3 Tips for teaching yourself anything and everything.

1. Arm yourself with resources- Learning a new skill and teaching yourself requires research and education. Read as much as you can about the new subject you want to immerse yourself with. If you want to teach yourself a foreign language, buy some audio CDs, sign up to an online forum in the chosen language and learn about the culture of the country. It’s important to enrich oneself the history of any given subject in order to teach yourself the valuable information you need to know to develop a solid background that will give you confidence and understanding of your subject.

2. Keep an open mind- When you teach yourself something new, you may feel awkward and begin to doubt yourself and your abilities. You may be used to being an expert in a chosen subject or hobbies you already possess. If you begin to falter, thinking that you are “too old to learn something new” or disappoint yourself with the learning curve you experience, remember that it takes time to teach yourself a new skill. If you begin to teach yourself a musical instrument, for example, it will take a few years to develop your basic skill set and you may not see results right away. Programming your brain takes time and as we age our brains become less and less elastic.

Teaching yourself something new challenges your brain to accept new information and new ways of thinking. Although you are focused on, say, learning to play the piano, the experience of teaching yourself will enrich your life in other ways that you can’t imagine unless you try. While you may not become a concert pianist within 2 years of studying the piano, you will become more familiar with music and its construction and begin to hear things differently, notice more sounds and enhance your life experience.

3. Practice, Practice, Practice- Immersing yourself in something new is the best way to teach yourself anything. If you want to learn how to do anything, the best way is to learn by doing. You will challenge yourself and have fun while you do it!