Understanding Is Not A Skill
Understanding is not a skill.
Knowing something is not a skill.
Let me tell you what I mean by this.
This is something I see all the time when I’m doing course audits for clients, or even when I sign up for courses myself. I’ll look through the table of contents and the lessons, and very often (especially at the beginning of the course) I’ll see something like, Lesson 1: Understanding This Concept or Lesson 1: Exploring This Skill.
And here’s why that doesn’t work.
Transformation doesn’t come from information.
Transformation doesn’t come from understanding or knowing something.
Transformation comes through how we apply that knowledge.
It comes from how we take what we understand, how we take what we know, and how we turn that knowledge into a change of behaviour, a change of mindset, or a change of outlook, etc.
So next time you’re stuck thinking, Well they need to understand this, or they just need to know this…
I want you to ask yourself, How will I know they know this information? How will I know they understand this concept? What does that understanding look like?
Often when we ask ourselves those questions we’ll say something along the lines of - I’ll know they understand because they’ll be able to…
And usually how you finish that sentence is the actual skill that you should be focusing on.
The problem with the course creation industry right now is that the dominant voices out there teaching you how to create courses have a marketing background. And marketing is driven by information, consumption, and by making things bingeable. So we’re constantly being pushed to put more “information” into our courses.
But what we actually need is to think about the science behind how people learn.
The science of how change happens. And ask ourselves, How does our brain actually take in knowledge and turn that into a transformation?
And at the end of the day what that means is focusing on skills and abilities.
And the best thing that happens when we focus on skills and abilities first is that we dial down into what truly matters. Which not only makes us feel so much more confident in selling our courses and sharing our programs, because you’re confident in the fact that your people are going to get amazing results but it also means you need less information in your course because you’re focusing on what matters most.
Which also means less content overwhelm for your learners and less content creation for you.
It’s a win all around.
So the next time you’re thinking that your people just need to understand or know something, I want you to ask yourself what is the actual skill and ability underneath that knowledge and underneath that understanding that you’re wanting your people to master.