It’s Time to Get Focused w/Lauren Waldman
Episode Overview
In this engaging episode of Making Better, Matt Gjertsen sits down with the insightful Lauren Waldman, an expert with an impressive background in neuroscience from Harvard, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. They delve into the intricacies of learning design, the remarkable human brain, and the underutilized connection between neuroscience and professional development. Lauren shares her wisdom on the vital role of continuous learning, curiosity, and the power of attention in personal and professional growth. They also explore practical strategies for enhancing focus, the significance of understanding our own neurology, and how this knowledge fosters empathy and effective interactions. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion that illuminates the invisible elements crucial to talent development and the awe-inspiring potential of the conscious mind.
Make sure to check out the recommendations from this episode:
Joining Forces with Your Brain: https://www.learningpirate.com/joining-forces-with-your-brain
A Slight Change of Plans: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/a-slight-change-of-plans
Learning How to Learn: https://amzn.to/3ULva16
About Lauren Waldman
Lauren Waldman, aka The Learning Pirate, is a Learning Scientist and an expert in the neuroscience of learning. Her amazing online course, Joining Forces with Your Brain, is designed to help people build the skills to be a better learner and overall human.
You can connect with Lauren through:
Full Transcript
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Lauren Waldman [00:00:00]:
Mindfulness is being able to be present in the moment. But if you cannot dim some of the external stimuli to do that, then you're missing out on these opportunities, not only to be present, but to use your executive function to the best of its ability. When you are learning, when you are just having a conversation with somebody, when you're sitting in a meeting and you realize this is a great one for anyone who has marathon meetings, am I really absorbing what's in front of me right now? And can I test that? Can I assess it in the moment?
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:34]:
Hello, and welcome to the making Better podcast, where we talk about how to make ourselves, our teams, and our organizations better. Whether you are a business leader, a talent development professional, or an individual contributor, this show will give you actionable insights to improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Lauren Waldman, the learning pirate. Lauren started her career like countless others before her. She was teaching courses, managing learning teams, but then she decided to go a slightly different direction. She wanted to understand more about how the brain works and what good learning looks like from a neuroscience perspective. So she decided to get certificates in neuroscience from Harvard, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. No big deal.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:26]:
In this episode, we talk about the importance of controlling attention, what it means to make memories, and how you can get started learning more about how the brain works to improve your talent development. Before we get into the episode, I do want to remind you that if you've never watched the show before, please make sure to like or subscribe so that you never miss a future episode. And if you are already subscribed, then I would ask that you share this show with at least one other person, because that is how we grow, and I can't tell you how much it means to me. So with that, let's get into the discussion with Lauren Waldman. Lauren, I am so excited to have you on today. How are you doing?
Lauren Waldman [00:02:09]:
I am amazing. Everything is great today.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:12]:
Excellent. I'm glad you were able to take some time. I know you're doing a bit of traveling right now. I always like starting off. You are by far the most academically backed, research backed person we've had on the podcast, which is fantastic. So I'd love to start there just kind of with a basic question of what's your favorite study related to kind of the brain and learning?
Lauren Waldman [00:02:38]:
Oh, my God, there's so many. When it comes to the brain and learning, I think not just my favorite, but I think one of the more prominent ones was done almost 20 years ago. I think it was back in 2004. It was published in one of the journals of Nature Reviews Neuroscience. And it was the study that revealed the importance of sleep to the consolidation process of memory. And that really level set so many things, not just for us as learning professionals, but for educators who didn't seem to realize that you just can't cram a bunch of stuff in that little brain and expect it to regurgitate it the next day. But that whole process of the critical elements of sleep, not just to our overwhelm well being, but to memory itself, that was like a breakthrough study for me that I really think made big waves very cool.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:32]:
It's interesting, and I think that says a lot about kind of when I see what you post on social, what you talk about, what's in the courses that you make, so much of the content is about all of the other stuff that we don't talk about around learning. It's like we talk, especially in corporate learning development, we talk about all the activities that you can have or the knowledge that you're going to do or which modality is best or whatever. But you talk a lot about all the other things that go into learning. It seems like a lot because there's so many factors there. I guess one definitional element that I would say from the beginning, because I think, as you point out, so many people in the field of learning development, talent development, don't have a formal background in learning science. How do you define learning?
