Adults as Learners

Been reading up on adult learning.  Surely we can agree that understanding how adults learn is an important element in learning how to coach and engage our clients.  My take on all of that is from my own experience as well as from published research.  Adults bring all of our decisions, life experience, obligations, and desires into our life-long learning.  Sometimes that learning becomes formal (with classes and tuition and degrees). 

So it is with coach training.  Unless you were a child prodigy you began and completed your coach training (or any other kind of training) as an adult at some age or other (I did a lot of the 'other') over my long adult learning career.

For anyone reading this blog who is not already, or going to be, a professional coach, just substitute your desired outcome and it all applies equally.  My most important education began at age 30 and continued for a couple of decades, culminating in teaching what I had learned (ergo, it never stopped).  Always a good student, I had a different motivation: I liked learning, did my assignments, stayed interested and knew I was going somewhere.  Somehow that was different from my youthful obsession with getting the grade A for everything.