There are three levers of learning.

Environment.
Repetition.
Mental models.

To pull the lever of environment is to shape your space. This is physical, digital, olfactory, aural, etc. Anything that consumes the senses is in your environment.

We are biologically hardwired to give the humans in our environment (versus animals or objects, etc.) more weight. We learn more from a face than a collection of words. So we learn most from the people around us.

We also, of course, learn more from the physical than the digital world. However most people are live almost entirely in the digital world so digital learning overwhelms physical by sheer volume. We can use that to our advantage (see the next blog post).

And finally, we are predisposed to absorb more from our environment the younger we are. Don’t let this push you to think that environment isn’t meaningful for adults or adult learners.

People underestimate how much you ARE your environment. All of the little things you don’t consider to be ‘you’ are still you, you just haven’t considered them.

• Where you are is who you are.
• Listening to someone speak is you speaking.
• Watching someone play is you playing.
• Their complaints become your complaints.
• Their food is your food.

I’m obsessed with environment. In fact, I think it was the environment of Suzuki learning (which emphasized environment) that I grew up in that has influenced me to value environment so highly.

When I began studying meditation I did so on my own. After coming back for a run I would sit for a few minutes in my dorm’s laundry room and pay attention to my breath. After a while I heard you could use an app to meditate. Then, I started attending morning sittings at the Austin Zen Center. This is when I read a biography about an influential Japanese-American Zen teacher.

It was in reading about the life of someone who studied zen that my life changed.

That led me to attend graduate school in Ithaca where I could also study and reside at the Ithaca Zen Center. Once I was at the Zen center I was plunged deep into an environment organized around Zen practice. Every moment became an opportunity to deepen our understanding. Walking a dog in Austin would have just been walking a dog. But walking a dog at the zen center was an opportunity to access a deeper understanding… because the environment encouraged it.

I sometimes marvel at how the potency of that living situation allowed me insights that I likely would never have gotten to on my own. I did so little to get there, it was all the environment.

It’s almost like we just can’t help changing, adapting to the environment.

If you play beautiful, captivating violin music for a student every day they just can’t help but learn from it. Gravitate to it.

Since growing up in the Suzuki Method and living at the zen center I have explored different ‘ways’ to shape environment.

• I studied ‘pointillism.’ One-point life.
• I’m now moving through the ‘Season.’
• Linking concepts with environmental cues.
• I built the Studio and then my room at ITE, obsessing over the physical environment of the room.
• I studied family structures and the unique home environment of many of my families.
• I invested in recording student/parent practice sessions and sharing them with the whole studio so that parents and students could see a model for how practice looks (not just performance).

Shaping environment is the place to put energy, because it takes so little effort. Set it once and you learn from it forever. It is the 1 decision that makes 10,000.

Learning happens on its own when the environment is optimal. There is a gravity to learning, an allowing, if the environment is rich.

What I want parents and students to learn from studying with me is that learning is easy and environment is not fixed. Change the environment and you change yourself. It’s that simple.

Steve Jobs put it this way…

You can’t be what you can’t see. The converse is also true: You can be anything you can see.

When I consider what I have the ability to shift in my environment I often bring to mind ritual worship across the many religions and denominations. What are the environmental artifacts of these religious systems? What do they have in common?

• Imagine having a building which was built exclusively for the purpose of worship.
• Every person who attends has particular, special garments they wear only on this occasion.
• There are often anachronistic, traditional elements. Things that you use in this place of worship which might otherwise feel tedious or old fashioned in modern life.
• There are smells, sounds, music, gestures, postures, and phrases that only happen in this place.
• I think of the green tea we would drink before every extended zen sitting. The taste of that tea is forever linked in me with the settling in of the mind.

So allow yourself to hold the intensity of those built environments next to the possibility for yours. I’m not at all pushing you to take on religious practices or iconography into your studio environment, rather to use the same strategies to invite your students into a completely altered and distinctive space.

Here are some dimensions on which to make decisions.

• Senses
  • Visual – illustrations, lighting, models
  • Olfactory – incense, aromatherapy
  • Aural – sound treatments, noise canceling headphones, quality audio equipment, musical cues
  • Feeling – clothing, textures, violin case, gloves, temperature
  • Taste – coupling food with the lesson/practice ritual
• Digital Landscape
  • ‘Reference recordings’ – repertoire, lessons, group lessons, practice
  • Lifestyle – following people who fit violin study into their life
• Real life communities, friends – group class, etc.

I hope you have fun building out your environment and guiding parents through similar practices.