Metacognitive Learning Design: how to stop fighting with your brain and start working with it

You’re ringing your hands/shaking your fists at the sky/saying unspeakable things to your laptop screen

You’re running your business yes…but between your particular flavour of neuro-spiciness, struggling to learn and commit to new business tools and strategies and navigating what feels like the beginning of the apocalypse, you wish that sitting down at your desk everyday felt energizing and calm instead of overwhelming and anxiety-ridden.

What if you could custom design your own approach to running a business with intention? (ie not by default based on what other people told you you need to do) This is what I call Metacognitive Learning Design.

CAVEAT: this is not a magic pill or an overnight transformation - it’s real change that happens when you put the work in over time (not in that way that requires you to be consistent every single-dingle day but in the real-life way of stop-and-go based on your energy, capacity and mental/physical health - you know imperfect, just like you)

Does any of this ring a bell?

• Tech tools and business strategies promise the moon and the stars but fail to recognise that your learning style isn’t mainstream
• There is pressure to find the right tools and strategies but this might be backward - identifying what you need first is a much more powerful jumping off point
• Your business operations are unkempt because you don’t actually know how to intentionally set them up (which isn’t your fault, more on this later)

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I created a simple, 4-step framework for digging up the overwhelm from the root and replanting something that will help take the edge off.

• STEP 1 → Identify the harmful affects of traditional education - trace a line between your struggle at school and your struggles in business
• STEP 2 → Uncover your approach to learning - develop your 1.0 framework to self-teaching
• STEP 3 → Audit your current set up - based on new information about how you learn, what’s working and not working about your current tools, strategies and systems?
• STEP 4 → Make a plan for your future set up - now that you know how to approach learning in your business, make a wish list and create a plan for integrating new stuff and phasing out old stuff

Let me tell you a story

When Nadia was in graduate school and still taking on some coaching clients she heard about Notion, got really excited about it and began playing around.

But without an intentional approach to learning and incorporating a new practice into her life, she treated it like a Google doc and mostly typed out lists and added links to YouTube videos she watched.

She’d even bought a handful of Notion templates but without knowing how to use the tool, Nadia became quickly overwhelmed, uncertain how to adapt someone else’s structure into her own needs.

When we met to talk about working together, Nadia told me that as one of only a few brown kids in her school, she was bullied pretty badly in the 3rd and 4th grade. Her response to this was to try to make herself invisible, hoping that if they didn’t notice her, the bullies would leave her alone. As she retreated further and further into herself, she stopped raising her hand in class and eventually, her curiosity faded away and she turned into an average student.

Fast forward a few decades and Nadia got an undergraduate degree and was going for her second masters. Somewhere along the way she realised that being an average student was a narrative she was ready to shed but that old habit of quelling her curiosity was holding her back from the organised, calm and supportive systems she needed as a student and entrepreneur.

In a pretty short period, Nadia designed a very flexible approach to learning, one that could accommodate her long-term health challenges, her energy levels and her family and community commitments. We clearly identified what current systems and tools were serving her and which were no longer working and why.

From here, it was a hop, step & a jump to planning out (which Nadia then began to implement) what the transition from her old systems to the new one would look like.

The solution: Metacognitive Learning Design

You don’t want one more business strategy, one more copywriting course, one more tech tool to get dusty on the shelf while you lament the price tag.

You want to follow through, learn the thing (even if it’s to discover it’s not the right thing for you) so your business gets closer to the vision you have for it.

My email course: Metacognitive Learning Design: why it feels like your business is running you, is an easy-to-follow guide to:

1. Understanding exactly how and why you struggle to do things in your business that everyone else seems to have figured out
2. Determine how you learn the best and what conditions you need to create to run your business so it doesn’t run you
3. Take stock of what’s working and not working so you can…
4. Decide what you actually need in terms of tools, strategies and systems and make a plan to put those things in place

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