Why is reading or writing something different from doing something?

First consider reading. Reading is (usually) a solitary activity, with no feedback. Without feedback, there's no check on what you believe you're learning.

Now, writing. Unless you put your writing in the hands of someone (or perhaps some computer analysis app), there's also no feedback, so there's no check on whether you wrote sense or nonsense.

When you do something, you interact with the real world, and the world responds in some way. With the world's feedback, you have the possibility of learning, confirming, or disconfirming something. That's why we strongly favor experiential learning over, say, lecturing or passive reading or writing.

If you want to teach somebody something, don't just send them to a book, or, even worse, tell them what you want them to know. Instead, figure out a way to have them experience the situation in which the learning applies.

After they've had the experience, you then might want to send them to a book where they can read about what they experienced.  Alternatively, you might ask them to write about their learning and have you read what they wrote.

You can try this out:

Step 1. Write a sentence or two about what would happen if you tried to move your desk six inches (15 cm) to the left or right.

Step 2. When you finish writing, get up and move your desk six inches (15 cm) to the left or right.

Step 3. What did you learn in steps one and two?

For a far more thorough answer to this question, see my four-volume series on Experiential Learning 

<https://leanpub.com/b/ExperientialLearning>

Then do some of the experiential exercises you find there.

Feedback to Yourself

Over the years, I've written a lot and taught a lot about feedback. See, for example, our book, What Did You Say?: The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback. The book has been put to good use by thousands of readers, through two editions, and especially to teams. Recently our handyman, Abel, taught me that we'd missed something 

In the book, we wrote about giving and receiving feedback with one other person and with groups such as teams and projects. What we missed was feedback to yourself.

Abel had been fixing a variety of problems in the kitchen of our old house: broken tiles, a stuck drawer, a slow sink, a jammed ice-cube maker. It was a long list, and Abel worked until he had to leave to pick up his kids from school.

"Did you finish everything?" I asked.

"Yes, and I did a good job."

"You always do a good job, Abel."

Abel smiled. "Thanks. There's a few things I could have done better if I had more time and a few things that weren't in your tool room. Do you want me to come back and touch things up?"

Abel explained what he could improve, and we agreed to another visit two days later, after he made a trip to Ace Hardware. That evening, I showed Dani all he had done.

"That's wonderful," she said. "Some of those things were beginning to annoy me. He did a good job."

"That's interesting," I said. "Abel said the same thing."

"What thing?"

"He said, 'I did a good job.'"

"Of course he did. He always does a good job.Just like you."

"Thanks," I said. "Maybe I always do a good job, but I don't always say so. I  think I was taught not to 'blow my own horn.'"

Dani nodded. "You know, I think I was taught the same thing. Like when you ask me about one of my consulting jobs. I say, 'Yeah, I did okay, but I could have done better.'"

"I do the same. I think it's the 'but' that makes us different from Abel."

"How so?"

"Abel said 'I did a good job," yet he left off the 'but I could have done a better job."

"I thought that's what he said?"

"No, what he said, in effect, was, 'I did a good job, and I could have done a better job.' In other words, he didn't fall to either side—good or bad—but he said both. He provided feedback to himself that was much better than the self-deprecating way that we do it."

In short, what Abel knew how to do was give complete and accurate feedback, something both Dani and I have taught for decades. But what Abel did was give himself that kind of useful feedback. He corrected himself, sure, but at the same time, he affirmed himself for what he did well without discounting it with a big "but."

Do you have a big but? If so, it's time to trim down.

Change Artist Challenge #8: Applying The Principle of Addition

The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking this world to give him. - Albert Camus

Satir's Principle of Addition says that people change behavior by adding new behaviors, rather than getting rid of old ones. The reinforced behaviors are done more often, leaving less and less time for behaviors not reinforced.

The Challenge
Your challenge is to practice giving affirmations for behaviors you wish to increase. This can be in the form of an e-mail note, a card, a phone call, a brief office visit, a comment in the corridor. It must be done, however, directly to the person, not through some third party.
Each and every day, give one affirmation to one person.

Experiences
1. This forced me to pay attention to what people were doing.

2. This was really hard! Something deep inside me got caught in my throat when I started to form an affirmation of someone. It's a good thing I had a support group to help me figure out where that came from. I'm still not very good at it, but I can get the words out.

3. I thought I was already doing this, so it would be a really easy assignment. It turned out that nobody recognized when I was giving an affirmation, because I always cut the corners off it by some little joke, or discount.

4. I'm pretty good at this, in person, so I decided to start sending little cards to people who had done something that helped one of my change projects. Boy, was I surprised at how delighted they were! Something about a card made them really sit up and take notice; maybe it showed that I was thinking of them when they weren't present, and I took that little extra time to do this in a way that wasn't the easiest (e-mail). Maybe that made it seem extra important.

5. I made a list of people I ought to affirm, and made five copies, one for each day. I would check each one off the day's list so I would have a measure of how well I was doing. My goal was to be able to do everybody in one day by the end of the week. There were 14 people on the list, and my scores for the five days were 4, 7, 6, 11, 14. I was very proud of myself, and on Saturday I showed the list to my Will (my husband) and explained the assignment. He read over the list and told me I had forgotten someone. I was devastated: What good was a perfect score if it wasn't the whole list? But I couldn't for the life of me figure out who was left off. On Sunday, in church, I was still thinking about it and not really listening to the sermon. Will leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You." At our church, some of us stay after the service for a discussion of the sermon. God must have been watching over me when He sent the sermon that day because the subject was "Love thy neighbor as thyself." I understood that if I didn't love myself very much, loving my neighbor as myself didn't mean very much. I'd say I had a religious experience because of this exercise.

Source
These challenges are adapted from my ebook, Becoming a Change Artist, which can be obtained from most of the popular ebook vendors. See my website <http://www.geraldmweinberg.com> for links to all of my books at the major vendors.