So, hello everyone, and welcome to the presentation. Hi, Lindsay and Maria, I know that you're the participants. Thanks for coming on this time on Friday. We're going to talk today about how to become a lifelong learner. Now, it's a very interactive session, so if you think that you want to add thing or share your experiences, feel free to do that, okay? My name is Dr. Lawari, I'm the spasticity director at the University of Minnesota, and a brain injury specialist, fellowship trained and board certified. With that said, let's get into it. So basically, our presentation today highlights that we all as doctors, we are lifelong learners. It's everything, everywhere in life, we are lifelong learners, and it's all about cultivating a curiosity about the world, trying to understand different sciences, different aspects, explore areas of passion, how to become a smart reader, and embrace the ups and downs of a career choice. So I have to disclose, until I got my board, I was all into rehab, I would breathe rehab, I would do everything and get all the updates in it. Now, I'm a faculty, so I'm expanding on my learning journey into different aspects, whether it's research, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's cosmetics, you know it all. So it's not just all about medicine, I think, and you know, life is bigger than that. So exploring what's available in this world and how to be a lifelong learner from different perspectives is an asset, and it's a gift, let me put it this way. So it's, yeah, education is not preparation for life, education is life itself. That's what the model, and that's what we live for as physicians and as lifelong learners. So when I say LLL or triple L, it's lifelong learner. And if I say that throughout the presentation, don't be surprised. So lifelong learner is not limited to formal school education, as I said, it starts from the moment we are born to the end of our death. I mean, that's a bit kind of stretchy, but I know. So lifelong learning covers the whole range of learning that includes formal, informal, non-formal, I'll get to the details of them all. It also includes the skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors that people acquire in their day-to-day experiences. Lifelong learning is a continuous building of skills and knowledge throughout the life of an individual. It not only enhances social inclusion, active citizenship and personal development, but it also competitiveness and employability. Let me put it this way. And I might give you a, I don't think it's a real example, but basically you finish, I become a brain injury specialist and literally that's my passion. It doesn't mean that I'm not good at low back pain or I'm not good at multiple sclerosis. So when I put it into professional perspective, it's also increases your chances of employability because that gives you a wide room and a range of skillset to acquire. Similarly, you all know in the medical field, the entrepreneurship has become some gaining popularity. So we have doctors who have their TikToks. So their skillset has improved not just from being a good doctor, but also being a good representative of their profession and being a good entrepreneur. And that also brings business. They often open their own business. So there is a lifelong learning to it and it kind of pays off as we move along in the career path. Why is lifelong learning important? Why do we care? There are many important aspects of that. It does increases your chances of employment. The more skillset you're comfortable with, you're more of a catch and somebody everybody would be looking forward to hire. It increases your knowledge. It opens the door for you to know more and understand more and reflect more on your journey. It also involves social development. It does improve your life skills in terms of communication, being involved in different activities at the community level, at the institutional or organizational level. So it does improve your skillset. And it also helps others. It's not all about you and what you are capable of. It also improves the community and what the community would gain and improve from improving their individual personnel in their skillset. So if, for example, I gained that sort of a presenting kind of skillset and now I'm presenting at our alliances, at the community level, at public health. So it does improve my community to understand what I do. Hence, it does improve my profession and my practice. So it's a win-win. Common themes, learn something new every day. Upgrade your reinventing skills. And it needs to be implemented from early childhood to the adulthood. I mean, it kind of depends on your childhood and it depends on what things you were busy at a childhood. But the earlier the skill of lifelong learning is implemented, the better you would be good at, the more mature you would be in your lifelong journey. Do you want me to stop? Is there anything you want me to add? So there are certain lifelong learning methods. There's the formal learning, which we have all been through, school, med school, residency, fellowship. It's well-planned, has a structure, has a curriculum, well-defined goals and objectives. And there are outcome measures to make sure that you have taken what is needed to be taken from that particular project or activity. And you're able to exhibit that in your day-to-day activities. So for example, learning that occurs within an organized and structural context, and that is designed as learning, and they will monitor your progress. It's like more of an adult learning skills. The informal learning, there's no systematically planned approach. It's taken away from traditional formal learning skills like classroom. So for example, in our residency, we all learn about traumatic brain injury, the severe traumatic brain injury, and sometimes that we have to take life measures from the patient because the severity of the injury, unfortunately, is so bad. What you learn from an informal learning is that soft skill or the communication skill and how to sympathize with the patient and the family or their