My mom speaks "prison Spanish." I put this in quotations because this is not an actual dialect of Spanish, nor do I have any idea what words fall into this vocabulary. I took many, many years of Spanish class growing up in Florida and in college at Loyola University New Orleans. I can assure you that Señor Butler did not mention anything about "prison Spanish" in high school, and he was exceptionally thorough in his teaching.

My mom and I connect on the phone every so often to catch up since I live in California and she's in Florida. In one of our chats, she mentioned that she was getting ready to head out to Spanish class which caught my interest because I have never known my mother to speak or be interested in speaking another language. It’s amazing how our parents become onions with so many interesting layers to peel back as we get older and begin learning more about them beyond just being our parents. They have lives that don’t solely revolve around us.

Upon further inquiry, Mom said she’d enrolled in the Spanish class that was offered through her work in the local jail to understand inmates a bit better and accrue more vacation time. I’m not sure which of these was the lead motivation, but she was now attending class each week with Señora and learning all the words that are relevant within this working environment. My mom fingerprints people as they are being brought into jail, and she wanted this new skill to be more helpful to individuals that primarily speak Spanish while also being able to outwit would-be troublemakers in the waiting room, casually chatting in Spanish about how they might escape or harm someone else. I cannot make this stuff up; the stories are entertaining to say the least.

I share all of this because, as Mom was describing the curriculum she was following, I was seeing this beautiful thing called the 70/20/10 Model for Learning play out in real time in a very unexpected place. The 70/20/10 Model suggests that individuals acquire knowledge and skills through a combination of on-the-job experience (70%), social interactions and mentoring (20%), and formal education and training (10%). It’s a holistic framework for effective professional development and learning something new that I’ve used regularly in coaching clients and managing teams in business and sport. I often use an example from my own life in learning something new when explaining it to clients, but this now seemed like a way more fun way to bring the model to life.

If we apply Mom’s desire to learn "prison Spanish" to this model, we’d note that 10% of her time was spent in the classroom with formal education from Señora, 20% was spent practicing with her classmates who were also enrolled, and 70% of the learning really came from using her new skill on-the-job with the inmates she was interacting with every day. It’s this real-life experience that makes the new knowledge stick and needs to be the bulk of how our time is spent learning something new if we want to sustain the skill.

I’m a firm believer that we’re all a work in progress, and sometimes that progress requires learning something new. As athletes, we love to break down the incremental steps to unlocking new potential, and this is a model that has helped me do that time and time again. If you’re looking to learn something new, check out this resource on TheNextPlaybook.com as a starting point to map out how to apply the 70/20/10 Model for sustainable growth. And thank you, Mom, for continuing to amaze and inspire me!

To learn more about how we use this model and many other tools to help individuals and teams develop new habits and learn new things, drop us a line at The Next Playbook to chat about your goals.

-Derika

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