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28 July 2012

Understanding vs Experiential understanding

By Rodney Inns


This is an interesting subject I have been considering the last five years of my journey down this most engaging trail of Hypnotherapy and NLP, particularly in my business at melbourne smoking hypnosis of which I had no clue I'd be travelling. In our society so much emphasis is placed on learning facts by wrote and being able to repeat the facts back in school, university and in most other forms of learning. There are 1 or 2 exceptions like becoming a doctor, Nurse, engineer to name a couple.

Having worked in a university in the past as an educational developer, I was accountable for teaching teachers how to design and deliver subjects to students, to get the very finest result possible for students. A couple of things became clearer quick, industry wants graduates who can do things, while our universities are concentrating on delivering graduates who've memorised tons of information, with very little understanding regarding how to apply in their selected profession by doing tasks.

There appears to be a gap between what companies need and what universities give them. So it is one thing to learn facts and understand those facts conceptually, it is entirely a different thing to apply that info and understandings in the performance of different activities. I've learnt that there are lots of different levels to understanding, which are developed when you apply that information in activity in a real world application.

First off there is the 1st level of knowing the information and an idea of how to use it, next we move into the area of application where so many things come to light that we were not taught, which deepens and textures our understanding of this information and its application. Then on an ongoing basis we come across more and more scenarios in performing this activity, where new and different variables present them self, which further deepens and textures your understanding of this information and its application. You can also increase your educational learning in this area which further develps and textures to your understanding. This process can go on for ages, you will continue to learn and develop a deeper appreciation and understanding in this area, which influences other areas too , which in its turn then re-influences this area.

So what I'm hinting at is we need to place more emphasis on the particular practical application of this knowledge, here is where bigger levels of understanding come to the surface for folk. A real sample from my practice of Hypnotherapy is I tell clients that I am going to get rid of all the counterproductive feelings from their body, due to these emotions being a sizeable component of their problem. Now most of the time they get my explanation of how it functions and understand what I am going to do, but I get stunned looks and incredulity when we have finished and test the work, to see the emotions are gone. In this situation the experience completely transforms their understanding and takes it to a totally different level, much of the time folk do not believe it is feasible, they would like to believe but don't really.

The self help industry is also good at telling folk what to do, but they simply do not know how to let you know how to do what you need to do, so you end up with being taught a very shallow level of understanding of what you have got to do. What would surpass this is if they gave you exercises to do to, teach you how to do what they say, this would transform and deepen that degree of understanding. This has traditionally been the downfall of the self help industry, the writers are telling you what they did, sadly they leave out the how which leaves most individuals high and dry with out any results. The exception to this would be NLP where you do plenty of exercises as part of your learning and development, as well as them teaching you the concept of what you've got to do. So they then get you to do exercises to help achieve this and develop a deeper level of understanding..

In our teaching establishments we need to move from teaching idea and facts to teaching a mix of theory, facts and practical exercises on using that theory, and we really need to stop getting folks to memorise plenty of facts when we have access to the web, and other kinds of electronic information, we should instead teach them how to find what they want quickly, then apply it.




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