ďťżHi Everyone and welcome back to the Hockey Journey Podcast, episode number 54,
Boost Your Learning Ability, presented to you by Online Hockey Training.com. I'm your host Coach Lance Pitlick. If you're new here, please make sure you subscribe, so you won't miss out on any future episodes.Â
Before we throw on the flip flops, head out to the beach and begin this conversation, if you want to learn more about me, my hockey experiences, what I know, and most importantly, how I've been helping hockey players get really good with a stick and puck, just head on over to onlinehockeytraining.com and gain instant access to my 10 part video series where I'll show you everything. Consider it my gift to you.
As I begin to construct this segment, it's 3:20am on Saturday, Sept 3rd 2022, I'm on day 3 of my end of the summer battery recharge with my wife Lisa, down in Treasure Island, Florida. I have to give a shout out to our friend Kerry, who once again, has given my wife and I an oasis to stay at on this important get-a-way. Thank You Kerry!!
This was a unique summer, because there was an adjustment in my weekly schedule, completely different after 25 years of everything being the same, reason being, my wife and I were no longer owners of a cabin. For over 2 decades, we've been making the trek over to Wisconsin to spend our summers weekends, mid-june through Labor Day weekend, on Bone Lake. As a family, we put our summers on that lake at the highest of priorities. Why, because, like most hockey families, hockey dominates the majority of our lives over the course of a calendar year.
As much as the players need a break from being on the ice, coaches and parents need to get away from the rink as well. If you're not careful, your family can be sucked into the hockey worm-hole, where all of the sudden, you've committed most weekends to traveling to different parts of the US and Canada, participating in weekend tournaments in the spring and summer.
I'm grateful that the Pitlick's experienced that when my oldest Rem was 7 or 8 years old. My son played on a spring AAA team, like most kids do now-a-days, which I was also helping out working with the kids. We'd practice 2-3 times per week from March - mid June, participating in 3-4 tournaments, a couple local events here in Minnesota, and then we'd take a trip to Chicago, Detroit or somewhere in Canada for weekend tournaments. The team would then take 4-6 weeks off, start up again in mid August, practiced together for a few weeks and then everyone would disperse to their local community based associations for the winter season.
Sounds like a solid developmental year, that is, if the family actually took the breaks they were supposed to take. We didn't, or I should rephrase that, I didn't allow my son to take any breaks. Any off weekend we had that summer from his AAA team, I had agreed to have him sub in on a bunch of different teams at different events, that all required travel. We only got up to our cabin a few times that year and my wife very quickly made it clear that that wasn't going to happen again.
As I mentioned, I was grateful we experienced this early, and as a family we made the decision that summers, moving forward, mid-June - Mid Aug, weekends were now going to be spent at the lake, as a family and not playing in a hockey tournament. My wife had identified that hockey had become a little too dominant in our lives, and we needed to balance things out a bit in order to re-establish a little harmony in the Pitlick household.
The following summer, the boys had a couple mid week on-ice skill development days, and then we spent every weekend at the lake, and did that routine for nearly 20 years. It was a little tough letting go of that place and all the memories, and yes, Coach got a little sad, but what was cool, was that I recognized that I'd entered into non-productive thoughts about missing the lake home and possibly disappointing all our family and friends, remembered from what I learned from meditation, and disrupted the thought, did a quick reframe, and started focusing all my attention on what I was grateful for regarding the cabin.
The more I thought about it, new memories would fly in and out and there became a clear pattern of something that was a constant at that lake, and that was everything that my boys learned over 2 decades of summer cabin life.
It started out spending a lot of time on wheels. Skate boards, rip sticks, those stand up scooters, roller blades, peddle bikes and then mini 4 wheelers. Transitioning to the water, there was jet skiing, knee boarding, paddle boarding, kayaking, swimming, wakeboarding, water skiing, fishing and wake surfing.
