Capacity

It is a word that has so many uses in our daily lives.

Capacity to endure
Capacity to listen
Capacity to understand
Capacity to improve
Capacity to delegate

For me in the last 12 months or so, it has been all about my capacity to retain information that I have just read. It’s almost as if my brain is full and just continues to reject the input of information I was introducing.

Therefore my reaction was simple, and what I believed at the time to be quite appropriate. Don’t read!

“Well, how’s that working for ya, Tex?”

Not very well to be honest.

So a change of approach was needed. But, a change that is not about justification and not about using confirmation bias to find a way around this. So it was about having an open mind to finding a better way forward.

However, my reality was that there wasn’t a change in my approach.

For some unknown, no sensible reason (often defined as insanity) I fell into the trap of “If I continue the same old approach, maybe something will change”. But it didn’t, and rightly so. The same old approach continued to bring the same ineffective result. Read. No capacity to retain the information.

Now before we go too much further into this, I believe context becomes very important here. In my situation, there was limited retention, but not enough to make the important learning impacts I was looking for. Some information was retained, but not around anything significant and certainly not to point where I could rattle off the key points from my reading.

When it comes down to analysing why I couldn’t retain information, it would be pertinent to consider, motivation, subject matter, personal energy, time of day all of the things that could have had an influence on my diminished capacity.

I am pretty sure at one stage or another, I considered each and every one of these variables along with any other influences that I could think of, that may have restricted my capacity to read and retain that information.

However, after being in the space of contemplation for an extended period of time, I decided to get out of there and get into moving forward and making a change. Change in approach and more importantly a change in the result.

So a true change of approach was needed.

So my change of approach commenced with this: Sometimes to see the world differently or at least you in it, you need a different perspective by observing it from a different vantage point.

Simply put, in my instance, it was to stop reading to learn and retain. It became all about reading information that would then inspire my own thinking. The minute I embraced and adopted this new approach things changed and changed fast, changed big and to this point, have changed permanently.

I started to read or listen to take in information. This information would then give me reason to think about some of my own understandings, beliefs, thoughts in and around the topic I was reading about. From this journey of exploration and subsequent understanding, high energy ensued, energy and excitement that I would then use to fuel further research and understanding of the topic. The increase in my preparedness to research has amounted to a greater amount of both reading and writing.

The outcome from this quite extraordinary journey has been a renewed and increased capacity to take in and retain information.

Once I changed my vantage point, I could then see the way to change my approach (Read to inspire vs read to learn) and from that came the change in the result (information retained, increased learning).

And from all of that the most important outcome of all…

The Journey Continues!