I have spent more than twenty years designing learning experiences, and my Ph.D. is in how people learn. The odd thing about this field is how much of what is well established never reaches the people who would benefit most from it. Plenty of what follows contradicts how most training still gets designed.
Here are 30 things about learning how to learn that I keep coming back to, and what I would add to each one after watching them play out in real rooms with real groups.
How learning actually works
1. Learning how to learn is a skill you can develop like any other. This is the one that changes everything else. Most people treat their own learning ability as a fixed trait they were issued at birth. It is a set of practices, and practices improve.
2. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so find what works for you. A caution here, because this idea gets stretched too far. The research does not support fixed “learning styles” where visual people must be taught visually. What it does support is that the right method depends on the material and the goal. Learning a language, a software tool, and a leadership skill call for three different approaches from the same person.
3. Practice is essential for learning new skills and improving existing ones. Obvious as a sentence, routinely ignored in practice. Most corporate learning is still built around exposure rather than repetition. People attend the session, nod, and never do the thing again.
4. Learning takes time, so be patient and persistent. The frustrating middle stretch, where you are no longer a beginner but not yet competent, is where most people quit. Knowing that stretch is normal is often what gets someone through it. The four stages of competence model is a useful map of exactly that discomfort.
5. The brain changes and adapts throughout life, a concept known as neuroplasticity. The practical consequence is the part worth holding onto. Age is a far weaker predictor of whether someone can learn something new than their recent habit of learning things.
6. The more you practice, the more efficient your brain becomes at the task. This is why expertise looks like ease from the outside. The expert is not working harder in the moment, they are running a process that has been compressed through repetition.
How to practise so it sticks
7. Learning is more effective spaced out over time than crammed. If I had to pick one item on this list to act on, it would be this one. Spacing beats cramming at the same total hours, which means you can learn more without spending more. It is also why a single full-day workshop, on its own, is a weak design compared with the same hours spread across a few sessions.
15. Deliberate practice means focusing on specific aspects of a skill and seeking feedback. The distinction that matters: repetition alone plateaus. Twenty years of doing something the same way produces one year of experience repeated twenty times. Deliberate practice means working at the edge of what you can do and finding out quickly whether it worked.
18. Spaced repetition techniques, such as flashcards, help with memory retention. The active recall is doing the work, not the card. Trying and failing to retrieve something strengthens the memory more than rereading it, which is why rereading notes feels productive and mostly is not.
19. Breaking a skill into smaller parts makes it easier to learn. Facilitators do this constantly without naming it. When I design a session, most of the work is deciding what the smallest useful piece is and what order the pieces go in.
14. Visual aids such as diagrams and mind maps help with complex concepts. Especially for anything with structure or relationships. If people cannot see how the parts connect, they memorize the parts and never use them.
20. The more senses you use, the more likely you are to retain it. The practical version is simple: doing beats watching, and explaining it to someone else beats both. Anything that makes you produce rather than receive is worth the extra effort. The Feynman technique works on exactly this principle.
Conditions that change the result
8. Learning is enhanced when it is relevant to your goals and interests. This is why I ask groups what they are actually working on before I design anything. The same content attached to a real project a person cares about is not the same content.
9. The context where you learn affects retention and transfer. Skills learned in a room that looks nothing like the place they will be used transfer poorly. It is one argument for doing the learning on a real challenge from the actual job rather than a tidy case study.
17. Set clear and achievable goals when learning a new skill. Achievable is the operative word. A goal you can reach this week produces evidence that you are improving, and that evidence is most of what sustains the effort.
27. A dedicated learning space helps. Partly focus, partly a cue to your own brain about what happens here. It does not have to be a study. A particular cafe at a particular time of day does the same job.
28. Exercise and physical activity enhance learning and memory retention. One of the more reliably supported findings on this list and one of the most ignored. A walk before a hard learning session is not a break from the work.
29. Taking breaks prevents burnout and increases productivity. Some consolidation appears to happen during the break rather than during the effort, which reframes breaks as part of the method rather than a reward for finishing.
Learning with other people
10. Learning is more effective when it is interactive and involves feedback. This is the finding that moved me from presenting to facilitating. Once you believe it, the sit-and-get model becomes hard to justify, whatever the slides look like.
11. Learning with others, in a group or with a mentor, enhances the experience. Part of it is accountability and part is exposure to how someone else approaches the same problem, which you cannot get alone at any speed.
13. Self-directed learning can beat a traditional classroom. With one condition attached: it requires structure you impose on yourself, because nobody else is providing it. Self-directed learning fails most often from lack of structure, not lack of motivation.
12. Learning how to learn is about developing critical thinking, not only acquiring knowledge. Knowing how to evaluate a source, notice a weak argument, and hold two competing explanations at once matters more each year that generating confident-sounding text gets cheaper.
The mindset underneath it
16. A growth mindset, believing skills can be developed with effort, supports learning. The useful version is narrower than the popular one. It is not general optimism. It is the specific belief that your current performance at a specific thing is a starting point rather than a verdict. Our books on growth mindset go deeper on this.
26. Learning how to learn helps with overcoming fear and self-doubt about learning new skills. The fear is usually about being seen not knowing, which is why psychological safety in a room determines how much learning happens in it. A group that cannot admit confusion cannot learn together.
22. It is a lifelong process requiring a willingness to adapt. The specific adaptation that gets harder with experience is letting go of a method that used to work. Expertise makes you faster and it also makes you more attached.
30. It is about developing a growth mindset as much as acquiring new skills. The compounding effect is the real payoff. Each thing you learn deliberately teaches you something about how you learn, so the next thing comes faster. That is the return people underestimate.
What it changes
21. Learning how to learn helps with career development and personal growth. The 70-20-10 model is worth knowing here: most development happens through the work itself, not through courses. Being good at learning from your own projects is the skill that actually moves a career.
23. It helps with problem-solving in all areas of life. Largely because a new problem is a learning problem wearing different clothes. The person who is good at working out what they do not yet know has an advantage everywhere.
24. It helps with personal empowerment and self-improvement. Knowing you can acquire a skill you do not currently have changes which opportunities look available to you, which is a bigger practical effect than it sounds.
25. It helps with decision-making. Better decisions come from noticing what evidence you would need, rather than from having more confidence. That is a learnable habit.
Where I would start
If you only take two things from this list, take spacing and retrieval. Spread the effort out, and make yourself recall things rather than review them. Almost everything else is an optimization on top of those two.
What is one thing you are trying to learn right now, and which of these 30 would change how you are going about it?
If you want to design learning experiences that work this way for other people, that is most of what we do. Our facilitation workshop and the Train the Trainer facilitator program both build these skills through practice. Tell us what your group is working on and we can suggest a starting point.