When back on land, there's all the yard games, from soccer, wiffle ball, trampolining, spike ball, can jam, cornhole or bags, and worked on balance with some slack-line thingy. Then there was badmitten, tips, basketball, and they had a space to work on their stick skills. They would just bounce around from activity to activity, only needing us parents to cook for them or take them on the boat.
Both of my boys never played another organized sport besides hockey after the age of 9 or 10, but I do consider them both to be multi-sport athletes, only because of all the unstructured activities they learned while at the lake with friends and family. The key part of this story is the learning part and that's how we've arrived on this podcast episode on how to boost your learning ability.
It's been said that "knowledge is power," and if that's the case, wouldn't you want to find the fastest and most effective ways to gain this knowledge? I know I did and would like to pass on some quotes from books I've read in the past that helped me improve my learning strategies and techniques.
My hope is that you'll discover some unknown story or scientific study related to best learning practices and that you'll apply a few of these new found learning enhancers to your daily life and see if they work for you? For the following books I'm going to reference, know that I'm only scratching the surface of all the golden nuggets in each of the titles. If something resonates with you from a certain book, by the end of this episode, I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of your own and read it in its entirety. I'll put the links to each of the titles in the description. With that being said, let's proceed.
Book Number 1
Limitless
Upgrade Your Brain. Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life
by Jim Kwik
Quote #1
âThe Heroâs Journey is the perfect structure to lend power and purpose to yourpersonal story. In Limitless, you are the superhero. One of my core beliefs is that human potential is one of the only infinite resources we have in this world. Most everything else is finite, but the human mind is the ultimate superpowerâthere is no limit to our creativity, imagination, determination, or ability to think, reason, or learn. Yet this resource is also among the least tapped. All of us can be the heroes of our own story, dipping into the well of our potential every single day and never having that well run dry. But so few of us approach our lives this way. Thatâs why I wrote this bookâto help you realize that no matter where you are, or where youâve been, you absolutely can free yourself and go from limits to liberation. That might be the only âextraâ you need to transition from ordinary to the extraordinary world. This book is going to provide you with the extra. What youâll get within these pages is a series of tools that will help you cast off your perceived restrictions. Youâre going to learn how to unlimit your brain. Youâre going to learn how to unlimit your drive. Youâre going to learn how to unlimit your memory, your focus, and your habits. If I am your mentor in your heroâs journey, then this book is your map to master your mind, motivation, and methods to learn how to learn. And once youâve done that, you will be limitless.â (End Quote)
Quote #2
THE LIMITLESS MODELÂ
âYou can learn to be, do, have and share with no constraints. I wrote this book to prove this to you. If you are not learning or living at your true potential, if there is a gap between your current reality and your desired reality, hereâs the reason: There is a limit that must be released and replaced in one of three areas:Â
⢠A limit in your Mindsetâyou entertain a low belief in yourself, your capabilities, what you deserve, or what is possible.Â
⢠A limit in your Motivationâyou lack the drive, purpose, or energy to take action.Â
⢠A limit in your Methodsâyou were taught and are acting on a process that is not effective to create the results you desire.Â
This applies to an individual, a family, an organization. We all have our own unique story of struggles and strengths. Whatever your situation happens to be, hereâs the best part: Youâre not alone. Iâm going to help you become limitless in your own way, within the three-part framework youâre about to learn: Limitless Mindset, Limitless Motivation, and Limitless Methods.â (End Quote)
Quote #3
SUPERHERO, MEET YOUR SUPERVILLAINÂ
âIâm a firm believer that we all have incredible superpowers that are waiting to be awakened. Iâm not talking about the ability to fly, create iron-clad armor, or shoot lasers from your eyes, but real-life practical abilities like flying through books, iron-clad memory, laser focus, boundless creativity, clear thinking, mindfulness, superior mental attitude, and more. We are all superheroes in one way or another. Just as every superhero has powers, so do they have arch nemeses. Enter the supervillain.Think the Joker to Batman, Lex Luthor to Superman. The villains we face may not look the same as they do in the movies, but theyâre still the bad guysâthe ones you, as a superhero, need to vanquish and hold at bay. Modern-day supervillains get in our way and make life harder, keeping us from our potential. They hold us back and rob us of our productivity, prosperity, positivity, and peace of mind. And itâs up to us to recognize and defeat them.â (End Quote)
