Ep. 1 | Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and 'Learning Through Experience'

8:30PM Sep 27, 2023

Speakers:

Heidi Brooks

Keywords:

learning

podcast

experience

teach

people

emotional intelligence

deeply

thought

turns

world

courses

yale

grew

harpist

offered

structures

felt

practice

classroom

school

Think about one of the major challenges of our times, it's being full of ideas and not being able to act on them. We can't run a life by syllabus and read our way through life. So that's where learning through experience comes on to the person who learns in a brain bound way, which is really most of us. It's so vague. When I thought about this podcast, I realized that it can't simply be about my telling you what learning through experience is I need to show you, I need to experience it and have us experience it together. So that's what I'm aiming for. In this first season, I decided to look at the experience of mentorship, which is an experience based on relationship. It comes from my own experience, I thought it'd be a nice place to start. Hi, I'm Heidi Brooks, I'm glad you're here. I've been teaching popular courses about everyday leadership at Yale for the past 20 years, I started this podcast, learning through experience, because I don't think the concept is just a good idea. It's actually how I learned. And I want to invite you into this learning space with me. You know, Miranda, the podcast editor was asking me like, What are we going to do? And you know, what's important to you? And what's this about? Anyway? It was like, you know, my, my 28th year, why don't I go back 20 years and kind of see where I was 20 or 25 years ago. And because I have so much respect for the context in which we grow and learn, and therefore, a lot of respect for the relationships and the people that open doors for us. I thought, why don't I kind of go back to that kind of juncture for myself, who basically mentored me in college and in graduate school, and see what they're up to. I'm young enough to have had mentors who are still alive. And that in itself felt like such a gift, when I realized, oh, my gosh, almost all of the people who have mentored me are still alive and well, and I bet I can get them to show up. And it was an amazing experience. I grew up as an athlete, and I'm pretty sure I have like the brain of an artist, whatever that means. And I'm also someone who's always existed as an unconventional presence in conventional spaces. You know, I am a mixed race black woman, I grew up with two white parents, my whole life have been kind of walking in this, what I don't even experienced as a line really, but like kind of living in multiple worlds. And, you know, is she black as she white? It turns out, she's both like, she's both. And so there's a way in which I myself learn most powerfully through experience. And so I come to this podcast, not so much claiming to, you know, have something to teach as something for us to discover together, making it okay to be a learner, we're so focused on hiding the process and revealing the Perfected ends. And that doesn't do justice to what actually happens with humans. You might be wondering, why do we need to learn through experience? Well, because life does not offer us operating instructions for everything that we are going to face. So even things that we have faced for millennia, like having a baby, every person who's having a baby for the first time, it's like, it's never happened to them before. So you actually have to learn through your own experience, how to take it on. And, you know, in my experience of having been pregnant, twice, I don't think I felt like the world was guiding me like every, like, there were so many kind of uncomfortable things. I will often like, you know how to how did I not know that this was going to happen, we also know that we forget almost all of it. The reason you have a second child is that you've forgotten the first time how hard it was. Not only do we not necessarily learn through experience, because people we don't know what to pass on from everyday life. But we also conveniently forget the hard parts, because we are, I believe, deeply optimistic, and it's easier to continue on. And we only remember what we wind up loving and living for. And so we are, we are built to continue. That's part of why we don't learn from experience. But the other reason is the world is changing vastly The world is changing. You know, we are in some sort of turning era. Certainly from the perspective of being based in a business school, we know that the world of work is changing from basic structures, like, you know, it's still negotiating hybrid and virtual and in person work to classic structures, which are deeply affected by the in person or hybrid factor, like how do we actually create a sense of meaning and belonging and unleash the potential for ourselves and each other in the in the workplace? And how do we kind of become leaders? I believe that we primarily do that through experience so we can read all the books that we want and take all of the courses that we want but we still need to You know, in here I would quote, you know, Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, that, you know, we become builders building, we become harpist by playing the harp. And so we can take a kind of Aristotelian approach to leadership development and believe that we develop our capacity by practicing into who and how we want to be. And yet, we're not great at learning through experience. And so experience in itself is not enough. We have to, and here's John Dewey, we have to reflect on experience. So that's why we're doing this podcast to pair, you know, the invitation of great ideas of being and how we want to act in the world with actually acting and learning from the experiences that we're having. And part of the experiences that we're having is how we act. So how did I get here today? 2003, I came to the university. And as a psychologist by training, I felt prepared to teach an emotional intelligence course, which was, you know, one of the popularized psychological concepts. And so I offered a couple of sections of emotional intelligence. And I didn't know basic things like in a business school, or in maybe any classroom was my first teaching job, you can limit your courses, like the number of people who can sign up. And so I just listed it and like, 75, people signed up for a section and I thought, Okay, well, that's just how many students are in the classroom, it turns out, that's a really big class, especially for the kind of way that I teach. And I had, you know, 25% of the student body, maybe at the time in my in my course, which also turned out to be unusual. So without any kind of awareness, I was actually having a bigger impact than I had thought about. But it also answered a question that I didn't even know to ask at the time, which is, what are people hungry for. And I don't know if they wanted more, but I wanted more, I wanted for them to be able to have a more profound experience of the material, I wanted for them to be able to practice more deeply. So what I could do in six or seven weeks, was offered them an idea. And basically, within a session or across a few weeks, we could have a little bit of practice. But I wanted them to have a more profound practice. And so at the end of that period, I went from teaching a seven week, three hours, week course, which is not nothing at all, to teaching, you know, full semester, six hours a week, plus a three day retreat. So I basically put much more time and, and so now it's more of a practicum course, as you listen to this season of learning through experience, keep this in mind. Well, there's a little bit of a paradox in this in this podcast is all paradox means is there's kind of an apparent tension or conflict. And so the tension or conflict that's here is that there's a podcast, what people are going to expect will kind of teach them something overtly, that they can visit each podcast episode and learn something concrete, I think that's going to be true. And yet, the podcast is called learning through experience. And so by learning through experience, I mean that I want people to experience something, mostly themselves their own thoughts, reflections, and to notice what is resonating with them and in their in their life. So I'm hoping that the podcast rather than being only kind of direct prescription on what they should be doing in life to learn, which would be a cognitive input, that they also in addition to picking up some tips and tricks about how this, you know, whatever this topic is, prompts them to learn through experience, that they actually go out and experience their life a little bit differently. This has been an episode of learning through experience. I'm your host, Heidi Brooks. This podcast is produced through the Yale School of Management. The editor is Miranda Shaffer. Please like and subscribe to learn more through this experience with me and the wisdom of the guests who join me to talk about our learning our way through the experience of life.