#91 – Means and Ends

"Poder aprender", el pódcast que te ayuda a aprender idiomas, hobbies

y skills de manera más efectiva.

Acá hablamos sobre hábitos de aprendizaje, práctica deliberada

y estrategias para aprender mejor.

Mi nombre es Walter Freiberg y te invito a desarrollar tu poder

de aprender para alcanzar tus metas personales y profesionales.

There's a phrase that says "the end justifies the means." I prefer

a slightly different version.

It goes like this: "Once we set a good goal, the means have to be good

as well." It's easy to get obsessed with goals: getting the promotion,

building the habit, fixing the problem.

But if the way we get there is out of alignment, we often lose something

more important along the way.

Growth that's rushed, forced, or out of sync with our values rarely lasts.

What's the cost of chasing outcomes without integrity?

How can we use learning itself as a space to practice the

kind of life we want to live?

And what does it look like when our goals are guided by

presence instead of pressure?

These are some of the questions we explore in episode number 91 of "Poder aprender".

When we set learning goals, learning a new skill, building a habit, improving

a skill, changing some sort of behavior, sometimes we forget about the how.

How we want to approach the process.

The way we practice, the energy we bring, the mindset we are holding in those

moments, that reveals a lot about our values, and it also can be a reflection

of who we are and who we want to be.

There are so many ways of going about learning something or

getting better at something.

We can bring our whole self into that, and that includes our values, what's

important to us, our inner compass, in all these efforts that we are bringing

to do something in a specific way.

For that reason, when we are learning, is not that we are

learning without values or without specific ways or an internal context.

For example, let's say that you set the goal of waking up earlier.

You want to create more space in your day and you want to feel more relaxed.

You don't want to feel rushed.

You set that goal and start practicing that.

You get up very early and instead of using that time to foster relaxation and

to become a more calm and intentional person, you use that time early in the

morning to scroll through social media or maybe you go to news websites, check

the news and do different activities that put you in a very reactive,

anxious, and stressful state of mind.

You would have accomplished your goal of getting up early, but

the cost would be very high.

So here's an example where the how and the why, the reason you wanted

to do that are drifting apart.

It's about having both and realign them.

If you're after presence, clarity, peace of mind, that would be

something important to keep in mind as you are thinking of this goal.

It's not just waking up, getting up early for the sake of getting up early.

There's something broader to this goal in the context of your life.

That specific thing has a place in the big scheme of things.

And depending on the place where you're coming from, you are

going to embody some of that.

So when you think of a specific goal, you can also take into account what

type of person you want to be doing that and practicing that learning.

And that might be a different way of saying this is how you bring your values

into the learning and into the practice process, whatever the goal might be.

I'm talking about practice.

Not all practice is equal.

There's the concept of integrity also in effort, and there are

different types of effort and there are different types of practice.

Effort alone isn't enough.

We want an aligned effort with the type of practice that we are developing.

Typically, we are told that persistence is something important and it's

good and consistency... and that we have to try hard and push through.

Sometimes, effort is not so useful.

It depends on the type of effort and the type of action, how

we are directing that action.

And you can put a lot of hours of practice or you can reflect a lot

and still be practicing unhelpful habits or thoughts, ways of thinking.

What's most important here is the quality and the intention behind your efforts.

I'll give you an example with meditation.

And I've been to this Vipasana retreat, Goenka 10-day silent retreat.

Since then, I continued practicing meditation at home and retreats,

monasteries in different places.

And I can tell you that not all the time that I've been sitting on a

safu or a meditation cushion I've been doing productive practice.

I am well aware of that.

And lately when I... I've organized myself retreat, when I was taking

more extended periods of time for practice and meditation and deepening

my practice, I knew that it wasn't all about the hours, even though they help.

It's about like the concentration or the focus or the attention

that I bring to those hours.

So the goal is not to sit as many hours as I can or try to mimic

the schedule of this meditation center, or that meditation retreat.

I know that I can be sitting, practicing distraction.

Fantasizing about my future instead of doing the meditation practice.

It's about being honest with ourselves.

Is 15 minutes going to be a good amount of time that we can remain

focused and concentrated on something?

Sometimes we tell ourselves: "Okay. I don't want to do less than an hour. I

don't want to do less than two hours or three hours a week." And maybe even though

that might be worthwhile time duration for the practice, maybe it's not sustainable.

It's not something that we can start with.

We end up being in this place where we tell ourselves that we should

be practicing this much time, and then we find ways of rendering that

ineffective because it feels too much for where we are right now.

I think that it's useful to be very intentional with

the quality of our practice.

And sometimes it can be better to do less and with more attention and more focus.

I've seen this in language learning practice, in

meditation, so many life areas.

it's not all about quantity and pushing through and effort . That's also about

the intention and the quality behind that.

