Discover Your Strongest Intelligence and Your Unique Learning Style

When you were going to school, did you do well on exams? Was learning easy for you? Or were you one of those students who had difficulty learning? Did you often feel dumb? Did you grow up convinced that you weren’t very smart? If you didn’t do well in school, it might not have been your fault. Our schools are set up to accommodate those students who learn easily by reading and listening, but they often ignore students who have other forms of intelligence and other learning styles. The truth is, there are many kinds of intelligence. Just because you don’t do well in one kind of intelligence, it does not mean that you lack in intelligence. You need to find out which sorts of intelligence are strongest in you. To improve your abilities in school and in your career, you need to find out you’re your strongest intelligence is. You need to identify your learning style. Not every school is set up to teach students who learn best by doing. Most schools are set up to accommodate students who learn best by reading and listening. Those students who don’t learn by reading and listening will often fall behind. They will grow up thinking of themselves as not very smart, but the truth is, their education system did not give them the kind of instruction that worked for their particular learning styles. Just imagine for a moment that you lived in a world where only people who were very skilled at musical ability were considered to be valuable. And in this world, only those people who were musically talented were considered to be intelligent. Everyone who didn’t have musical ability was considered to be slow-witted and intellectually inferior. In this imaginary world, only those people who were the greatest singers, composers, and instrumentalists could run for the office of president, or enter the upper levels of any corporation. In a world like that, would you be one of the people who would easily succeed? Or would you be shut out of all the best opportunities? If you had grown up in such a world, would you consider yourself to be intelligent? Would other people think you weren’t very bright because you couldn’t carry a tune? If you happened to be very good at reading and mathematics in a world where only musical ability was regarded as valuable, would you decide that these other abilities you possess weren’t important? Do you think it would be fair that other people decided whether or not you were smart based only on this very narrow definition of intelligence? What if you lived in a world where only athletic ability counted? Or a world where only artistic ability was respected? You can easily see by these examples that deciding to value musical ability only, while disregarding other forms of intelligence, would be very unfair and quite unrealistic. And the same would be true if we decided that only artistic ability, or only athletic ability mattered. Yet in a way, something similar does happen in the world we live in. In our world, and particularly in our schools, people tend to value one particular type of intelligence very highly, and they often regard other forms of intelligence as less valuable. If you happen to be talented at reading, logic and mathematics, you likely did very well in school. You were probably be regarded as very intelligent by your teachers and your peers, and you grew up confident about your intelligence and your ability to succeed. That is because in our current world, an aptitude for reading, logic and mathematics has been defined as synonymous with intelligence. When you take an IQ (intelligence quotient) test, this narrow range of abilities is what is measured, and then the score is said to be a measure of your intelligence. So if you happen to do poorly at logic and language because your skills are elsewhere, these tests and our school systems may label you as someone who is not very intelligent. The truth is, the education system fails many students who simply have different learning styles and different learning needs. If you want to become a better learner, you need to indentify which forms of intelligence are strongest in you, and which unique learning style works best.