We all are learning beings.

Life is all about learning.  As a child we learn to speak and walk and soon enough we are running and chatting away.  In school we learn to do the three R’s: Reading wRiting, and aRithmatic- plus all the fun stuff: history, earth science and eventually languages and literature.

I learned French in middle and high school and took it in college to a pretty advanced level.

I loved French, especially the music and the culture.

When I moved to Switzerland I first lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, in Leysin on the top of a mountain.  There I learned that their French was not the school French I had learned, nor was it “France French”.  So, I learned a few local dialect phrases and moved onward and upwards.  For example, I learned how to order a round trip train ticket with a discount, and a coffee with lots of warm milk, which I didn’t learn in school French, unfortunately.

Then I married my Swiss-German husband and moved to Zürich where people do not like to speak French.  It’s a very sad truth.  Even my children are almost “afraid” to speak it, although the also learned it in school and are pretty proficient, when necessary.

Because I moved to Zürich, I had to learn to speak Swiss-German.  Luckily, I had taken a travel German course in Minnesota a few years back and could ask where the city hall and the post office were.  Unfortunately, the course ended before I learned what the natives’ answers meant.  Thus, I was forced to ask the same question many times and follow pointing fingers to get to the right place. Learning by doing, at its rudimentary.

So, I took a beginning intensive German course for three weeks before my firstborn arrived and I tried to communicate with my in-laws, who didn’t speak a word of English.  The German course and the necessary practice helped me a lot, as did the pre-birth exercise class where I learned birthing terms, like what “contraction” meant.  That teacher was really talented, she spoke in Swiss German, French, Italian and English each hour to walk us through our exercises and talk about the upcoming birth experience. Hearing the phrases in German and French first before hearing the instructions in English helped me to learn the appropriate midwifery terms for our “big day”.  This even helped me to be able to tell my Swiss husband the word for contraction when he called the hospital that fateful night.  He had a loss for words in the stress of the moment.  I remembered, though, and proudly told him.

Then, after the birth of our daughter, I was on my own most days with a new child while my husband worked, and I had to find a new way to learn German.  Eventually I took a few classes before my second child was born, and then I had weekly Swiss German conversation lessons with a friend when baby number two was little.

But I was not very good, and my grammar sucked.

So, I continued to learn via reading the newspaper.  We eventually started buying the newspaper for me to read most days, and I tried to learn more that way.  I also learned “kid” Swiss German via my children’s friends, and a little bit of high German from the “Kinderkanal”, a German children’s TV channel.  To this day I try and read an article or two in German every day the newspaper comes.  Reading is a great way to learn vocabulary – in any language.

Then I decided to become a business coach and bought an iPad and found some good translation websites (dict.cc is my favorite) and went to class taught in (Swiss and high) German; sometimes I didn’t understand the gist of the information being taught, especially at the very beginning.  After 18 months, though, my German was a lot better and I even passed a German oral coaching exam.  Then, last year I passed a German oral supervision exam ONLINE.  I feel like I also passed a German language oral exam, and I am quite proud of myself.  We all can learn.  It takes some of us a longer time, some of us a shorter time, but we can.

Of course, I am not saying that my German is perfect, but it is now functional albeit ungrammatical.  My youngest says I don’t speak the language.  My delightful next door neighbor says it’s great.  Probably, it’s in the middle somewhere, depending on the subject.

Unfortunately, there is a type of person who thinks they know a lot, though, and is less teachable, especially when it comes to (negative) feedback.  Henry Cloud, in his famous video called “The Wise and the Foolish”, talks about this.  Also, there is a phenomenon called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” where the person (hopefully NOT in a leadership position) thinks they know it, but they don’t.  The main idea is to be open to feedback and even criticism, looking for even wee grains of truth.  We all have something to learn.  Let us keep on learning, even if we think “I know this”.

What do you want to learn?

What do you need to learn?  What would the people around you say?

What do you want to change?  How much pain is it going to take you to change?

Change and learning are really possible, no matter what.

Have a great learning (and change) week’!

Patricia Jehle               patricia@jehle-coaching.com