They’re not always seeing what you’re seeing.

Think back to a time you were attempting to teach someone a skill or activity. Maybe it was showing your kid how to tie his shoes, your parent how to change a setting on an iPhone, or your spouse how to do the floss. Sometimes, depending on their dexterity or prior experience, they can follow along adequately. Other times, their attempts at reproducing those actions are just laughably bad. It’s so simple! How are they getting this wrong?

Your question is valid. You and your learner live and operate in the same world in which there are objective realities. A bowl is a bowl, a phone is a phone, the sky is up, the apple falls from the tree, and blue and red make purple. So if you’re showing them something so obviously clear, how could they possibly do it any other way?

In this dynamic space between teacher and learner, or expert and novice, the fact is that you are seeing things through completely different lenses. If two people are given different magnifying glasses – one is 5X and the other is 10X – they’re going to see the same object with very different levels of specificity. Your learner’s understanding of what the activity or focal point is might be different from what you see or intend for them to see. You see?

(This isn’t too dissimilar from the parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which subjective experiences and limited perspectives can impact how different people perceive the same thing.)

Differences in Perception

These different lenses exist within all kinds of relationships: peer to peer, mentor to protege, etc. It is especially apparent in the parent-child dynamic. Let’s explore:

My five year old son has been writing up a storm. The problem – if you can call it that, because it’s perfectly age appropriate – is his letter writing. The “e”s are backwards, the “d”s look like eyeballs, and the “k”s are…interesting. The biggest issue, however, is that he writes all of his letters bottom-to-top and right-to-left:

Knowing how common this is and not wanting to shatter his burgeoning confidence, I offer him gentle corrections here and there, which he patently ignores or, worse, interprets as criticism before flinging himself onto the ground in frustration.

So, I’ve resorted to a method that modern parenting experts might be critical of: the reward chart. Mastering all print letters gets him a trip to Bricks & Minifigs. Mastering all the cursive letters gets him a new Star Wars Lego set. Guess what? It’s working, because while some children are motivated by the pull towards self-betterment and intrinsic reward, others are highly activated by the idea of getting a prize. (I have one of each.)

We began with the letter “A.” According to ChatGPT, the average adult my age has written the letter “A” approximately 554,800 times. By all measures, this means I’m something of an “expert.” The problem with experts is that, the deeper the knowledge resides in the bones, the harder it is to teach.

It’s so OBVIOUS to me that he should use up all the real estate he’s given.

It’s so EASY for me to write top-to-bottom and left-to-right.

It is therefore BAFFLING to me that when I write the letter A with such abundant clarity, his interpretation is this:

But again, what the learner sees in the early stages of learning is not always what the expert wants or intends. What I demonstrate to him is a tall, erect, and symmetrical “A” written top-down and left-to-right. What he sees and hears is: draw three vectors that kind of come together. Guard lines and symmetry be damned, they simply are not on his radar. His path to mastery starts there. If I can recognize that, meet him where he is, and then guide him towards that eventual destination, I will have done my job.

This ability to imitate and reconstruct actions and skills hopefully improves as we get older and more dexterous, but this same gap in perception exists within all learning relationships.

The Stages of Learning are Layered

Remember that movie you watched countless times as a kid, so much so that you could repeat all the lines and reenact scenes? If you watched it again today, chances are you would experience it in a whole new way. Suddenly, you’re picking up on nuances, jokes, and references you had no idea were there. You discover that there was a whole layer of the viewing experience that went right over your head when you were a kid.

Learning actions and skills is a little like that. Over time, the things you see and the nuances you pick up on evolve.

Imagine looking at a painting for the first time, and the only thing you can see are the broad brush strokes: basic lines, maybe a central object that fixes your attention.

The more you look and study the picture, or the more mature you become, perhaps, the more you notice: the expressive movements of the forest floor, the gait of your subject matter.

At a certain stage, the visualization comes to life. The wild, serene, and colorful backdrop. The fine lines that detail the emotion and intimacy between two people. The painting has not changed, but your ability to see it in all its vividness and detail has.

Not only does it take time for novice learners to see the completeness in an action or movement, but it takes considerable repetition and iteration for them to be able to develop mastery themselves.

Lean Into Repetition

Have you ever met a child that learned how to tie her shoes perfectly after only being shown once? Probably not.

Most likely, the child needs to see each step again and again in order to make sense of it, put it together, and practice until it becomes muscle memory.

Repetition in doing is how physical actions and movements become habituated. What people don’t talk about is repetition in demonstration and visualization. As we stated earlier, the learner needs to see deconstructed actions and movements multiple times in order for them to truly understand what’s happening. And oftentimes, they need refreshers down the road due to knowledge drift.

Providing opportunities for repetition is exceptionally difficult. The expert cannot be expected to be at the learner’s beck and call to show them one sequence twenty times in a row. Knowing this, the learner is often too embarrassed to ask for multiple demonstrations or quick refreshers. Better, they might think, to just risk making mistakes than be seen as inept or – worse – needy!

Accepting the learner’s need for repetition and providing more opportunities is one place to start. It will take a great deal of time and patience. The other option is using a tool like Larabee, where repetition is baked in.

Don’t Say “It’s Not Rocket Science” (or Something Similar)

Years ago, a colleague of mine was showing me how to do something in Excel, like fill out an expense report or fulfill a purchase order. It was a novel 20-step process for me, but something so routinized for her that she couldn’t help blurting out “It’s not rocket science” every three or so steps.

She was right, of course. What we were doing was not hard, it was simply procedural. However, anything that’s new and procedural will invariably take time and repetition to learn.

Learning anything new can be a clumsy, frustrating, and discouraging experience, regardless of how simple or complex it might be. I remember a time during my college work/study when our organization’s executive director could not figure out how to operate the fax machine. Her assistant, decades my senior, leaned over to me and whispered, “If I was at her level and couldn’t figure out how to send a fax, I’d kill myself!”

A little dramatic and mean, but okay.

It’s unfair to attach someone’s inability to complete a new task with their overall aptitude, but unfortunately this happens all the time. Sometimes, things take time to figure out because they’re unfamiliar. Making demoralizing or critical statements like the ones above can be needlessly discouraging.

There is an Arab proverb that goes: “The mouth should have three gatekeepers. Is it true? Is it kind? And, is it necessary?” There are countless contexts where this quote can apply, and teaching skills to novice learners is one of them. Don’t say things that imply inadequacy. It’s neither true, nor kind, nor necessary.

Conclusion

For centuries and across cultures, actions and skills were learned through apprentice-style teaching methods. A novice learned and gained proficiency and dexterity through observation, iteration, and necessary error, scaffolded by the expert and community of practice.

In our modern world, so much of learning and skill-building occurs asynchronously, and too often the misconception is that if an action or movement is written down or documented, that is enough. It should be obvious and clear to the learner.

Learning physical actions and skills is not like learning concepts and ideas. They’re processed differently by the brain, they’re harder to put into words, and they’re harder to interpret from words. But once mastery occurs, the good news is that they’re harder to forget than concepts and facts, which is why a person who hasn’t knit in decades can suddenly pick up two knitting needles and blow through a scarf.

Remember: learning new things isn’t easy. And if a learner is forgetting or is unable to reproduce your actions, it might have less to do with aptitude and more to do with individual learning styles, perception, and the need for repetition.

Be Patient with New Learners

Do you or someone you know suffer from RIFS?