Quote #4
LEARN FASTERÂ
âTo get the most out of this book, here is a simple method for learning anything quickly. I call it the FASTER Method, and I want you to use this as you read, starting now. The acronym FASTER stands for Forget, Act, State, Teach, Enter, Review. Hereâs the breakdown:Â
F is for Forget - The key to laser focus is to remove or forget that which distracts you. ...Â
A is for Act - Traditional education has trained many people that learning is a passiveexperience. You sit quietly in a class, you donât talk to your neighbor, and you consume the information. But learning is not a spectator sport. The human brain does not learn as much by consumption as it does creation. ...Â
S is for State - All learning is state dependent. Your state is a current snapshot of y0ur emotions. It is highly influenced by your thoughts (psychology) and the physical condition of your body (physiology). ...Â
T is for Teach - If you want to cut your learning curve dramatically, learn with the intention of teaching the information to someone else. Think about it: If you know you have to give a presentation on what you learn, you will approach how you learn the topic with the intention of mastering it well enough to explain it to someone else. ...Â
E is for Enter - What is the simplest and most powerful personal performance tool? Your calendar. We enter important things on our schedule. ... Do you know what a lot of people donât schedule? Their personal growth and development. If itâs not on your calendar, thereâs a good chance itâs not getting done. ...Â
R is for Review - One of the best ways to reduce the effects of the forgetting curve is to actively recall what you learned with spaced repetition.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
LEARNED LIMITLESSNESS (LIES AND BS)Â
âAll behavior is driven by belief, so before we address how to learn, we must first address the underlying beliefs we hold about what is possible. Weâre not born with pre-installed mindsets about what weâre capable of achievingâwe learn these fixed and limited ways of thinking from the people in our lives and the culture weexperience growing up. Think of a young elephant tied to a stake in the ground. When itâs a baby, the elephant isnât strong enough to pull the stake up so it eventually stops trying because it learns the effort is futile. As that elephant grows, it gains more than enough power and strength to pull out the stake, but it remains tied up by something as inconsequential as a rope and a flimsy piece of metal because of what it learned as a baby. In psychology, itâs called learned helplessness. Most of us behave like that elephant. At some point, we had an experience that gave us animpression of what weâre capable of, and our belief about our potential has been set ever since. But just as helplessness is learned, itâs just as possible to learn to be limitless. In this section, youâre going to learn about the seven lies weâve been taught about our potential and how to replace them with new beliefs.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
MOTIVATION: THE EQUATIONÂ
âWhen you combine purpose, energy, and small simple steps S3 , you get sustainable motivation. And the ultimate form of motivation is the state of flow. Think about it as energy management. Creating it, investing it, and not wasting it. A clear purpose or reason gives you energy. Practices you employ will cultivate energy for your brain and the rest of your body, and small simple steps require little energy. ...Purpose drives us to act, and our purpose must be clear enough that we know why weâre acting and what weâre hoping to gain. Generating sufficient energy is vitalâif youâre tired or sleepy, or if your brain is foggy, then you wonât have the fuel to take action. Small simple steps take minimal effort and keep you from being paralyzed with overwhelm. And, finally, finding flow is the ultimate boon to motivation.â (End Quote)
Book Number 2
How We Learn
The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens
By Benedict Carey
Quote #1
âThe treasure at the end of this rainbow is not necessarily âbrilliance.â Brilliance is a fine aspiration, and Godspeed to those who have the genes, drive, luck, andconnections to win that lottery. But shooting for a goal so vague puts a person at risk of worshipping an idealâand missing the target. No, this book is about something that is, at once, more humble and more grand: How to integrate the exotica of new subjects into daily life, in a way that makes them seep under our skin. How to make learning more a part of living and less an isolated chore. We will mine the latest science to unearth the tools necessary to pull this off, and to do so without feeling buried or oppressed. And we will show that some of what weâve been taught to think of as our worst enemiesâlaziness, ignorance, distractionâ can also work in our favor.â (End Quote)
