August. It’s the traditional back-to-school month that kicks off the next nine months of formal education for those in K-12 as well as in college.

But what about us adults who have already earned diplomas, certifications, and other badges of accomplishment?  We now require ongoing, wider ranging  education than mere formal school.     

Adult learning needs to be a year round and life-long practice—with recesses and other breaks for good behavior, celebration and recovery. Continual learning has become essential today—not just a nice-to-have—because of the speed at which technology, work, and geopolitical conditions are changing.

When you make the effort to learn as an adult you can reap at least these five benefits:

1. Keep your current skills fresh and acquire new skills, such as learning how to use GenAI effectively.
2. Continue to grow and develop personally and professionally as you also meet the rising expectations of your customers and clients.
3. Guide your actions more strategically and intentionally to support your values and purpose. Otherwise, you can find yourself falling behind, playing catchup or having to settle for options you don’t like as much.
4. Become more agile to respond to work that’s more complex and interconnected across domains. You’re doing more than deepening your expertise; you’re opening your aperture and broadening your perspective.
5. Spark innovation by integrating new ideas, experimenting, and creating new solutions plus spotting new opportunities.

You may discover other benefits too. (Please share if you do!)

Becoming and staying a continual learner isn’t only about consuming content. It’s also about intentionally taking actions that help you develop your “being” side, that is your internal operating system as Dr. Ryan Gottfredson describes it. This involves cultivating a   growth mindset, adopting systems, and building habits to support you as you grow and develop.

The roots of strong, effective continual learning is a growth mindset that supports cognitive flexibility as well as your “being” side. With a growth mindset, as identified and defined by Dr. Carol Dweck, you believe that you can improve your abilities and yourself through effort and learning.  Cognitive flexibility is the mental ability to adapt your thinking and behavior in response to changing goals, environments, or perspectives. (To learn more, check out Why and how cognitive flexibility can help, not harm, you throughout life.)

Tip: To nurture your growth mindset, you can ask yourself these two questions every week:

1. What did I learn this week, and how am I going to use this?
2. What am I focused on learning about this coming week? Recognize that you may prefer to be more opportunistic and learn new things you haven’t yet anticipated. Asking the question nonetheless primes you to pay more attention to learning.

Here are some other tips for practicing continual learning. Use any or all of them that appeal to you and  work for you. And please experiment to finetune them to work even better for your unique brain and body.

• Reserve time for learning. Block time on your calendar in 15 – 20 minutes periods for intentional learning. Doing this one, two or more times each week gives your continual learning a big boost. You also can do 14-day or monthly “learning sprints” around a specific topic or skill.
•  Ask questions. Cultivate curiosity. Ask “Why?” and “What if?” regularly. And when you interact with others, especially individuals you don’t yet know all that well, make an effort to learn something from them and something about them. That way you’re adding to your content knowledge while building your relationships.
•  Learn with others. Take part in communities of practice, professional networks, book clubs, and other groups that interest you. That helps you incorporate diverse perspectives and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Also, “social learning” experiences help you build stronger relationships with individuals as well as  making the content stickier and easier to remember.
•  Mix sources. Read articles, books, research papers. Listen to podcasts. Watch videos. And try using new tools and techniques. Learning sticks better when it’s multisensory and applied.
•  Diversify topics. Challenge yourself to explore topics outside your usual areas of responsibility and interests. When you explore new topics, especially those that intrigue you, you’ll get some new ideas and insights that can challenge and expand your thinking. The information can increase your agility as well as ignite new ideas that may lead to innovation.
• Reflect and apply. Set aside time to pause and ask yourself “What does this information/learning mean for me?” That helps you turn information into insights, which builds deeper learning.
•  Leverage tech to support you. Use apps to capture and connect ideas that you can refer to later. You also can use apps to summarize information for you. Be careful though. On the plus side, summaries help you get acquainted to new ideas quickly, especially if you’re looking for highlights in a new area. However, if the summaries are more like fast food than a well-balanced meal, you could have a false sense of comfort with the subject matter. You may feel informed but you haven’t engaged deeply enough to internalize the topic, explain it to others, or apply the knowledge.
• Experiment and iterate. Try some or all of these various approaches or others and then reflect on what’s working and what isn’t. Remember you’re getting helpful feedback; you’re not making mistakes. It’s hard to make mistakes as an adult learner, especially when you know yourself well, as my grandmother experienced.

 My grandmother influenced me to become a continual learner, I recently realized. When she was in her 60’s, she decided to enroll in college, shortly after my moving to Lafayette, Louisiana from West Texas with her second husband and their teen-aged son, my uncle.

The University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL), home of the Ragin’ Cajuns, accepted her as a freshman majoring in English in 1965. She quickly discovered the study habits she used as a Chicago high school student 40 years earlier were rusty. She and I, her oldest grandchild, became long-distance accountability partners for studying. (Being in grammar school I had more time for this responsibility than did my uncle who was now in high school.)

My grandmother enjoyed her academic classes and some electives, including art, music appreciation, and yoga. American History of the 20^th Century was a challenge though. The professor and her fellow students expected her to share stories about the Depression since she had lived through it. She apologized; she had blocked those years out of her mind.

Her other challenge was the school’s gym requirement, which she had put off until senior year. Big mistake! Her son was now a freshman at USL as were many of his high school friends, whom my grandmother knew and liked as they often attended his parties at my grandparents’ home.

My grandmother hated wearing gym clothes.  (She had gained weight over the years and was very self-conscious about how her figure compared with her young classmates in the all-female gym class.)  Plus, she had no desire to run and play on a basketball court with students more than four decades younger than she. My grandmother was so  uncomfortable that she went to the Dean and pleaded her case for taking some other class. I can’t remember how they resolved it, but she did graduate and get her diploma.

And she inspired me to keep on learning—and probably to challenge authority figures too. I’m thankful for these skills as they help me immensely.

How about you? Are you also  experiencing the value of lifelong learning?