“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”

– John F. Kennedy

In our previous articles, we’ve established that to be more than a mere manager, you must work toward being a transformational leader.  If you subscribe to the philosophy of transformational leadership, you may be interested as well in transformational learning.

In their excellent book The One Minute Millionaire, authors Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen wrote this:

“Change expert Don Wolfe teaches that there are two kinds of learning: informational learning and transformational learning, or head learning and heart learning. Transformational learning is about empowering students to discover the answers for themselves. It’s a slower process, but much more profound. That’s why it’s transformational.

We live in an age of too much information and not enough transformation. When people get stuck, it’s rarely because they don’t know enough. It’s because they lack the ability to act on what they already know.

Transformational learning is not about taking notes in notebooks. It is about writing the lessons on your heart and in every cell of your body so that your behavior flows effortlessly, without compulsion, from the wellsprings of your natural desire to live the life you were born to live. God designed life to be a transformational experience.”

These are profound statements. Have you ever said to yourself “I learned my lesson this time?” You probably never said that when information came into your head for the very first time. You said it when information you already had “sank in” to your heart and you committed to use that knowledge going forward.

Earl Collins, introduced in a previous lesson, understood the role the heart played in everything. After “It’s so simple,” his most frequent remark was “It’s about this.” – pointing to his heart.

How many lessons do the people you manage have in their heads but “lack the ability (or motivation) to act on what they already know?”

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