5 tips on how to keep learning at work

1. Challenge your own beliefs regarding your learning capacity

If you're feeling tired, you might start to identify your fatigue so much that you forget you have agency over your. thoughts and beliefs, Chhaya writes. In this state of mind, every time you say, "I'm so tired," you're teaching your brain that it's likely impossible to learn anything while you're exhausted.

Instead, Chhaya recommends you try to observe your fatigue without judgment or a desire to get rid of it and start thinking about what's possible even while you're tired. Having a more mindful response to your fatigue can help you creatively challenge any unhelpful beliefs you've been holding onto.

2. Start with topics that address urgent issues

Your motivation to learn will gain momentum when you build on what you already know and do, Chhaya writes. So instead of pushing through subjects that don't feel urgent or relevant to you, start with topics related to challenges that already exist and expand on your current knowledge to gain some momentum.

Chhaya writes about a coaching client he had who had been feeling overwhelmed at work and felt that others perceived him as "slow to make decisions." After overcoming some initial resistance to the feedback, the client decided to learn from it and discovered that his avoidance of being decisive had led to work piling up, which was likely why he felt overwhelmed.

After learning more about how to make better decisions, the client decided to teach his peers some of the methods he learned, which helped improve his own mastery of the topic and improved his confidence in applying it.

3. Formal programs aren't the only way to learn

When professionals think about learning on the job, many often think of pursuing a graduate degree or certificate at a university. While these programs can promise certain benefits that are valuable, they can also be expensive, unnecessarily exclusive, and time-consuming, Chhaya writes.

It's important to remember that formal programs are just one of many ways you can continue to learn, and oftentimes these programs can be too theoretical and tedious, making them less useful than other on-the-job methods like peer-to-peer learning, mentorship, or 360 feedback.

Chhaya mentions a client of his who was a newly promoted VP of human resources who had very little free time but wanted to improve her financial acumen. However, she didn't want to enroll in an MBA-level course and instead decided to ask her peer on the leadership team, the CFO, if she could learn more from him. This led to monthly one-on-one meetings where the CFO would explain the key aspects of their profit and loss reviews and the client would present her interpretation to receive the CFO's feedback.

4. Develop an emotional connection to learning

Another way to make learning easier is to pursue experiences that align with your deep-seated values instead of the expectations of others, Chhaya writes.

When what you're learning about is intrinsically motivating, it becomes a desirable part of your routine instead of another item on your to-do list. You can also develop an emotional context around your learning, which will lead the work involved to become a source of inspiration.

Chhaya mentions a client he worked with who was an executive always being recommended for advanced training programs, leadership conferences, and speaking opportunities because her managers believed she was someone who could continue to rise up the ranks, potentially even to CEO.

While the client was flattered, she also found these activities were difficult on top of her job and started wondering if she wanted to advance at all.

To get an idea of what she wanted to do, Chhaya writes that the client put aside what others wanted for her and reflected on her own values, which included a love of solving big issues in her industry and an ambition to drive change, but also a desire to spend more time with her family.

She ultimately decided that moving up the corporate ladder could result in less time with her family but also more agency over decisions and where to spend time than being in a junior role. She also felt on an emotional level that if she could be successful in honoring her values across family and work, it would serve as an example to her daughter of what was possible for a woman in business.

The client used this emotional context to reframe the learning opportunities she had from other people's expectations to things she specifically wanted to leverage for her aspirations.

5. Don't work against your brain

Once you're invested in learning new skills, you'll often feel the urge to push through fatigue and continue to absorb new information. But absorbing new information is useless if your brain won't retain it, Chhaya writes.

Instead, follow your brain's preferences for retention. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, once described the "forgetting curve" to explain how quickly people forget things they've learned. Factors like rest and the complexity of the topic can affect how well we retain information, but even so, we often forget things quickly.

Within a day, you typically only remember half of what was presented, and after a week, only around 10% of it, meaning that any lasting learning journey is "a literal fight against time for your brain," Chhaya writes.

However, techniques like spaced repetition and testing recall can help you improve retention for higher learning stickiness, Chhaya writes. For example, if you've come across some valuable but complex frameworks to improve business results and you want to be able to present them confidently, you can set aside a half hour every morning and evening to review it in parts, spacing out and repeating the exposure. Then, you can test yourself from memory until the frameworks become second nature to you.

Research has also found that the greater degree of original learning you add to the content you're absorbing, the slower your rate of forgetting. For example, you could consider developing more context around the frameworks you memorized, like learning the stories of companies where they were used or interviewing colleagues about the frameworks in order to get new perspectives on them, Chhaya writes.

"In today's fast-paced world, continuous learning is the key to having lasting influence in your career, yet already feeling overwhelmed by your daily workload makes it hard to stay consistent," Chhaya writes. "By using these strategies, you can develop a lifelong learning journey that not only elevates your skills but lifts you out of exhaustion by moving closer to your highest potential." (Chhaya, Harvard Business Review, 9/24)

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