Lauren Waldman [00:04:25]:
And I think I just want to caveat my answer just so by saying, I didn't know this either. I was in the profession, I was in education, I was in learning development long before I got into the sciences. So for anyone listening to this, give yourself a grain of salt. It's just we learn when we learn. So how do I define learning now is very much from not the outside in about content and being absorbed by knowledge, books, language, but from the inside out. So how is the brain doing it itself? So now when I think about what is learning, I think of it from the aspect of structural changes of our neurons, these 86 billion cells that we carry around in our heads, and then all of these connections called the synapses, which is really where the communication between those cells happen. And it's the change and the manipulation of those which then forms or modifies our neural circuits to become a memory. And that was super sciency and nerdy, but that's how I see learning.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:33]:
I love it. And I think maybe you can help me kind of deconstruct something that I often think about with this, because I got into learning largely through, honestly, sports, and it was like sports training and the idea of muscle memory and the idea of training specific actions and behaviors, because as I've been reading, I've been trying to kind of parse out the differences there of learning a specific behavior or action versus learning some bit of information. Is there kind of a difference between. I think I've read that there's a difference between the neurons that are in your brain versus has your brain expands out into your body. Is there kind of like a difference there in what that learning is of learning behaviors versus learning knowledge? Is there any difference?
Lauren Waldman [00:06:23]:
There's a difference, but I wouldn't say it's in the functional elements of us. Right, because the brain is sending signals to the rest of the body, and it's basically because the brain has functional areas. So when we are learning something like a sport or, for example, I studied piano when I was younger. So I'm not only learning the element of the theory and being able to read the music, but then all of a sudden, my brain is encoding the physical elements, the somatic elements of it, and that's a different part of my brain that's encoding those, like you said, the muscle movements allowing me to move my fingers. So because everything is connected, I would say it's more in the modalities and the methodologies that we use to learn those different things, whether it be something that we are doing physically versus if we are just trying to absorb knowledge for skill or ability or behavior.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:16]:
Okay, that makes sense. So you mentioned when you were talking about the definition of learning, kind of that transition that you made, and I completely agree. We all get thrown into situations that we're not expected to be in, and who knows what background we have, and we're all just doing the best we can with what we got. That's certainly true for me. I recently listened to, you were on Sarah Kinestra's podcast, and you talked about that before you went into the deep dive of the science. When you first kind of got into learning, you had kind of a feeling of something feels off here, like in how training was happening. Do you have any thought of where that intuition came from? Because, again, I feel like I had some of that feeling when I moved into the field, and I think it was because of the sports background. That's what I was kind of bringing into it and trying to connect with.
Matt Gjertsen [00:08:12]:
Where did that intuition come from?
Lauren Waldman [00:08:13]:
You, I think, where does intuition come from? It comes from this gut feeling, this gut sensation. But I want to say that it probably started back in the days when I was in the classroom, and it was not only from teaching, but it was from observation, very strong observation. And then it was a matter of, well, I was always going out of my way to take this generic content that was just in every textbook and every activity sheet and making it different, trying to alter it, because it just didn't seem like it was hitting the mark. And it wasn't until much later, when I got into the sciences, when I started understanding the brain, when I started understanding focus, attention, and memory, that those light bulbs started going off. It was like, oh, that's why I thought that was the better way to do it. Not because it was necessarily more fun and engaging, which it was, but because it drew the attention of the brain to focus in a different way than just regurgitating content and rope memorization. So that, and it allowed me to go, I like to call it, there's like a Willy Wonka meets Alice in Wonderland kind of imagination that happens in here when I'm designing, and that's kind of where it all sort of sparked as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:34]:
Yeah. And it totally makes sense from that point of view of you were in the field, you were seeing it, like, very hands on, real time, and noticing what works, what doesn't. I think that's one of the benefits that I think you can get from, whether it's the classroom or a lot of different training environments where you just have lots of repetitions of attempts at teaching things. And I think, at least for me, that's where a lot of. To go back to it, like the intuition or the insights come from, it's just like something back here just keeps recognizing those repetitions, and all of a sudden, it spits out some new idea. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know where that came from.
Lauren Waldman [00:10:21]:
I think a lot of. Sorry, Matt.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:23]:
No, go ahead.
Lauren Waldman [00:10:25]:
No, I was going to say, when I'm teaching and when I'm doing workshops in the master classes, and even when I just do a keynote, sometimes I start off by saying, maybe you've already had the similar sense of, like, there's a reason why I want to do it this way. And I think the more that you discover about the operational system of how the brain works, and if you're in learning and you're in design, especially, I had so many of those moments of, like, how did I not know this? How did I not know this? Because it did seem very like, oh, okay, I probably did. I just didn't know how to apply it. I didn't really know the why behind the how.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:09]:
Yeah.