When we set a goal we also have a specific view in mind and we have

an idea of how we could get there.

We'd like it to be short, preferably.

And we are looking for shortcuts.

Sometimes, we end up compromising our views or adopting views

that are not so healthy.

We might get influenced by what those around us are doing or what we see

in our communities, social media, on the Internet, on the news, anywhere.

And we think that also we should be displaying, we should be sharing, we

should be making what we're doing visible.

Also that might make us set unrealistic expectations for ourselves.

We believe that we should be doing this in a certain way because that's

the information that we have around, and that's what we see others doing.

There might be an easier way, there might be a shorter path.

And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with trying

to do things in less time.

And sometimes we get obsessed with that or we become fixated

with the idea of being efficient.

Even in the world of self-improvement, there seems to be always a more efficient

way, a more productive way, a more perfect way of doing specific things.

And sometimes it's about having an honest view and being willing not to

cut corners to get where we wanna go.

That might imply considering means that maybe take more time.

It all depends where we are going.

Regardless of what we are doing, real progress usually starts slow, and what

it requires from us is patience, being self-aware and sometimes being willing

to do less and with more intention.

It's about being willing to do less but better.

The potential problem with looking for shortcuts is that maybe when

we are looking for intensity and trying to get a lot done in a very

short period of time, we might end up compromising sustainability.

Let's say you get into a very difficult, exhausting 30 day challenge that's very

extreme, and where you have not much rest.

Maybe it feels very productive and maybe you crash in the

middle or at the end of that.

That wouldn't be very much of service to you.

I mean, for your future self and for what you want to create long term.

If your goal is to get something in 30 days and you are not

interested in sustaining that over time, maybe that works for you.

Sometimes, longer periods of time tend to be better to maintain the changes and the

transformations that we're looking for.

And there are different ways of doing these 30 day challenges.

We can make them more or less kind to ourselves, to our body, to our minds.

And so that's something to keep in mind.

I believe that good means are good preparation for better ends.

In fact, the way that you are practicing shapes what you'll be

able to handle later, what you will be able to do and how we are going

to respond to future challenges.

We underestimate the power of small actions and what that will

enable for us in the future, like: what's the bigger version of that?

At the end of the day, even when practicing and doing things as a

small action or small habits, you are working your way there bit by bit

transforming certain habits or patterns.

That is building you up for the future.

For example, let's think of a person who has anger outbursts, who feels

like saying what they wanna say.

And sometimes can be hurtful for other people.

They want to get better at not saying that out loud right away.

And even though they want to say something and they feel the

emotion, they would like to maybe be able to give that to themselves.

And if it started with I am able to delay that reaction by

one second or three seconds.

That doesn't seem like progress to many people.

That doesn't seem much.

Or maybe when they are able to not say hurtful thing just once, but

then the rest of the day or during the rest of the conversation, they

keep saying hurtful things to others.

That might not sound like progress or that's like they are still doing

it and I think that it counts, and that goes in the right direction.

It's preparation for something better.

It's not the end yet, and it's a good intention, and that's something

that is leading to where they want to be, where they are able to say

less and less of this type of things.

Or with exercise.

Let's say a person would like to walk on the treadmill 30 minutes a day.

And right now they're not able to for multiple reasons.

They try starting with three minutes and that's something they can do.

And then the next day they do four minutes and then five minutes.

I know someone who recently has started practicing this and they're creating a

daily walking habit, because when you say "I'm walking, I walked three minutes today

and four minutes the following day."

After three days, you can start saying like: "I'm walking daily. I'm walking

every day on the treadmill." Every day I'm getting on the treadmill

and I am walking for a little bit.

It doesn't matter how many minutes.

And of course that eventually we want to increase that number.

And it can be done in a gradual way, bit by bit.

Sometimes, it's not realistic or it's not feasible to go from zero to 30.

We need to go start with three, four.

Maybe 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8.

And there will be days where we are repeating and then we get to increase.

It's like when going to the gym, sometimes we get to increase the weights

and we stay at that for a little bit.

And then as we get stronger, and we are able to increase that again,

we stay at that weight and that counts, and that's important.

That's part of the process.

And then maybe we increase that a little bit and we continue that process.

How you pursue something is just as important as what you are pursuing.

If your means are rushed, reactive, or disconnected from

your values, the result might not be worth it or it might not stick.

But when you choose aligned action, when you move from clarity and

not from fear, the process itself becomes part of your transformation.

Every small decision is a rehearsal for the kind of person you want to become.

So yes, goals matter, but so does the road you walk to get there.

Because the most meaningful wins aren't just achievements.

They are a reflection of how you showed up moment by moment.

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Sigan aprendiendo y acuérdense de practicar bien.