loved ones when you convey that to them. So this is a soft skill that there is no structure to it, but you learn it from your mentors, you learn it from experiences, you learn it as a human, as a passionate physician. It does involve the daily work as an individual or self-taught material. So it's more of like how much you invest in yourself in that informal learning activity. It's spontaneous, it's incidental, it's not like every day you go with a certain structure to achieve. It's a learning resulting from daily life activities related to family, work, or leisure, experiential and accidental learning. And again, you learn it from everywhere, from home, from family, or from community. Non-formal learning. There is a difference between informal and non-formal. So the non-formal is either situations that have no curriculum, syllable, certification, accreditation, flexible, and there's no clear timeframe. And sometimes it's systematically planned, organized, and integrated to day-to-day activities. It's embedded as well, which has certain life skills to be acquired. For example, teleconference. I mean, honestly, before COVID, I bet that the teleconference skill set was something that we would master. But now with teleconference, you have seen a revolution in communication skills. So for example, in the physiatry world, when you have a patient with wound care and you do a teleconference, one of the skills that you learn is to ask the patient to put the camera on the ulcer or the wound, and you document what you can document through a teleconference. You take a functional history and you see the patient's transfers and ambulation through a videoconference, and you can determine or analyze their gait based on that. So it really depends on the situation. We didn't learn it, to be honest, before COVID. Now here we are in, I would say, a revolution of that entity in patient care. What are the benefits of lifelong learning? It's kind of similar to why we learn it. It benefits individuals, communities, and economy, because it does give you the skills, the values, the knowledge to understand the need of your patients. It makes you more productive and innovative. The things that you never thought about, these are the things that you do. So for example, learning about artificial intelligence would help you to understand how you approach your patients, especially in the concussion world or in brain injury. And in our knowledge-based economy, it's also financially productive. Not that we care much about business in the medical world, but honestly, we do. So the more you learn about different skillsets and different challenges, the more you bring to the table in your organization, and the more appealing you would be financially. And again, at the end of the day, you improve yourself, you improve your patients, you improve your institution, and you improve the overall medical system. So there are like five powerful benefits. It's sharpen the mind as we get older, and I mentioned that, but it's the nature of the beast. There would be some decline in our passion or ability to acquire new knowledge. So as you keep learning, it does improve your mind, improve your memory. This is from the literature. The more you're involved in active learning, the less likely the risks you're gonna acquire dementia. So it's not that it's something that is encouraged in every single aspect in our lives. It sharpens the confidence. The more you know, the more confidence you are in achieving or knowing what you're talking about, because you read about it, you learned about it, and you're talking evidence. It sharpens the interpersonal skills. So there is an opportunity to socialize with different professions, with different organizations by having different skillset. It does increase the career opportunity. I cannot emphasize that more. The more skillset you have, the more appealing you're gonna be to different institutions, and the more career growth you would have. And it also sharpens the ability to communicate, because the more you know, the more words retained in your brain, the more like you're having that encyclopedia that you have the right words at the right time, and you know how to defend yourself, you know how to back up yourself, you know how to use the evidence base. So it does increase your ability to communicate. Enrich life or self-fulfillment. You're gonna be satisfied with your achievements. Again, it comes with its ups and downs. As a lifelong learner, I had my periods where I was like, I need to stop, or I'm burned out, or I need some break. But then it's like, the more you get used to it, the more it's fulfilling for you to proceed with that. It gives you new friends and establish valuable relationships, as much as, for example, let's stay away from medicine for a bit. The more you know about cosmetics, the more you're able to talk about that in the social media world, the more you can contribute and relate to from even the non-medical world. So you have active social life, you're engageable, you have so much knowledge from different life perspective. Everybody, the comment you would perceive, you're someone you can open a topic with at any point in time with any topic because you're so much knowledgeable and it's fulfilling to talk about different aspects. Keeps you involved in the society and finds a meaning to your life. And I cannot emphasize that further. Again, it gives you joy, it gives you a passion, and it gives you a motive. Adapt to change. I mean, we're all getting used to the AI world and what brings it to the table. So if you're learning about it, you will be better equipped compared to somebody that has no idea about artificial intelligence. So you have a better options and better tools to choose in your career when you learn about them more. It makes the world better place, right? We all want a peaceful world. We all want that sort of a knowledgeable, everybody talk with each other. There's no anger, there is no inferioration. We all want that better place. And being a lifelong learner makes you humble and makes you aware of what is