Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

My old dog knew the same one trick by heart. Every time he saw a treat approaching he’d break out into the same Tiktok-style choreographed routine he’d mastered as a puppy. Double-paw-shake, heel, sit, lie down. He’d rush it so much that sometimes he’d try to do multiple steps at once and trip over himself. If we tried to teach him even a new sequence of the same steps, we were blatantly ignored. The trick got him the treat every time. Why change?

This is the dog version of what Carol Dweck famously calls the “fixed mindset”. “The fixed mindset doesn’t allow people the luxury of becoming”, she explains. “They have to already be.” For dogs aspiring to regular treats and a warm place to sleep, a fixed mindset is just fine once the puppyhood is behind you.

But this is also true for many humans: once we attain an elevated status that allows us to “already be” (perhaps as an expert in our field) we let go of the luxury of becoming.

Why We Stop “Becoming”

When we start our careers, our world gets steadily wider, yet there’s a point where it starts to shrink. The more years of wisdom we acquire, the less we branch out. There are several reasons for this — some we inflict upon ourselves, and some are inflicted upon us.

We focus on control, not curiosity 

As our responsibilities shift to delivery, we become more focused on getting stuff done to a high standard and less on enjoying the learning opportunities they represent.

Challengers shrink into the shadows

The more our views are respected as industry experts, the less others debate and counter our points of view, making it easier to fall into an echo chamber trap and harder to uncover divergent perspectives.

Our filters get narrower 

The more time we spend on a topic and the deeper our knowledge, the more we zero-in on the best sources of information for what we need. We see less of the edges as we’re stuck in the middle, able to quickly get to an answer without searching widely and uncovering fresh possibilities.

As a result, we consult a smaller range of sources and form less diverse perspectives. We can slip into this mindset without realising it — so how can we slip out of it?

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Learning new tricks again

If we want to change, we need to tackle our natural resistance to change in different ways. To do that, we can use the famous ADKAR model to figure out where our resistance lies and lean into learning.

Awareness

We level up our awareness of new learning opportunities by inviting **different points of view — surrounding ourselves with people of diverse perspectives and inviting them to challenge our own.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch formalised the concept of reverse mentoring in 1999 with a pilot project pairing 500 senior and junior employees. At the height of the dot-com bubble, he aspired to “have the youngest and brightest teaching the oldest” about new technology — “we tipped the organisation upside down.”

For everyone I mentor from a different generation, I ask them what matters most to them and their peers. What about the status quo makes them angry? What about the future seems most exciting? And what could I do differently?

Desire

Old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks because they’re comfortable and learning can be a slog. Much like getting up off the sofa and into your gym clothes can be the hardest part of going to the gym; digging deep to find the motivation to learn is often half the battle.

Director of Learning Design, Lisa Christensen recommends starting with the places where learning is most fun for you and making it intentional. How to find the fun? Curiosity. As Rakesh Jhunhhunwala explains: “the biggest quest to learn anything is curiosity. if you are curious about anything, you will go and dig.”

Start digging where you’re most excited to find the treasure and see where it takes you.

Knowledge

One of the secrets of highly effective learners is the ability to peel away the extra layers and remember only the crucial need-to-knows, then take time to reflect on them. Rather than drinking from a firehose of information, Christensen recommends absorbing the key learnings and then pondering them, unpacking the pieces and putting them back together to cement the learnings in your brain.

Productivity Coach Mike Dee recommends supporting this with a notion database to help you absorb high-level information at speed and store the deeper-level detail in a digital database, organised in a way that makes it an effective extension of your busy brain.

This helps concepts stick in the long-term memory, rather than cramming the short-term memory and making it hard to retain new information.

Ability

Dweck’s alternative to the fixed mindset that tells us “ability” stories such as “I’m too old to learn new tricks”? The growth mindset. It’s scientifically proven that our ability to learn does not diminish with age: anyone has the agility to get their head around new concepts, it’s just how relevant they believe it is to them.

Once the growth mindset kicks in, we’re capable of putting our minds to anything. A financial advisor recently shared with me that two eighty-year old women he’s been working for have recently stopped relying on him for wealth management and have learned to take control of their own finances, putting their minds to an entirely new set of skills in their retirement.

Reinforcement

How can we put all this into practice before we decide we want to learn something new, so we don’t get out of the habit?

• Broaden your network: engage with people you don’t normally and ask them to share their perspective on areas you’d consider yourself an expert

• Take up a weekly challenge: read, learn or do something out of the ordinary that breaks with routine or shares a fresh angle on something you knew a lot about. Make it easy by subscribing to different information sources or picking up a book that’s outside your usual wheelhouse.

• Exercise your brain: whether it’s puzzles, word games or math quizzes, there’s plenty we can do to dust off the parts of our brain that don’t get much use day-to-day and train them like our physical muscles. From communication to attention to detail to perseverance, they hold some surprising benefits.

Next time you cross a new idea or a mysterious technology and you feel like an old dog in need of a nap, take time to figure out where your resistance to learning lies. Do I believe I lack the ability? Am I truly motivated to learn about this topic? What’s in it for me?

Tackle the source of the resistance and teach yourself a new trick or two.

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