“With a lifelong love of learning as a life skill, the continuing education mandated by your State Board can take on a whole new meaning for you.”
As a kid, did you ever read the cereal box at the breakfast table, just because it was there, and just because you could? Well, you might have been developing a lifelong love of learning.
A lifelong love of learning can cause you to google random subjects, just because you’re curious about them. You might follow links online, just to get a deeper level of understanding about what you’re reading — and you do read, when you have a lifelong love of learning.
You can borrow any ebook for free from your local public library. All you need is a library card, a smartphone, and the library’s app.
Or you may take a course about computers, for example, at your local community college, just to find out how they work. It’s not expensive. You feel driven to it, when you notice that computers have begun to dominate everyday life, and you can’t go on being “an analog man/woman in a digital world.”
And you do notice things, because you have a healthy level of curiosity about life in general. You want to know how things work, or why they are the way they are.
If you do take classes, you don’t just sit there memorizing things just so you can repeat them by rote for a high grade on an examination. You ask questions. You figure out how you can use all this new information to make life better for yourself and others.
You never know where this kind of curiosity can take you. If you develop an interest in a subject, and go deeply enough into it, you could land in a whole new lucrative side gig — one that’s simply not available to those who don’t bother to keep up.
It happens all the time.
The world is changing so rapidly, now that the amount of knowledge available these days doubles every one to two years, and continues to increase faster and faster as developing technology continues to make it more and more available.
There’s no time to codify it all, for it to be formally presented as courses in schools. The people who know these things are the ones who go out and study it on their own — and who keep up with new developments, because the information you learn today might be obsolete this time next year.
In the beauty and fashion field, we get much of our continuing education at hair shows. When you have a passion for fashion, you’re eager to see the next center-stage extravaganza. You’re excited to learn some new technique from an inspiring platform artist that you can put to use in your shop.
You may even be willing to pay above and beyond the cost of the hair show ticket for a class, for instance, to perfect your foil placement for the next set of highlights you plan to do.
With a lifelong love of learning as a life skill, the continuing education mandated by your State Board can take on a whole new meaning for you. Depending on where you’re located, they may require you to complete a certain number of hours of it before you can renew your license.
The fact that it’s mandatory can cause you to think of it as just another chore you have to get through. You know what I mean — the uninspired free online courses put out by a state worker whose job doesn’t require him/her to be engaging or creative. So you sit through it for the required number of hours, just so you can check it off your to-do list. We’ve all done it.
But what if you could approach it with the same level of attention you had for the cereal box. Or the same enthusiasm you feel at hair shows. Wouldn’t that make life a tad more interesting?
Mandatory continuing education might not be as exciting as the center-stage extravaganza at the hair show, but when you think about it, it’s not really any less attractive than the cereal box, is it?
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Lynn Fountain Campbell owns a salon in the East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Currently, she helps stylists and salon owners build better websites that are structured to gain more traction in the search engines. Contact her at besthairstylistintown.com/contact.
