We go through the motions of everyday life trying to do our best in the areas and fields we find ourselves thrust into, whether it’s our jobs, business, family, school, college, social life or a new skill we’re trying to perfect and master. We aim to do the very best we can to excel in those areas of life we care about the most, but more often than not we hit a plateau and find ourselves in a stagnant phase of the process without showing any improvement in our endeavours, whether personal or professional.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re working hard but not moving forward or significantly improving at a certain aspect of your life, you’re not alone, most of us experience this at some stage of our lives. What’s the way out of this stagnation that we face? How can we become better in the areas we wish to become better at? What separates the best performers in the world in their particular areas of expertise from the rest?
The answer, is to alternate efficiently between two zones: The Learning Zone and The Performance Zone.
This chart below shows what we experience in each zone and the processes that define each zone.
This activity of spending enough time in the learning zone and then applying what we’ve learned into action in the performance zone separates the masters from the rest.
As simple as it may sound, investing more time in learning, studying and practicing a particular skill where there is room for mistakes, or enhancing our knowledge about the particular field we want to excel at, giving room for experimentation and error, is as important as performing to our best capabilities in that particular field. In turn, we can perform and deliver better results in the performance zone if we’ve spent enough time in the learning zone.
In our daily lives, we’re forcefully thrust headfirst into just the performance zone, where the culture is to constantly deliver results and produce our best performances. Whether it’s at work at our jobs or at running a business where the focus is solely on the results or for that matter even in schools and colleges, which should be a time for learning and growing, the culture is relentlessly result and performance driven. We’re made to perform at a high level constantly, get the best results or get the best grades or you fail.
Our systems are designed to focus on only the performance zone while the learning zone is often overlooked. However, if we take the time out to spend time in the learning zone, perfecting our knowledge in our chosen areas, we can then apply those concepts and that knowledge into our performance in the performance zone, which in turn results in better performance. In essence, the performance zone affects our immediate performance but spending time in the learning zone increases our growth and future performance.
In his TED talk, after extensive research, while also citing examples and outlining the process, Eduardo Briceño states the facts about how vital it is for us to spend time in learning zone and to then alternate between the learning zone and the performance zone to excel and master the areas of our lives we care about the most.
Learning is a continuous process and should never stop. Everyday should be a new day to learn more and expand our knowledge and skills, we can then successfully improve in our performance and excel in the areas of life we care about the most.
Words For Reveries 
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