All of us have been posed this question some time or the other. And we usually shrug off the question with flippant dismissal. Very few of us are ecstatic or gush about how swell life is. Many of us reply with weary sighs while some of us grimace with ill-concealed pain. What we are talking about here of course is not life in the sense of being alive and breathing, but the quality of life we live.

I often wonder about the quality of life we seek, and can’t help comparing it to food to see whether we have the recipe to make life tick.

Childhood to maturity

For most of us, childhood is when life is most enjoyable. Bereft of responsibility, we are taken care of, sheltered, fed, clothed, educated and kept in good health. All we have to do is savour every wonderful moment to the fullest. Whenever we take ill, all we have to do is lie back and recover. Nothing clutters the brain beyond the events of the day. It is often said that a child is happiest because he or she lives in the present with both mind and body as one unit.

When we are young adults, life begins to bloom as the mind and body are nourished with knowledge and metabolism, peaking to produce perhaps the finest co-ordination between the mental and physical states. Life is one great colourful flourish on the canvass of time. But what happens thereafter?

Youth moves on to maturity and we begin to gain “focus” on our lives and what direction we wish our lives to take. Ambitions and achievements take over from the spirit of adventure. Dedication and devotion to purpose replace daredevilry. Deliberate thought process prevails over impulsive intuition. Career quests overshadow the carefree spirit.

Coping with stress, chaos, work-life imbalances, pressures of the daily grind, people relationships, demanding targets, conflicting goals, aspirations and professional paradigms of an ever-changing world are daunting tasks that sap us mentally and physically! Burnout, suicide and divorce are some of the outcomes of such a life.

Life on a platter

There is no solution unless life resembles a balanced meal. And how is that so? Well, sometimes we assume life to be only that part which takes up most of our time. For the career chasers it is their vertical growth rate in the organisation or in their own business and for the homemaker, it is housework. All this reflects quantity and not quality. But not so with food!

Almost anybody I know has dined out at a restaurant. When choosing where to eat, we invariably look for not just good cuisine, but also the location of the restaurant, the parking service, the air-conditioning, the music, the décor, the ambience, the nature of its current clientele and so on. While all we really do is eat there. But the packaging and the surrounding benefits are so necessary and all so important to us. Then why do we judge life by just the food, or sometimes by just the main course?

Why not package life in a way that even the most miserable meal or career glows in the ambience of hobbies or career offshoots? Whenever I’ve sat down to order a meal, I invariably look for the accompaniments, and often enough it is these that decide the success of the meal. I cannot get into my steak, no matter how delicious it looks, without my baked potatoes, spinach and boiled veggies and that pat of golden butter oozing goodness. I know of a fellow who went berserk when he did not receive his pickles with the food. It simply shows that not always is the quality of food or for that matter, life, defined by just the main serving, but often enough, it is the tiny add-ons that really decide the lip smacking goodness of life.

Packaging the zing!

What are these add-ons that put the zing into life? This is for each one of us to find out individually. It can often be an absorbing hobby or sport or music or any parallel line of activity that brings in tangible fulfilment. Sometimes physical evidence of effort ploughed in, does not reflect as much as we desire, in our basic square meal in life. So we choose to bring in activities of our own, which meet this need.

I often offset my reverses or lack of results at work by creating my own successes, unto myself, if not to anybody else, through penning my thoughts and experiences into tangible form, either in prose or poetry. Energizing yourself becomes necessary to sustain the quality of living in the main life zones, usually career and family life. Somehow, if we were as fussy about the add-ons to our lives as we are in choosing the toppings for our pizza, life could become one big delight.

Not all of us are fortunate enough to choose a line of work or career that dovetails comfortably with our skills or education or interest. But aren’t we often told at the restaurant that the very item we wish to savour is not on the menu of the day? Do we leave the restaurant and seek another one where we find what we want, even if it takes all night? The chances are, we don’t and instead settle for the next best or whatever else is available.

We can make the best of the situation by either being open to the new experience of what gets served in our plate, or disguising what we have with a whole lot of sauces and condiments, hoping to reconstruct something totally new. Isn’t life often frighteningly like that?

If we could only pause to listen to the winds of fresh thought whispering through our minds, we would certainly have cause for celebrating the true quality of life!

Over time it has been realized that the wise one is not necessarily the most skilled teacher. Learning proficiently and transferring the learning just as well is not really as simple as it seems. It takes far more skill to teach than to learn.

The teacher has not only to have a full and wholesome appreciation of the subject but also know how best to transfer this in its entirety in a useful manner to the learner considering the learning styles and needs of each individual learner.

Whilst studies have been popularized concerning learning styles, and suitable adaptation of knowledge transference has been undertaken to match the varied learning styles of participants, the newer platform of transference has to do with the multiple intelligences that seem to be far more effective in reaching across to the learner.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University. It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on IQ testing, is far too limited. Instead, Dr. Gardner proposes several different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:

•    Linguistic intelligence (word smart)
•    Logical-mathematical intelligence (number/reasoning smart)
•    Spatial intelligence (picture smart)
•    Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (body smart)
•    Musical intelligence (music smart)
•    Interpersonal intelligence (people smart)
•    Intrapersonal intelligence (self smart)
•    Naturalist intelligence (nature smart)

How does this affect us learning facilitators and trainers and our participants?

