In Mindshift, Prof Barbara Oakley shares how to break through obstacles to learning to discover your hidden potential. A “mindshift” is a deep change in life that occurs thanks to learning. She teaches on what is probably the most popular online course in the world, “Learning How to Learn” for Coursera/UC San Diego.
In Mindshift, she shares how we can learn, change and grow far more than we can imagine. She shares about how we learn and how we can use our talents and learn new ones to create a more satisfying career for ourselves.
She described how she had a passionate contempt for mathematics and science and did poorly in them from an early age but was able to master these to become a Professor of Engineering.
In Mindshift she followed people all over the world who have made unusual career changes and overcome enormous learning challenges. She advocates the power of taking a “pi” approach to our career and why it is smarter to broaden your passion than to follow it.
She discovered in her lifetime list of jobs and careers from waitress, cleaning lady, tutor, writer, wife, US Army officer, Russian Translator on Soviet trawlers on the Bering Sea, and radio operator at the South Pole Station that she had the more power to learn and change than she ever dreamed. She discovered that what she learnt in one career often enabled her to be creatively successful in the next phase of her life. Often, seemingly useless information from a previous career became a powerful foundation for the next.
In this TEDx talk, she speaks about learning how to learn which includes the Pomodoro method, the illusion of competence in learning, how exercise, tests and recall can increase ability to learn.
#mindshift #learning to learn #career development #learning for deep change