A lot of us are in the business of knowledge production.

I look at my coaching practice as basically a “knowlege factory”. I build and distribute knowledge.

Now, you might think that knowledge is something that just “Is.” Either you have it or you don’t.

But, actually, it doesn’t work that way at all.

The evidence from neuroscience

“ I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

— Comedian Emo Phillips

In the last few decades, the field of neuroscience has exploded. With modern diagnostic and imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we’ve learned an incredible amount about how our brains and our minds work.

One of the key findings is that we construct knowledge out of bits and pieces of information from our environment.

For example, look at the following image:

What do you see there? If you’re like most people, you see a “face” — taps for eyes, a faucet for a nose, and a drain for a mouth.

There’s no “real” face there. Our brain “recognizes” a face by assembling previous recollections of “face” and mapping them onto something with a similar arrangement.

And even more accurately, light patterns hit photoreceptors in our eyeball, which triggers our optic nerve, which transmits these patterns as electrical impulses to the brain, which then assembles them, flips them right-side-up (for what we see is actually given to us upside-down), makes sense of them, and sticks the word “face” on them.

Then, other brain departments remember that we like faces, and judges that this particular face looks friendly.

Our limbic brain, attuned to human connection, finally makes us feel mildly pleasant when we look at this cute friendly “face”.

What does this have to do with learning and understanding the world around us? Everything.

Perception to reality

Our understanding of the world is built out of a vast array of these types of processes.

Our sensory apparatuses are always gathering information, our brains and bodies are always processing it, and we’re always responding.

We can’t possibly take in all the information out there. We have to filter it. We have to prioritize.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to walk down a city street — we’d be totally overwhelmed by all the sounds, sights, and smells, along with navigating around other moving pedestrians and cars.

The same is true of my role as a coach. To my clients, you’re the information filter.

I help them process nutritional information, decide what’s important, and make sense of it.

Otherwise, it’s just a cacophony of “nutritional noise”.

But before I could do that for others, I had to be able to do it for myself.

Knowing how to know

To know how to know, you have to be able to construct knowledge. And that’s a challenge.

There’s a lot of information out there. It’s exciting and overwhelming to have so much at our fingertips.

Expert knowledge is important.

Yet (for me) coaching competency depends largely on wisdom or purposeful intuition — in other words, assembling, prioritizing, and using knowledge.

There is a distinction between “knowing how” (skills) and “knowing that” (facts).

Both are important, but right now we are focusing on the first element — leaming how to learn, know, and teach things.

Obviously, this isn’t something that can be wrapped up neat with a bow on top in a blog post and humans will likely always be trying to figure out how to improve this topic.

But for now, here’s a few key

• We construct knowledge. It isn’t “just there”. We constantly assemble the “puzzle pieces” from our perceptions. It’s an active and ongoing process.
• We need some knowledge. You can’t decide who’s won a game if you don’t know the rules. Likewise, you can’t decide whether a food choice is “better” if you have no idea what’s “better” or “worse”. Factual knowledge comes before skills and higher-order thinking.
• Knowledge alone is not useful. My clients (as well as myself) are likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of available information on nutrition, exercise, and health. Again, we all need some knowledge. But knowledge alone doesn’t inspire anyone to change.
• More information isn’t always better. In fact, research shows that more information often de-motivates people. It’s too much, and people are paralyzed by all the options. Resist the urge to do an “information dump”. And consider how you can do more with less information.
• Part of my job as a coach is to be an information filter. If help clients decode, process, understand, and prioritize nutritional information. Being in an industry where there’s more incorrect information being spread (both intentionally and with good intentions) than not, this is a part of my practice that I am very intentional about. Because of this, my views are often shifting and adapting to new information and research as it comes out.

History matters

Since processing and constructing knowledge involves pattern recognition, our perceptions are shaped by experience and prior knowledge.

If you’ve never seen a face before, the picture above will just look like any other sink.

But since you know faces well, and faces are very important to humans, your brain assembles everything even remotely face-like into a face.

Likewise, my clients to me with their own nutrition experiences, biases, and histories, which will affect how they receive and make sense of the knowledge I share with them.

As a coach, the ultimate purpose of my knowledge is action.

Fundamentally, I am here to help clients make a change.

All knowledge and information should eventually lead to meaningful action. Knowledge is powerful. But knowledge alone doesn’t create change.

More to come on this. But for now, keep these questions in the back of your mind:

• So what? What’s important, useful, and/or valuable about this information I’m getting?
• How can I use this information to help me or someone I know right now?
• How does this information affect my (outcome-based) decision making?
• Which information is actually helpful, and which is not? How can I tell the difference?
• How can I prioritize, process, and simplify this information so I understand in what situations I could use it?

Want to start now?

Much of these ideas originate from Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, which I recommend to anyone who does not find everything I’ve written thus far totally nauseating.

Here’s a synopsis from one of his Ted Talks