The theory of multiple intelligences has strong implications for adult learning and development. Many adults and young professionals seeking to make their mark in life often find themselves in jobs that do not make optimal use of their most highly developed intelligences. For example, the highly bodily-kinesthetic individual may be stuck in a linguistic or logical desk-job like customer care when he or she would be much happier in a job where they could move around, such as in front-line sales.

The theory of multiple intelligences gives adults a whole new way to look at their lives, examining potentials that they left behind in their childhood (such as a love for art or drama) but now have the opportunity to develop through courses, hobbies, or other programs of self-development.

This is another way of chasing away the boredom with the routine or the mundane work one becomes habituated to accept and live with, lowering the levels of enthusiasm, responsiveness and creativity – some of the essential ingredients for success in these competitive times.

What we must recognize is that these multiple intelligences offer choices to (a) trainers/teachers/learning & development facilitators to use varied methods and practices of transferring and processing learning deliverables and to (b) participants to acquire and learn varied methods of addressing work itself, using creative methods to address work issues through the favoured and more developed intelligences

Let’s look at the eight intelligences and how training or learning methods can be matched against them.

Linguistic intelligence (word smart): Reference reading material, reference books, well scripted program handbooks.

Logical-mathematical intelligence (number/reasoning smart) Case studies, problem solving models & techniques, inventory/ questionnaire/ response form/ instrument evaluation & analysis.

Spatial intelligence (picture smart): Use of graphs, charts, pictures and diagrams.

Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (body smart): Role plays, projects, structured training games/activities.

Musical intelligence (music smart): Music with learning deliverable lyrics. Participants create musical learning summaries using popular tunes, leveraging nursery rhymes to advanced learning songs & anthems.

Interpersonal intelligence (people smart): Team exercises that need the identification and use of the varied resources of team members.

Intrapersonal intelligence (self smart): Presentations by participants on processed learning, role-reversals. Participants study and deliver (teach) selected modules in the program itself, participants are asked to create learning models/modules

Naturalist intelligence (nature smart): Learning from real world experiences, interpretations and guiding principles that emerge from such experiences.

Dr. Howard Gardner says that other than areas of developed expertise, most of us react or process and infer learning outcomes in all other areas in the manner we used to do as 5-year-old kids – the earliest levels of cognitive intelligence.

Implications of this are as follows for trainers/facilitators/teachers and our corporate participants:

1. As trainers/teachers/facilitators we need to be experts at what we teach else we are simply transferring our own 5-year-old childish reasoning and logic to the participants, who receive it believing it is the word of the expert. The snowballing consequences are nightmarish!

2. To be experts, demands more than average attention and learning in the area of study.

3. Extensive reading (to replace extensive research and study) is the minimal effort one has to undertake to raise the levels of personal awareness, knowledge/content and competence/understanding.

4. Participants are unlikely to react in the ‘expected’ manner in either receiving, processing or understanding the learning deliverables, as they are most likely to be at a level of ‘non-expert’ in these areas and therefore would have learning conclusions matching their own 5-year-old level of logic and belief.

Concluding remarks

This exercise leads us to some interesting conclusions in the training-learning process:

a. Content transference is easily possible at an adult learning level. Summarising received content at the end of the program is not an indication of learning or understanding as pointed out by Dr. Gardner.
b. Understanding can only be ascertained when participants apply the learning in simulated real world experiences that are necessarily different from the experience created when delivering the concept. For example, participants can offer each other their own past experiences and ask others how they would use the learning to have handled the situation, or offer their own new approaches to the old
c. Training videos, role plays, case study experiments, training exercises, need to be processed with ‘understanding’ in mind – not a simple analysis of what happened in the experiment or video or exercise, which is what participants tend to explain, but how this learning can be applied at work/back in real life.
d. Similarly hoping that the video/exercise or experiment is ‘self-explanatory’ is not constructive as the learning derived by participants is likely to be unprocessed content management and learning summaries are derived from the 5-year-old child-like ‘theories of life’. The ‘expert’ must anchor the learning rather than leave loose ends to be automatically tied.
e. Understanding can be investigated only by moving from basic questions like what, why, how to the more advance ‘aesthetic’ level questioning skills/questions that ask participants to offer personally processed input that has direct bearing on their work practices or behavior.
f. This points to program design and delivery process. Program designs which are packed almost like a school time table leave very little processing and understanding time. The program flow is often ‘impaired’ by handling lack of understanding or processing by participants and therefore participants learn to respond by cleverly managing the showcasing of content to represent learning and understanding, in order to release the program flow and time which tends to be the casualty, in a concept-crowded program.
g. The facilitator has to be equipped to deal with the following learning hurdles which participants will unconsciously throw up.

• Misconceptions: Based on their past experiences, pet theories and assumptions
• Rigid algorithms/formulas: Formed from their earlier explanations of how the world works; input to output formulas that worked or seemed to work; expert opinions of others they consider experts, information in magazines/MIS data (tabulated and charted data tends to overwhelm the thinking and understanding process).
• Stereotyping and world views held by participants to diagnose and judge the rest of the world , in order to make decisions, are usually based on earlier formed assumptions and perceptions which without confrontation or validity checks, often script the guide book of their current life.

Dexter J Valles, business and life trainer renowned for his programs under the “At the Steering Wheel of Life” and “Winning Edge” banners, is CEO of VALMAR INTERNATIONAL, a Mumbai-based management consultancy. Contact him at www.valmarinternational.com or http://valmar.page.tl