Lauren Waldman [00:11:10]:
And that's the big difference.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:12]:
Yeah. Do you have an example of that to kind of spell that out of whether it was something that you specifically remember, a way that you did things and then learned why you did it that way later on? Or maybe it's, if it's not a specific one, that you did just some example to kind of spell that out for people watching and listening of those kinds of things, that you might think, this feels like a better way to do it, and then now apply the science to that. And why is that a better way to do it?
Lauren Waldman [00:11:39]:
I remember when I first started in my educational career and I started teaching English overseas, that was like my very first sort of introduction into teaching. And when you're working with people who don't speak the same language, it can get very challenging. You have to find multiple different ways to try to articulate and explain something. And I remember it could be something very simple that I would challenge myself is I could pick up my pen and think, how could I explain this to somebody in ten different ways? What's a pen? What does it do? And that's when I started tapping into the creation and the novelty and the different varieties of way that someone might actually understand, whether that be through a physical demonstration, whether that be through a video, whether that be through getting them to do something. And that's when I started to realize that there are so many more modalities that go outside of traditional teaching and learning design that we could be tapping into. And then you start adding in the information that we know about the brain. Right. Which is, okay, the brain doesn't only learn in one place.
Lauren Waldman [00:12:52]:
The whole thing is activated at any one given time, especially when it comes to things like music. But because we're not just visual learners, and I'm not even going to say the myth that we all know exists, I'm not even going to say it. But because we aren't just those things, when we understand that the brain isn't just one resource, it's multiple resources, and we can tap in to those different areas, then we have a lot of different varieties of ways that we could potentially design learning, and not just from visual, auditory, kinesthetic. By understanding what is focus and what is attention, how do we use the mechanisms and the skills of focus and the attentional networks in the brain to help somebody draw their attention to something very particular? That's where the magic really started happening for me, especially in my designs.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:45]:
Yeah, I can see that. And I'll be honest, from a design perspective, that's something that I kind of have the hardest trouble grappling with, because again, like you mentioned it, in the very beginning, sleep was one of those, a study on sleep and the importance of sleep for learning was really important to you. And when I listen to a lot of what you say, it reminds me a lot of almost like, mindfulness practices that I've heard about and that I've learned of how to think about keeping people's focus and guiding the focus of your own brain. I've thought about it a lot internally, but I will say I'm not certain. I spend a lot of time trying to apply it externally. Right. To my learning design. You brought up focus as an example.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:35]:
What are some ways that you think about utilizing that in learning design?
Lauren Waldman [00:14:40]:
So the first sort of premise of focus is that you need to understand is that attention is the mechanism to focus.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:47]:
Okay?
Lauren Waldman [00:14:48]:
So when we look at attention in the brain, there are multiple attentional networks. So one might be governing your executive function. The other one's going to be guiding your auditory function. So when you think about when you're sitting in a busy restaurant and you're sitting across from your friend and you're having that conversation, there are particular areas and particular networks that are guiding your attention to be able to listen to that person sitting across from you and then dimming out all the rest of the stimuli. Now, when we think about learning design, when we look at a typical course, there's a lot going on in those. Let's take away the fact that most people put in way too much content in a small amount of time, way too much content, which is exhausting the cognitive load and the working memory as it is. But when we put that aside and we look at the very particular design elements, your typical elearning course is going to have some sort of music, it's going to have buttons, it's going to have directions, it's going to have text on the screen. It's like, oh, my God, how many different places do you want me to be looking at? So when you think about if focus is the gateway to learning and attention is the mechanism to focus, then what is that you are trying to do to help someone focus? How are you guiding their attention? So I like to look at it as you can go around the house and put all the lights on, or you can start turning off some of those switches and save some energy.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:17]:
Yeah, that's really interesting. I remember just recently I heard a stat I'm going to get these numbers completely wrong. But you might know these numbers. It's order of magnitude about how every second your brain is processing like 10 million bits of information, but your conscious mind can only focus on 50 bits of information. Again, those numbers are wrong, but it was some kind of just drawing attention to the point of how much information is flooding through our brains at all times, because that's all our brain is, just this repository of neural signals coming in from all of our senses. But how narrow our focus really is to all of that. And thus it makes sense that we should be spending a lot of time thinking about guiding that focus to what we want, because there is just so much other information that could be distracting to people. That's really interesting.
