Learning skills

Are you learning real skills from your activities, or is it just something to make yourself temporarily feel better? I recently learned this framework, and I'm not able to unsee it.

Recently, someone I know started going to a psychiatrist after having already seen a few therapists (the fact that I’m “out” with my neurodiversity means people talk to me about such stuff). The psychiatrist’s first question to her about this was “what skills did you learn at these therapy sessions?”

He went on to say (obviously I’m paraphrasing) that the only purpose of therapy is to learn “skills” that help you live better, and make better decisions than you’ve made in the past.

While I only got this info “second hand”, I’ve been unable to “unsee” this. In all potential learning contexts nowadays, I start thinking about “learning skills”, and funnily enough, someone else’s therapy psychiatry session has started making me live my life differently.

On therapy - my take (having seen a few therapists) is that the fact that it has become “cool” has meant that there is a lot of low-quality supply in the market nowadays. Now, based on what this psychiatrist said (or how it was reported to me), if you are spending too long just talking about your mother and not learning any “skills”, the therapist isn’t adding value.

Anyway back to skills. The favourite example I have on this is my gym - which has what used to be that rare combination of group classes and “heavy” lifting (squats and deadlifts are regular parts of the gym program). However, I’ve given up on doing the program because I realised it wasn’t teaching me any skills (for the record, I stopped doing the class regularly well before I heard the psychiatrist’s story).

They introduce a new lift or movement once in a while, keep it on for the next couple of weeks, and then abruptly yank it off. This has happened primarily with the olympic lifts (snatch, and clean & jerk), but also for some more basic stuff like deadlifts. This means that you go to the gym, go through the program, burn a bunch of calories but don’t really learn anything. And because the big lifts come once in a few months, you don’t load weights sufficiently, and you don’t become stronger.

Another example where you can evaluate using skills is in terms of kids’ classes. Now there are two purposes to sending kids for after school classes - the first is that it is “extended day care” (school being “primary day care”). It keeps them busy and allows parents to do their own thing for that time period (and Zoom classes and ability for parents to work from home is a boon in this regard).

The other purpose, of course, is for them to learn skills. And when I look at the classes our daughter goes to, and participate in a discussion on whether to extend the classes, this is precisely the framework I use - whether she is learning “skills”.

For example, she went for a year-long swimming class in 2022-23. That she didn’t do very well in an “entrance test” (this is a hyper-competitive swimming centre) meant she was assigned to a fairly poor coach. And all they did was to play in the water and swim a bit, rather than improving their swimming quality. The only reason she went for it for close to 9 months was because we had prepaid for the year.

Her school also offers “organised after-school classes”. In 2022-23 and 2023-24, she went for Kalaripayattu and “montessori sports”. In the former she clearly learnt skills, as was evident to us from the end-of-year performances. The latter - which was an experimental program - enabled her to play with her classmates and get some sun, but not necessarily learn skills. We had already made the decision to discontinue her from the Montessori sports program before the school itself pulled it at the start of this academic year.

And I’m not just talking about “classes” (which can cover kids’ after school classes, gyms and therapy) here. Any activity you do - you need to ask yourself if it is actually teaching you new skills, or if it is just “timepass”, or something that makes you temporarily feel better. If it is solely the latter, you should question yourself if you find yourself doing it repeatedly and often.