Quote #2
DISTRIBUTED LEARNING (THINK: WATERING YOUR LAWN)Â
âThe technique is called distributed learning, or, more commonly, the spacing effect. People learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distributeâor âspaceââtheir study time than when they concentrate it. Momâs right, it is better to do a little today and a little tomorrow rather than everything at once. Not just better, a lot better. Distributed learning, in certain situations, can double the amount we remember later on. ... I like to think of the spacing effect in terms of lawn care in Los Angeles. L.A. is a city with a coastal desert climate and cultural commitment to the pristine lawn. I learned while living there for seven years that, to maintain one of those, itâs far more effective to water for thirty minutes three times a week than for an hour and a half once a week. Flooding the lawn makes it look slightly more lush the next day, but that emerald gloss fades, sure enough. A healthy dose every couple days and you can look your neighbors in the eye, while using the same amount of waterâ or even less. Same goes for distributed learning. Youâre not spending any more time. Youâre not working any harder. But you remember for longer.â (End Quote)
Quote #3
ENEMY #1 FOR LEARNING: THE FLUENCY ILLUSIONÂ
âLetâs recall the Bjorksâ âdesirable difficultyâ principle: The harder your brain has to work to dig out a memory, the greater the increase in learning (retrieval and storage strength). Fluency, then, is the flipside of the equation. The easier it is to call a fact to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. Repeating facts right after you studied them gives you nothing, no added memory benefit. The fluency illusion is the primary culprit in below-average test performances. Not anxiety. Not stupidity. Not unfairness or bad luck. Fluency. The best way to overcome this illusion and improve our testing skills is, conveniently, an effective study technique in its own right. ... The technique is testing itself. Yes, I am aware of how circular this logic appears: better testingthrough testing. Donât be fooled. Thereâs more to self-examination than you know. A test is not only a measurement tool, it alters what we remember and changes how we subsequently organize that knowledge in our minds. And it does so in ways that greatly improve later performance.â (End Quote)Â
Quote #4
CAN YOU TEACH IT? (<â POWERFUL WAY TO REALLY LEARN!)Â
âMany teachers have said that you donât really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else. Exactly right. One very effective way to think of self examination is to say, âOkay, Iâve studied this stuff; now itâs time to tell my brothers, or spouse, or teenage daughter what it all means.â If necessary, I write it down from memory. As coherently, succinctly, and clearly as I can. Remember: These apparently simple attempts to communicate what youâve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studyingâthe high-octane kind, 20 to 30 percent more powerful than if you continued sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. Theyâll expose what you donât know, where youâre confused, and what youâve forgottenâand fast.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
MIX IT UP TO STRENGTHEN IT UPÂ
âItâs not that repetitive practice is bad. We all need a certain amount of it to become familiar with any new skill or material. But repetition creates a powerful illusion. Skills improve quickly and then plateau. By contrast, varied practice produces a slower apparent rate of improvement in each single practice session but a greater accumulation of skill and learning over time. In the long term, repeated practice on one skill slows us down.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
SLEEP (+ NAPS) = LEARNING WITH YOUR EYES CLOSEDÂ
âNapping is sleep, too. In a series of experiments over the past decade, Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, has found that naps of an hour to an hour and half often contain slow-wave deep sleep and REM. People who study in the morningâwhether itâs words or pattern recognition games, straight retention or comprehension of deeper structureâdo about 30 percent better on an evening test if theyâve had an hour-long nap than if they didnât. âItâs changed the way I work, doing these studies,â Mednick told me. âItâs changed the way I live. With naps of an hour to an hour and half, weâve found in some experiments that you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eight-hour nightâs sleep.ââ (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
