I spent my weekend in Italy together with Alsu, more specifically on the lake Como in the north of Italy – close to the Swiss border. This is a place of exceptional beauty – almost too much, so that you practically get overwhelmed – and I can imagine that in less popular times it was an excellent place for reflection.

In Griante, the city we stayed in, there is a church perched on top of the hillside called San Martino. I haven’t yet been able to learn much about the actual church but it seemed to me to be the place where you would retreat, take long walks about the mountain and reflect on your experiences.

The past years has been mostly relentless learning for me – wether it was teaching in China, leading a team or trying to deal with poor leadership within my companies or organizations. Last spring I had many possible paths to choose but in the end I went for one that gave me more time for myself, rather than engaging in a wide range of new activities. This leads me to the fird and final behaviour for learning from experience:

Reflect on your learning – how far you’ve come and what you have achieved, think about your goals and motivations and try to put the experiences in context – try to understand what happened and why. Without this behaviour, which involves both having calmer years and 10 minutes of reflection on the bus – you won’t be able to process your learning and turn it into new realizations and behaviours.

A way to introduce this habit is to look at your next 6 months say and see where you will have the opportunity for major impacting experiences – be it travels, new job roles or conferences. Then plan already now in your calendar one or more days of reflection after this experience. Also set a side one or two days during the winter holidays to look back at your 6 months and try to get an overview over all the experiences and how they impacted you.

The second step would be to also recognize that each day brings with a unique experience and that a daily reflection practice is of great use – and as this is something I am still working on having in my life I will get back to that topic later.

This sums it up for my three behaviours to make the most from your experiences. Remember to make time for all of these three activities – Discovery, Experimentation and Reflection. Without one piece of the puzzle the picture isn’t as good as it could be.

The major thing that has held me back when it comes to learning is not the discovery of new things to learn (I am all about discovery and new ideas) but rather the willingness or bravery to try my newly learnt things out in practice. I guess it might be because I am Swedish.

The second behaviour to learn by experience is to experiment and test your new skills – did you learn how to say Hello in Chinese yesterday? Go practice in your closest Chinese restaurant! If you just learned how to swim – plan a vacation to the ocean. Give yourself ample opportunity to try your new skills in new contexts and environments.

Experimentation should be the easy part of learning – that is all you need to do is to try, alter and test new combinations of what you have learnt. However, like me, a lot of people often hold themselves back because of fear of failing in their experiments – without thinking that failing is exactly what the experimentation phase is about.

There is a catch though – as in science, if you want your experiments to really count they need to be observed by someone else. Sitting alone in your bedroom trying to pronounce “你好” is of course better than just reading it in a book – however it will not a chinese speaker make.

When I was around 13-14 I learnt a lot of programming through experimenting by myself, I read all the books on programming in my local library and in the end manage to rack up the knowledge of how to write programs in 9 or 10 different programming languages. However, it wasn’t until my first programming job that I learnt about how to really make software. In this job I experimented a lot too (I was way in over my head – but I managed it) but now I had the eyes of the rest of the team on me – something that both gave me insight to my errors and my successes.

To conclude, make a habit, for each of the things that you are learning to write down 1-3 situations where you – in the presence of other people – can try this skill or knowledge out. Wether it’s a pub quiz night, the local Chinese restaurant or dinner out on town – just make sure you go public with your skill as soon as you can – if you fail, just try again.

“The things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them” – Aristotle

Last weekend me and Allison travelled by car down to the French north coast – also called Cote d’Opale – a beautiful place of beaches and cliffs. We ended up taking a chance for a hostel (suspiciously cheap at €10 per night) in a village called Montreuil-sur-Mer. It proved to be a great choice as the hostel was located within the compounds of a medieval castle – which we had to ourselves!

Staying a night a hostel in a small french town in a medieval castle was an experience that I won’t forget. One of quite a few in the past year. My work and AIESEC has enabled me to be in many places and meet a lot of different people – as well as do things I wasn’t prepared for. This has left me thinking many times – how do you make the most of these kind of experiences?

Since a long time back (think Aristotle & Confucius) people have known that we learn by doing, by experiencing. In 1984 David Kolb published a book that has since shaped the discussion on the impact of direct exprience in learning – he created a model describing learning to start from experience, continue with reflection and abstraction of key concepts and then action or practical use of the learning acquired. As any model, it’s certainly not perfect and much can be said about it – but it does provide you with a framework to make the most out of your experiences.

With this framework in mind I have three personal things that I try to do in order to have more effective experiential learning in my life. The first of which I’ll share today.

1. Seek out new things to learn – and never stop! Stimulate your divergent thinking by being in new and unexpected places. I find travelling for me, like our trip to France, is a way of discovering new and unexpected things to learn and try to understand- but your ways will of course differ.

The key is simply to always be curious and try to go deeper, understand better and look at it from a new light. If you find yourself ever thinking “that would be cool to do” – then write it down and make a deal with yourself to go ahead and try. This type of experimentation got me to try things like hang gliding, not me in the video (I saw it on a Discovery show, wrote it down and then tried it) – a sport I would really like to take up for real.

“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” – Confucius

Btw. today is a good day to start.