available in this world and makes you appreciative of what you have and what you need to be. Dampens the mind, develops the natural abilities. Again, I don't wanna say I'm repeating myself, but I'm using different words with different approaches for the same goal. Increase your wisdom. Not sure about that, but yeah, it does increase your wisdom because it helps you understand the successes and failures that you encounter through your life. And there's no failure that is a failure per se. It's either you learn or you win. You win when you have the right methods and you learn when you kind of lose your battles or learn something new. But life has its ups and downs. And the more knowledgeable you are, the more likely you would perceive the losses in a better way than throwing temper tantrums. All righty, once you stop learning, you start dying. That's what Albert Einstein said. So this is what is great about the lifelong learner. It just keeps you going. And once you stop doing that, you're like, I think I have no meaning in life. So it's something that is very appealing once you get involved in it. Okay, it was a very quick one because we have a very quiet audience. Unfortunately, I would want it to have more participation. Any questions, anything I wanna be aware of, any advice, any life experiences, happy to hear. I can probably add a few things in. I feel like I'm a lifelong learner. I think the skill sets that I have now, almost 12 years post training and residency fellowship are very different. Obviously the core was the skills and obviously the core was built by the training that I had. And I'm glad that when I was in residency, I did not pigeonhole myself and just thinking I'm gonna only do inpatient or outpatient or spine or sports or EMG. And I literally took every single rotation as this is what I'm gonna do the rest of my life. That's why I really focus on being the best pediatric rehab resident as I possibly could. Because you never know, you never know where life takes you. You never know what your passions are gonna be. You can never predict really what the market is gonna be like, what the demand is. I think I did still go towards what I was passionate about, which is sports and spine. I did the fellowship in that. But at the same time, even after finishing that, my practice is much more than just that. I do a lot of geriatric, a lot of P&O, palliative, pain, spine, sports, we need to do spinal cord, everything, I do everything. So I think that is one part of it that obviously you can build your baseline of your knowledge base. But I think it's the other stuff that tends to scare people, learning about business, marketing, social media, AI, for example, right now, and getting into it. And how do you learn exactly? Do you just pick a book up and figure it out? Do you take a course and figure it out? Do you just practice it and figure it out on the go? I'm a believer in just knowing the basics of it, which is so many resources now. I didn't grow up with YouTube around. I didn't grow up with access to eBooks around. There weren't that many if there were. But now, podcasts are so common. You can learn constantly, and you can constantly work on self-improvement. But I think what's helped me is, as I've changed my trajectory of my career from mostly just being a clinician to transitioning over to mostly admin, and now transitioning more to technology, is that I've had these three transitions in 10 years. I think mostly just because I followed my passion. You know, I went for what I like to do. And for that to happen, it required some self-reflection on what exactly is it I'm passionate about? What makes me happy? What makes me get out of bed in the morning to go work? Is it still patient care? Is it working with people, working with insurance companies, hospitals? Is it technology? You gotta figure that out. That's a journey that we all go through. And I might have the journey now, and three years from now, it might be a different journey. But being able to change your career trajectory based on what your passion is, in my opinion, really prevents burnout. I think it makes you excited about your work. It makes you want to keep on working as long as you can. And you might be able to find a passion early on, unless you stick with it, and that's great. But I think the world moves really fast. You never want to be someone who's not a lifelong learner and get basically, I don't know, satisfied what you know. There's part of that, obviously, things like if you do CMEs and other stuff that you keep up with your general basic knowledge of your as a clinician, but there's so much more to learn. And for me, it was basically taking a couple of classes that were available on my certificates to learn about healthcare strategy, learning about AI. And that made me start thinking about, okay, maybe I should get an MBA, maybe take a couple of classes here and there and see how it goes. So now, again, I'm enhancing my knowledge base because it's too much to know. You have to, last thing is you have to balance it out with your schedule, because obviously your full responsibility of seeing patients and managing research and students and residents and that kind of stuff is still there. Unless you take something off that and then replace it with, otherwise it's too much. So balance is key. That's why I addressed the fact that there is a, there might be some periods where I'm kind of burned out and I'm like, okay, you need to back off. And then once I back off, I'm like, okay, I'm ready to move on and get like in a full kind of mode. So it has its ups and downs, but I know that's a great insight. That's great, Aslan. Thank you. Anything else from the audience? Any suggestions, any comments, any experiences you wanna share? All righty then. I think we're gonna end up way early than we anticipated and that's okay. I learned my lesson the hard way, not to put it on any Friday, I promise. But we'll see how it goes for the next year. Yeah, yeah.

brain injury specialist

lifelong learner

continuous learning

formal learning

informal learning

active learning