Lauren Waldman [00:17:19]:
So there's two sides to this. When I think about, especially in the area of learning and development, or we look at teachers and education, and I think there's two folds, so we can design learning much more effectively for the operational system of the brain so we can help that process. But then where we're constantly putting the cart before the horse is that we have this expectation that people just know how to drop into focus. And until we start teaching the fundamentals, those underlying fundamental human skills, and focus is a skill, especially in this day and age. Especially in this day. I don't know how many times I've watched people walk down the street clearly not paying attention because they're looking at their phones and about to walk into traffic. And this is a habit and behavior issue, right? What are the habits that we're cultivating, but those underlying skills of being even able. You talked about mindfulness.
Lauren Waldman [00:18:16]:
Well, what's mindfulness when you really break it down? Mindfulness is being able to be present in the moment. But if you cannot dim some of the external stimuli to do that, then you're missing out on these opportunities, not only to be present, but to use your executive function to the best of its ability. When you are learning, when you are just having a conversation with somebody, when you're sitting in a meeting and you realize this is a great one for anyone who has those marathon meetings, and you start just kind of drift off, but you know, you should be paying attention, it's almost like you can grab yourself out from the clouds and be like, I'm aware of the fact that this is how I am responding or I'm behaving. And when we go into the world of learning, the critical elements of being able to harness your attention in order to focus is going to really play well. Into things like metacognitive ability, when you want to regulate and monitor what are my cognitive processes? Am I really absorbing what's in front of me right now? And can I test that? Can I assess it in the moment? Because what's the point of getting to the end of a course, the end of a training series, and realizing I actually wasn't really paying attention, so I haven't remembered anything.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:34]:
Yeah, I do that all the time when I'm reading. I will find most people do, even a fiction book, just something that I'm doing for fun. I'll find myself having read two or three pages and just like, wait a minute. I don't know what's going on here, but I think it's at least, correct me if I'm wrong. So much of what I've seen is that, again, this comes back to this idea of attention and your brain, because it's having to decide what to pay attention to. It's doing that based on kind of like, what's the most important thing at this moment or what's going to help you survive or something like that. And so when I find myself drifting when I'm reading, it's because there's some kind of external I need to send an email or there's a project that I'm working on. And so my mind drifts to that, probably because my brain is saying, like, this is the more important thing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:31]:
And you're right, it is something that I've had to learn how to do, of how to consciously say, I'm going to let go of that. Maybe not call into question, but how does this factor into? I'm usually a big fan of learning in the flow of work, just in time learning those little things. But I can imagine those kinds of engagements would be challenged by this because they're in the middle of all of this stuff happening, and all of a sudden you get an email that says, hey, watch this video. What are your thoughts on that?
Lauren Waldman [00:21:09]:
I think it all comes down to the strategic and intentional elements of the design, right? And I think where we greatly fail in these conversations is we only say the word. Learning to me is the process and the act in order to create a transferable memory, and we do not use that word nearly enough. So learning in the flow of work, to me, has to be intentionally and strategically designed to serve its purpose. And again, within that flow is, are you doing it passively? Are you integrating the stages at a very fundamental level of memory, which is when we look at it from a psychological standpoint, you've got encode, store and retrieve. Now, in the encoding process of memory, we need a lot of designated focus and energy because that's what the brain requires. But once we get into the storage, which is a very critical piece where we're now working within the memory systems, we now have to intentionally and strategically test ourselves, rehearse, find ways to practice, find feedback, because the only way we're going to get to the last stage of memory, which is being able to retrieve a solidified memory, is through the storage process. So in the flow of work is wonderful in my opinion, though, if it's not intentionally and strategically designed with purpose, then it's going to be bypassed.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:44]:
Yeah, and memory is such a great word to bring up there. You're right, it's not often a thing we associate with learning, or maybe we assume it's there, but we don't consciously bring it up, because the nice thing about bringing it up and saying it explicitly is because to your point, so often we just overload any learning engagement with too much content. And if you just simply ask the question, do you think you'd be able to remember this afterwards? It just breaks it all down. Of course, not even the person designing it would say, well, no, it makes it really apparent that we're just doing putting way too much into any single learning engagement.
