Life: How To Get More Books In Your Life And More Life From Your Books, Steve Leveen writes about reading as an investment.
Your Notebook is Not a Miser’s Sock …