ZEIGARNIK LONGER-TERM CREATIVE PROJECTSÂ
âQ: Is there any effective strategy for improving performance on longer-term creative projects? A: Yes. Simply put: Start them as early as possible, and give yourself permission to walk away. Deliberate interruption is not the same as quitting. On the contrary, stopping work on a big, complicated presentation, term paper, or composition, activates the project in your mind, and youâll begin to see and hear all sorts of things in your daily life that are relevant. ... This is all fodder for your projectâitâs interruption working in your favorâthough you do need to return to the desk or drafting table before too long.â (End Quote)
Book Number 3Â
How to Become a Straight-A Student
The Unconventional Strategies Real College
Students Use to Score High While Studying Less
By Cal Newport
Quote #1
âWhile most college students toil arduously through the study and paperwriting processes, there exists an elite group of undergrads who have discoveredunconventional strategies for earning much higher grades in much less time. Iwanted to share these secrets with other students, and thus the idea for this bookwas born. ... In the pages that follow, you will discover the details of these often surprising study strategies. Iâve included examples and case studies throughout the book to demonstrate how to apply the advice in many different real-life academicsituations. You will learn how to:Â
⢠Manage your time and deal with the urge to procrastinate.Â
⢠Take targeted notes in class.Â
⢠Handle reading assignments and problem sets with ease.Â
⢠Prepare efficiently for exams.Â
⢠Master the art of exam-taking.Â
⢠Write incisive critical analysis essays.Â
⢠Write standout term papers.â
(End Quote)
Quote #2
PSEUDO-WORK VS. REAL WORK (SECRET FORMULA)Â
âIn fact, when asked what one skill was most important in becoming a non-grind straight-A student, most of them cited the ability to get work done quickly and with a minimum of wasted effort. So how do these students achieve this goal? A big part of the solution is timingâthey gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts. To understand the power of this approach, consider the following simple formula:Â
 work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focusÂ
Pseudo-work features a very low intensity of focus. Therefore, to accomplish something by pseudo-working, you need to spend a lot of time. The straight-A approach, on the other hand, maximizes intensity in order to minimize time. For example, letâs rank intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most intense). Assume it takes ten hours to finish studying for a test by pseudo-working with a low intensity score of 3. According to our formula, this same amount of work can be accomplished with only three one-hour bursts, each with an intensity of 10. The work that took you all day Sunday to complete could instead be finished by studying an hour after breakfast, an hour after lunch, and an hour after dinnerâthe rest of the day being free for you to relax.â (End Quote)
Quote #3
DECLARE WAR ON PROCRASTINATIONÂ
âOver time, these extended responses began to paint a clear picture. When the straight-A students answered âI donât defeat procrastination,â they really meant to say, âI donât defeat the urge to procrastinate.â And this makes perfect sense. To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the straight-A students interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work. Itâs unavoidable. Therefore, the goal in this step is not to teach you how to love all the work and never feel like procrastinating ever again. Instead, Iâm going to describe some targeted strategies to help you sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arisesânot destroy it altogether. This is how straight-A students prevent procrastination from destabilizing their schedule. They donât rely only on willpower and good intentions, but instead deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short-circuit their natural desire to procrastinate. These students, of course, arenât perfect, and they still occasionally put off work for no good reason. But overall their strategies made them significantly more effective at following a study plan than their peersâand this made all the difference.â (End Quote)
Quote #4Â
WHEN? WHERE? HOW LONG?Â
âThe little things count. This is especially true when it comes to studying. Before we get caught up in the details of exactly how to review and synthesize material, there are some basic questions that we must address first: When during the day should you study? Where should you go to study? How long should you study before taking a break? The right answers will boost your productivity, allowing you to squeeze more work out of even less time. The wrong answers will slow you down and make this process more difficult than it needs to be. Straight-A students, I found out, devote a lot of thought to these questions; they recognize how these seemingly little details can make or break their study efforts and have experimented extensively to discover the most effective strategies.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
