Your personal development coach

Transfer Learning to Life

This tip will help you bring new knowledge, skills, attitudes and creative ideas into your life and work. Let it help you to:

  • See and be a real change agent. You can change habits and influence the world around you. Fully accept this power.
  • Prepare to bring your learning out of the realm of “the possible” into life and work.
  • Actively manage your change process for long term success.
    • Implement your plan
    • Set dates for completion of progress benchmarks.

Here’s how to be a powerful change agent:

Create a multi-sensory vision to guide your learning transfer. Envision and feel the changes you want to make in the actual environment where you will use your learning. Plan to keep this vision where you will frequently see it.

  • In your imagination, experience yourself using your learning and realizing the benefits of changing – benefits to you, others, your work, the future. Let your imagination support and motivate your change efforts.
  • Use the Transfer to Life Guide (in Tools) to lay out your vision

Map the energy field by listing everything you can think of that will help or hinder the changes you want to make. This is called a “Force-Field” analysis.

  • Include what will be happening inside you when you try to use your learning. Include your own resistance and desires, your energy for change, your fears and courage,
  • Identify how other people will make it easy or difficult to change.
  • Consider how procedures, routines, tools, reward systems will make your changes easier or more difficult. Imagine how the people, places, and things around you will your success.
  • Your Transfer to Life Guide (in Tools) is a place to record your thoughts

Clearly define the main situations where you will use your new learning… If/when (this happens)…..Then (I will take this specific action)

  • Creating “If/when---then” scenarios makes you more alert to the situations that would normally trigger old habits. You want to notice these triggers to remind you to use the new knowledge, skills, attitudes you have developed.
  • Example: “When …(this technical problem, this situation, this feeling, this opportunity, etc.) arises…. Then I will …(do, say, propose) this….
  • The Tool, Transfer to Life Guide will help you organize your intentions

Get support from another/others who will make it easier to make the changes you plan

  • Go to people who can either directly support and encourage your personal changes or people who can influence the environment.
  • Describe the changes you want to make. Explain the benefits you hope to see for you and others – your work.
  • Ask for any specific support that others can provide – changes in procedures, schedules, anything related to more successful change. Share any ideas that others may want to adopt for their own life and work
  • Talk about the change as a win-win.
  • You Transfer to Life Guide (in Tools) will help you do this.

Lobby for changes in procedures, tools, routines, communication patterns and content, feedback, rewards, processes

Let your Calendar support you! … set up reminders

  • Put a reminder symbol on your calendar for every work day for a month. In month two, phase the reminders out – every other day, every third day every week. These will help you start and then sustain your new behavior long enough for it to be habitual.
  • Set specific review dates that mark progress.

Celebrate/reward success and progress

  • Reward yourself for progress along the way (even very small steps forward!)
  • Self-rewards may include …
    • Internal rewards like self-recognition. Just tell yourself you are making progress. Appreciate your hard work.
    • External rewards along the way: special breaks, treats, opportunity to go somewhere or do something you enjoy, etc.
  • Again, the Transfer to Life Guide (in Tools) will support you.

Take the time to document and track your changes using the Guide or a tool of your own. This will help you strengthen your intentions and persistence in the face of daily pressures to continue to do what you have always done.