By Lisa Hochgraf
“This movement is not hard. It's just that you have no idea how to do it.”
This is my favorite quote from a series of movement learning cassettes by Anat Baniel. She teaches
Feldenkrais, a method of slow movements designed to help people learn to move more easily and to relieve pain. She follows this statement with comments about how we need to give ourselves opportunities—and then the time—to learn.
I was thinking about these ideas earlier this month as my husband, son and I navigated the new-to-us worlds of Germany and The Netherlands. Besides buying buttermilk and carbonated water by mistake because we hadn't taken time to learn German and Dutch, we also had to pay to use the restroom at an autobahn rest stop. This last experience made all three of us feel pretty lost.
First we had to get our minds around this foreign idea of having to pay for this service. Then we had to actually navigate getting the right coins in a currency that we don't usually handle. And, finally, we had to find the silver lining—if you read the back of your bathroom receipt, you can get an equivalent amount to spend in the host convenience mart.
Feeling lost led us to new learning. And while learning to move better like Baniel encourages through the Feldenkrais method is probably more meaningful than learning to effectively navigate the paid toilet system on the German roadways, the idea of getting into new territory as a way to learn something new resonates.
In credit union land, I hear about employee training rotations where managers or executives take on projects in unaccustomed parts of the operation as a way to broaden their knowledge and nimbleness. Similarly, I often hear graduates of CUES' CEO Institute say the program's out-of-box experiences left them a bit bewildered at first, but led them in the end to more effective ideas about leadership.
How do you get out of your usual stomping grounds to learn new things? Please share your strategies in the comments.
Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES editor.