THE #1 WAY TO MASTER/LEARN SOMETHING (+ #1 THREAT)Â
âWhether itâs philosophy or calculus, the most effective way to imprint a concept is to first review it and then try to explain it, unaided, in your own words. If you can close your eyes and articulate an argument from scratch, or stare at a blank piece of paper and reproduce a solution without a mistake, then you have fully imprinted that concept. Itâs not going anywhere. The same is not true if you merely read over something. Passively reviewing a concept is not the same as actively producing it. Most students make the mistake of relying only on passive review; they read and reread their notes and assignments, and assume that the more they read, the morethey will remember. But as Ryan from Dartmouth warns: âSimply reading it over doesnât work. You have to make the extra effort to get it into your head.ââ (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
S . P . A . C . E . O . U . T . Y O U R S T U D Y I N GÂ
âIf you have material that must be truly memorizedâdates, chronologies, formulasâthere are, unfortunately, no real shortcuts. You just have to keep working with your flash cards until you have no trouble providing the right answer, even after you shuffle the cards into a random order. Memorization is particularly dependent on your available mental energy. It doesnât work if you try to commit items to memory for eight hours straight, but it does work if you memorize only an hour at a time and only one or two hours a day. So separate the task of memorizing from your other review. Spread the work out over many days, and never dedicate too much time to any onesitting with your flash cards. Melanie from Dartmouth recalls how some of their peers would âreview their flash cards at any opportunityâeating dinner, waiting in line at an e-mail terminal,â which is the most effective way to commit the necessary items to memory.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
CREATING AUTONOMY TO PURSUE MEANINGFUL OPPORTUNITIESÂ
âAs our generation finds itself increasingly stressed and disillusioned with life paths that we feel have been imposed upon us from the outside, this lesson takes on a particular importance. By mastering the skills in this book you are, in effect, taking control of your own young life. You are declaring to the world that youâre not at college just because it seemed like the thing to do; instead, youâre there to master new areas of knowledge, expand your mental abilities, and have some fun in the process. Youâre also denying your major or the climate of the job market the right to dictate what you can or canât do after graduation. By scoring exceptional grades, you are opening the door to many interesting and competitive opportunities that allowyou, and not anyone else, to make the decision of what post-college pursuits will bring you the most fulfillment. In the end, therefore, this book is about so much more than just grades; it is about taking responsibility for your own journey through life. I wish you the best of luck in this adventure, and hope this advice helps you to launch an exciting future.â (End Quote)
Hearing all that goodness makes me wish I had access to the information back when I was a kid, as school never came easy to me. I wonder if I had known about some of the pre-mentioned tips, strategies and techniques, would my experience have been completely different? I think so, but I don't dwell on something in the past for too long. I'm excited that I eventually discovered these hacks, as I'm still trying to tweak my days, optimizing just a little bit more week after week. What I'm really grateful for, is that I can share this information with you. The question is, are you going to apply some of the things you've just learned? I hope you do...Â
As a reminder, if one of the books struck a chord with you, and you can't stop thinking about it, then I highly encourage you to pick up a copy and read it in its entirety. I'll have the links in the description.
Well that concludes another episode of the hockey journey podcast.  I canât thank you enough for stopping by and listening. I hope you enjoyed this segment on how to Boost Your Learning Ability and are maybe interested to learn a little more and see if you can strengthen learning centers a bit more with less effort? One last thing, If you think thereâs someone in your circle of family and friends that might like this episode as well, please share it with just one person, it will really help me in growing this hockey community.
Again, I appreciate you being here, donât forget to subscribe, rate or submit a review, I hope to see you back here soon, and do me a favor, make someone close to you smile today. All the best my friends!!
