Recently, I came across a famous aphorism by Lao-Tzu in its original Chinese form. Since I don’t read Chinese, I solicited a scholarly body for a translation (in the body of Mr. Wong at my local Chinese restaurant). He made short work of converting several ideograms into an interpretable phrase that read, “The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” You’ll probably recognize this in its more colloquial form as, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Can you think of a more practical phrase that describes how we learn? Every attempt to learn anything, including any complex behavior you can imagine, begins with a beginning—a single step.
Learning anything—and I do mean anything—is based on the assembly of smaller, simpler behaviors into larger, more complex ones. We start with what we know (the known) and move toward that which we don’t know (the unknown). If the step taken is small enough, but not so small as to be insignificant, the unknown becomes known. Now we have a new starting point from which to repeat another small but significant step in learning. Effective learning is all about taking small steps, each one within the student’s ability to achieve easily.
Unfortunately, as flight instructors, we often fail to promote the value and the power of small steps in flight training. Instead, we often have our students focus primarily on where all those steps lead (i.e., the private pilot certificate) without reminding them of all the smaller, more manageable steps they’ll take to get there.
For instance, one of the more common reasons some individuals avoid taking flying lessons (or attempt to acquire new and complex skills) is the magnitude of the training that lies ahead of them. Overwhelmed by complexity, they ask, “How will I ever get through all those books?” or “How will I ever acquire all the skills needed to pass a practical flight exam?”
When students express these concerns, I ask them this question: What is the most complex behavior you possess and how did you acquire it? A person might be a master mechanic, a professional bowler, or even a professional sumo wrestler (which is like professional bowling except people are used in place of pins). Each of these individuals possess complex skills that might appear difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. When viewed through the lens of step-by-step learning, they become skills that are within the reach of the average person to obtain.
Step-by-step learning is the same strategy used by ballroom dance instructors and martial arts instructors to train their students. Dance students are instructed to follow the numbered feet painted on the floor, and karate students are shown how to execute highly choreographed single-step kicks and blocks to develop their skills. Within a short time, all those smaller, easily achieved steps combine to produce a beautiful dance or a martial arts kata (defensive dance). Hopefully, a student won’t take both classes on the same day; otherwise, he might try to punch the other dancers or waltz with his adversary.
Your job as a flight instructor is to keep your students focused on the smaller steps they need to take to move steadily toward their long-term goal. Doing so helps keep them motivated and prevents their being overwhelmed by the enormous learning task ahead of them.
So have a talk with your students. Show them how small steps in learning lead to large jumps in skill development. Emphasize how the first small step they’ll take at learning anything moves them from the known to the unknown. A small but significant change in behavior occurs when the unknown becomes known. Make sure they understand that the very next step they’ll take is based on having acquired this small but still significant change in behavior. This renders the complexity or difficulty of jumping from step two to step three or even step seven to step eight about the same (relatively speaking) as the jump made from step one to step two.
Finally, make sure they know that if they look at the jump from step one to step eight, the amount of learning might appear complex and intimidating—no one becomes a Bruce Lee or a Fred Astaire in one jump. But if your students keep on steppin’, they’ll keep on learning.
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