A Small Learning Hack
Do you want to retain much more of what you learn in your study for the day?
When I resumed coaching privately in April 2023, I had a lot of new experiences from the last few years:
- Selling low-ticket memberships/subscriptions;
- Creating 20+ chess courses;
- Running a high-ticket group coaching program;
- Going through the whole learning/mastery process again with poker (which continues to this day).
These experiences gave me a much better understanding of how to help students improve much more rapidly.
In my early 20s, I would verbally tell students what to do to improve, but they would often forget it, due to it not being written down.
Now, at the end of every lesson, I make sure to write down a 'Training Plan' with the key study suggestions.
But there's something even more powerful that I do.
I get the student to say, in their own words, the main insights they gained/things they loved in the session. (A technique I learned from High Performance Coaching). I write those down in the lesson notes, as the summary of the lesson.
When you put something in your own words, it's so much easier to remember it. It also proves that you understood the lesson.
Recently, I thought - why not do this for every day of our Study? (not just when we have a lesson).
But it's harder to keep writing notes without an 'audience' to share it with, right? (At least, that's true for me).
So what I did in the last days is, I created a WhatsApp group and added two of my poker friends to it. I named it 'Daily Study Notes' and each day, I write bullet points of the things I learned that today on an important topic.
This is a great way to leverage other people - by sharing a summary of what you learned with a few others, it doesn't just improve your understanding/retention of what you learned, but also creates that accountability (did you do what you said you would do?), and the process of explaining/teaching to someone else is the most powerful way to master the skill yourself.
So my suggestion for you this Boxing Day is:
- Start a WhatsApp group 'Daily Study Notes';
- Invite a couple of trusted chess friends who have similar ambitions to you;
- Write as the first message 'The purpose of this group is to share a summary of what we learned each day from our chess study.' (you can always add aspects like accountability and training games later).
By the way, I've had a lot of inquiries about my coaching in the last few days and already made some initial arrangements. I expect the 2 private coaching spots to be taken very soon, so this may be the last chance for you to get in at the current price.
