… the personalization of learning through demonstration, expression of what has been learned. Simple definition, but with no equivocation. I realize that I talk a great deal about application, demonstration, learning and all in the context of personalization. (Webster doesn’t seem to like my word – but personalization – the integration into one’s mindset, lifestyle is critical.) My point is if we don’t demonstrate, don’t test what we say we believe, how do we know what we believe. And equally important… how do we continually refine our understanding?
In my world, it is rarely (if ever) one and done. We are always growing, though unless we are also intentional, not necessarily ‘improving’. I also believe that we need to declare, daily, our ‘new or refined’ learning until it is a given in our personal MO. And declaring, in this context, means testing the learning and acting on what it is we are declaring – not mere intellectualization (also a new word or a non-Webster word). It is critical for us to walk outside our comfort zone to be able to look at the learning and see where/when/how/if it needs to be incorporate into our ‘who’.
In applying what we think we know we test and then have the ability to build on the plateau we are on. We can refine and tweak the expression when we look at life as a continual learning lab in which we live. Application is nothing without a foundation which comes from knowledge. Knowledge apart from applying is merely an intellectual exercise – interesting but with little significance in life. Application allows us the ability to prove, disprove, refine, build on from the information we discover from applying knowledge.
I do believe that a day without learning is somewhat dissatisfying, something has been missed in the day. And without intentional application we really are like a 3 legged stool that is trying to remain upright on only 2 legs. I often discover that in my applying, testing what I think I know that this leads me onto a new plateau, perhaps a different understanding of ‘knowledge’. It most often is out of the box but it is also stimulating and exciting.
We are always building on our platform of what we know and believe. When we allow ourselves to apply this in our lives, we find the validity of the knowledge for ourselves and when and where to apply ‘it’. Application is merely the next stage in our growing and refining. Perhaps it’s an issue of trust when we don’t take that next step? Do we trust ourselves about what we know when we don’t apply knowledge to life? Life is meant to be lived, to be experienced… not simply to exist in our thinking.
