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Resilience 137

1 Set a clear objective for the session and try not to stop until you
have achieved it. But, be prepared to stop if you discover something
you had not anticipated and rethink your objective.
2 Make sure that you leave a message on your mobile phone and
email that lets people know that you will not be replying to them
for the duration of your learning. Turn off all telephones.
3 Make sure that there are no distracting noises around you.
4 If you start to daydream, get up and walk around.
5If you are hungry, have a sensible snack and drink some water.
6 Have a list of all your normal displacement activities—making a
cup of coffee, turning on a TV or radio, doing things that are easy,
irrelevant, and not urgent—and ration yourself very carefully over
the way you indulge in them!
7 Tell your colleagues, friends, and family that if you try to get them
to divert you from your chosen learning activity, they are to tell you
to “get on with it” and to go back to concentrating on the task in
hand.

Focusing on developing your preferred learning style is one way of
playing to your strengths and may make it easier for you to persist.
In Chapter 3 you also looked at rewards and how these can be used
to help you keep going, and in Chapter 1 you saw the effect of food
and drink on your ability to concentrate.

Think of something you are currently trying to learn but finding it difficult to keep going with.
Apply some of the ideas above to that activity.

BEING AN ADVENTURER

We all started out as adventurers when we were young children, but
somehow we seem to lose this important characteristic.
You have already seen how the brain is continually trying to
search out information and make sense of it. You have also seen
how it likes to form patterns and make connections. The most suc-
cessful learners use the patterning tendency of their mind but do
not get too set in the ways they think about things. (There is more