It’s all starting to come together and I’m feeling excited, connected and optimistic. About ten months ago, over an afternoon coffee with someone I value and am continuously inspired by, sense of learning was born. With excitement we embrace the challenge of making it happen, and believe it as an opportunity for us to share our experiences, observations and knowledge – and of course to (ourselves) learn from the experiences of it all and from those who share their experiences with us.

Getting here has been a journey; we’ve gone from conversation and registering the domain name, to making it a reality with this website, writing a few posts and now on the cusp of releasing our logo and working to build more of a learning community. I am truly feeling connected now and proud of what we initially envisaged and where it’s heading.

Throughout the journey so far, I’ve learned a lot and over the last week or so I’ve paused to reflect about what new knowledge and skills I’ve gained since we started this venture. Without this reflection, I doubt I would clearly recognise just how much I have learned, both skills and knowledge. It really is important we all recognise that much of our learning isn’t planned, scheduled or formal; it just happens. But do we pay attention to this implicit learning?

Implicit learning – learning without awareness

Implicit learning occurs for us constantly and happens without much conscious control. It’s a passive process where we don’t pause and prepare ourselves for new learning, it just naturally occurs as we go about our day-to-day activities (both at home and work). I’m typically a learner who prefers to find out for themselves, apply a bit of trial and error, and only asks for help when I get to a point of truly being stuck.

And in making sense of learning happen, a lot of my learning has been implicit. I’ve added skills to my toolkit I never envisaged I would – creating this website being my biggest and most rewarding recent learning experience (although I now find myself looking at ways to refine and enhance).

Thinking about my own implicit learning raised an interesting question about how often we stop and reflect on our own learning. How are you aware of what you’ve implicitly learned? I have often not been acutely aware of how much I have learned during a week, whether it be a new snippet of knowledge, skill or even greater understanding of people’s behaviour or my own.

At the start of a new week, do you challenge yourself to learn something new (explicit learning)? If you do, then why not reflect on all the learning that has happened without your conscious control? How can you build on these new skills and knowledge, and nurture your personal learning?

I’m going to set anyone who reads this post a challenge – come back a week after you’ve read it and share in the comments below what you learned during the week without knowing you were learning.

(and keep an eye out for our soon to appear logo!)