# Learning starts with love

## How to change your narrative about your ability to learn

A week before Thanksgiving a new movie, based on the true story of the real-life friendship between Fred Rogers and journalist Tom Junod, starring Tom Hanks, will play in a theater near you.

Click here to see where and when:

[Find out where it is playing](https://www.fandango.com/a-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood-219638/movie-overview)

What Mr. Roger did was to help children own and change their narrative of who they are what they can accomplish.

When you believe a narrative about your ability to learn your brain will follow. If you believe that you are a bad learner you will be.

## Narratives about learning

Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narratives that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation and meaning. We tend to not examine the slow progress of experiences upon our narratives.

What is the narrative of your learning experiences?

Describe your learning ability or experiences in:

• Kindergarten  
• Grade school  
• Middle school or Junior high  
• High School  
• Right now

Are you seeing patterns?

What was your mindset?

These experiences in school build upon narratives that become ingrained into the vision of who we are.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

If we change the narrative your ability to learn via memory and mental performance will follow.

> To change your learning narratives you need to confront them with rational thought and believe the science about our ability to learn and then change your mindset through vigorous Learning Frames practice.

Page 89 of [The Learning Maze](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1697218482/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i6)

## Published by Shane Lester

Shane Lester is a Learning Strategist who earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Professional Writing and a Master’s of Science degree in Instructional Technology with an emphasis in learning psychology from Utah State University. Shane has had a dual corporate careers in training design and software product design. Shane has published four books and is now on a mission to help people analyze their failures and create learning strategies to help them achieve their goals. [View all posts by Shane Lester](/content/author/shanelester2016gmailcom/index.html)