Learning: A Process

Learning

**the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.

Too many times I see people wanting to “learn” something new. Wanting to learn indicates wanting to be at the end of that process. I say this because learning is a process. We don’t go from not knowing to learned. You don’t just learn catching, or hitting, or throwing, or much of anything for that matter.

It is a process.

This is something you hear a lot in the baseball community…”trust the process”.

If you have spent any amount of time in baseball you have more than likely heard this said by a coach and if you haven’t then you haven’t spent enough time around the game. Spend a little more time in the game and you will hear it.

I’m not so sure I agree with this statement as an overarching statement within the baseball community because it is too loosely used. Any coach and any parent can just say to a kid, “hey man you just gotta trust the process”.

What if that process is flawed? Is trusting that flawed process going to be in the player’s best interest? Nope.

So it is more than just trusting the process.

It’s about trusting what it means to learn. It’s about understanding how learning works. Knowing that to learn something will take time, energy, and effort.

Knowing that learning will involve simple victories and crushing defeats.

Learning will include success and failure and sometimes more failure than success for a longer period of time than you may want to experience.

So if these coaches are saying “trust the process” and they are referring to learning then they are probably right in saying it. But if they are referring to a process that they are having the kids follow then i’m not so sure they can get away with saying “trust the process”.

When kids learn that throughout the learning process they will experience failure and let-down, when they come to accept this as a part of the process, it doesn’t affect them as much. They start developing skills they didn’t even set out to develop. Skills like self discipline, dedication, perseverance, persistence, self-control, and emotional maturity.

They may even start to see failure as success.

Yep, failure can be success.

We can learn just as much if not more from failure than from success. And with that mindset, we are actually turning failure into success.

Remember, trust the process, the process of learning, not just some made up "process" that a random coach tells you to follow because following a flawed process will absolutely yield results, just not the results you're looking for.

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