In the Welcome to 2020 post, I mentioned that Sense of Learning would be changing slightly this year.

We’re not just going to focus on organisational, operational and personal learning. We’ll branch out and include more posts on life lessons, personal growth, intentions and behaviours. After all, as a learning and development professional I spend my days learning all sorts of things across exceptionally broad areas. This learning spans the smallest of “things” to the biggest of concepts.

Lifelong learning is about embracing every opportunity there is, formal and informal, to learn and apply something different; or to do things differently.

We need to liken ourselves to a garden that needs:

• the right soil and environment to ensure we can adapt, cement our roots and thrive
• water to ensure we can survive each and every day
• sun to stimulate our growth and shade to give us time to let the growth happen
• fertiliser (natural of course!) to enable us to grow and flower
• weeding to filter out what can become all consuming, toxic and unhealthy to us
• protection from the pests who will try and destroy us
• occasional pruning to bring us back to reality and help us learn to flourish again

I could go on!

To start 2020, we’ll take a look at some of the life lessons many of us may have been exposed to, yet overlooked.

We’ll start with FAIRYTALES.

In many fairytales there are lessons to be discovered. As children, it may be unlikely that we uncovered the deeper lessons; we may only have learnt the most obvious one. However, as adults we can see beyond the (classic) happy ever after or idyllic ending and uncover the deeper meaning the authors are just hoping we discover.

Stay tuned for our first post in this series. It’s a fairytale that is lesser known.