Why You NEED a Teacher or Coach to Learn Effectively

There’s only one way to become a badass.

Growth. Improvement. Lots and lots of skill acquisition. The badass lifestyle is one that demands you learn constantly. You’re always reading a new book. You’re always taking new classes and picking up new hobbies.

And because growth is so important, the speed at which you’re able to grow has to be as well. The ability to learn quickly is vital.

After all, it could be the difference between you becoming excellent at five different skills over a two-year period, vs only becoming excellent at one.

It’s with this in mind that I’ve written this miniseries of articles on how you can learn faster. In case you missed them, we’ve already covered goals, cognitive rest, and growth mindset.

Now let’s talk about another key component – why you need to learn from the master.

Why You Need a Teacher or Coach

Having the guidance of a good teacher can dramatically improve your learning speed, for several reasons. Let’s go through them one by one.

You’re Learning the Right Things

One of the most overwhelming parts about picking up a new skill is figuring out where to start. 

It can be tough to know what’s important and what isn’t. Which areas are foundations that everything else will be built upon, and which are things that won’t be overly useful in the grand scheme?

This isn’t to say that you can’t figure these things out yourself. It’ll just take a longer, more indirect route than a teacher can provide. Think about it like fumbling around in the dark. Eventually you’ll find your way to the light switch but it’ll take time and you’ll probably bang your shin on the coffee table along the way.

And this is all for the simple reason that novices don’t tend to know what they don’t know. That’s what makes them a novice in the first place. Fortunately, having a teacher completely nullifies this issue.

After all, their primary purpose is to tell you exactly what to work on and how to do it. This makes the process simple and ensures you’re not wasting time on things that won’t provide bang for your buck.

Spotting Errors

Just as self-learning can lead to an inefficient path, it can also lead to you developing some bad habits.

When we start with a new skill, we do things in a certain way because they feel natural or seem correct to our untrained brain. Over time, we reinforce them so much that unlearning them or replacing them with a better habit becomes frustratingly difficult.

But it goes even further. Beyond bad habits, you could also potentially be making incorrect choices during the learning process without realising it. For example, you might choose an inferior method of doing something, while believing it’s effective.

Fortunately, both habits and choices can be corrected by a good teacher. They’ll be able to notice troublesome habits early on and guide you to replacing them with something more effective.

Once you have that effective foundation, you’ll benefit from compounding improvement in all of your practice sessions, because your brain is free to focus on more challenging aspects while also having an effective support network of dialled-in fundamentals.

Accountability

For many of us, this will be the most powerful benefit behind having a teacher. While the sections above focus on the learning itself, accountability is all about motivation and showing up to learn – something almost all of us struggle with from time to time.

The reason is simple:

It’s much easier to convince yourself to skip a practice session when you’re the only one who’ll know about it.

Once you bring a teacher into the fold, the circumstances change. Now you have someone setting assignments and placing expectations upon you. If you choose to skip a practice session or not meet the standards that your teacher sets for you, you’ll have to have an uncomfortable conversion. You’ll have to explain yourself.

This places a huge amount of psychological pressure on you. Skipping out on a practice session now has a price attached.

Although that might sound unappealing or intimidating, this type of pressure is often all it takes to push you outside of your comfort zone in a way that you would have been unable to accomplish by yourself.

And anyone who’s read my articles before will know that this is the key to substantial, rapid growth.

Bringing It Home

Between the three benefits outlined above, it should be easy to see why you need to learn from the master.

An effective teacher will put you on the most effective learning path, help you avoid and learn from errors, and speed up your growth.

And above all, they’ll provide the accountability you need to take your learning seriously. This will ensure you take the right actions more often.

All up, having a teacher is a recipe for becoming capable, and therefore a recipe for badassery. Which is ultimately what we’re all after, right?

You need to learn from the master. Food for thought.