Lauren Waldman [00:23:31]:
I'll take that just one step forward and get a little bit controversial and say, if you were to go to those same people and not just ask them, do you think that this is too much content? But take that a step back and say, could you very simply explain to me how human memory is created? How a memory in a human brain is created and watch the crickets start singing? That to me is the bigger problem here is I'm not saying that people have to go as deep down into the sciences as I did. I've dedicated a very significant amount of my time in my career to be the translator to all of this. But when we have mass populations of not only learning development professionals, but teachers and educators who can't answer that question, and our primary role is to help aid in the creation of a memory, have a neural network of memories that will represent those tangible behaviors, those tangible skills that you want to see transferred into your employees, whether that be their projects or whatever it is that they're working on, or in the elevation of your students abilities as they go through the years of school. But if you can't answer that one very fundamental question, we've completely missed the point of the act of learning.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:48]:
Yeah, we can keep going down this path because I do think it's in previous conversations that we've had, and I think I agree with you. I do agree with you. You've mentioned how the whole field is kind of at risk of just becoming completely irrelevant to organizations and not. Irrelevant is the wrong word. But just like, as you mentioned. So I come from a lot of engineering backed companies and software companies, and you can't be an engineer if you don't understand the base elements of what engineering is. You have to understand the physical properties of the thing you are working with. And it makes sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:34]:
It's interesting because when people talk about, hey, what are the L and D books that I should read to up my game? It is pretty rare that they do the design portion, but they rarely go the next level down of like even just books about the know, reading stuff from David Eagleman or whatever. It's pretty rare. And it's something that, to your point, probably isn't. We can't all go get phds, but there's a big middle ground between reading no books and getting a PhD. I don't know. Do you have a sense of where in that scale you would recommend people try to aim at to up their game in this?
Lauren Waldman [00:26:24]:
There's just the foundations, like very foundational things. Right. You don't have to go too far down. I'd say people like myself, now this is where the challenge is, and I think I've been sharing this for many years, is that people like myself are very few and far between compared to the millions and millions of scientists and practitioners out there. And the researchers, the translators like myself, who are also practitioners. And then just to add even, what is it? The horn to my unicorn outfit here is having also been a Clo, worked in the organizations in that role as well. That's where I think there's a little bit of a gap, right? Is we don't have enough translators to can a have the credentials, who've done the time to actually do the work, to understand the very complex things so we can deliver them to everybody else in a very simplistic and practical way. So there is a big gap.
Lauren Waldman [00:27:20]:
Know, I was on a podcast recently with Kathy Hoy, and I think three times she said that she wanted to clone me. And I thought, careful what you ask for, but that's definitely an issue. I think expressing interest in these things is one thing. There's loads of podcasts out right now from neuroscientists, from behavioral scientists, cognitive neuropsychologists that you can listen to, but it is a challenge. I think this is why I created the series that I created, because this was a massive gap for me as well. I wish there would have been a me when I was learning all of this, because it was so hard. It was so, so hard and complex. So looking for the credible, and I'll repeat that again, the credible, validated translators, and then find the practitioners.
Lauren Waldman [00:28:12]:
Those are your sweet spots. But there's a lot. I'd say the low barrier to entry for anyone who wants to start learning about these things is we call them the pop science books. Now, even though the word pop is in them, they're written by credible scientists. I can refer to Maya Shankar, who has a wonderful podcast who I just enjoy listening to because she's sharing stories and she's bringing guests on. There are smaller length podcasts that just explain the science through the element of story. Those are wonderful. One of my board members who I adore, he's taken science to the comedic stage and he cracks me up so we can share some of those resources.
Lauren Waldman [00:28:57]:
He's going to kill me for sharing these with everybody. There is a low barrier to entry, or you find someone like me, you find someone like me, and if I'm not available, I find someone to help you out.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:13]:
We're definitely going to link to your series. We'll link to those resources that you just mentioned as well. Because I think ultimately, kind of like I mentioned before, the base substance that we all are working with in our field is the brain. So if we don't understand that, at least at some level, then it's hard to really move ahead and really call yourself a serious practitioner in the field, that can feel really intimidating. But like you said, I always like to think of skill level. If you think of skill level as, like a zero to ten scale and ten, getting to a ten on that scale takes a lifetime. Right? If you want to be a Michael Phelps, if you want to be a Michael Jordan, if you want to get to a ten in any field, it takes a lifetime. But getting to a six or a seven is usually really surprisingly easy.
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:13]:
Like, it takes work, but it's something that in most fields, somebody can do in a couple of months of deliberate focus. Like, you can get to a six or a seven, where you're better, that you know more, you're more skilled than the vast majority of people. And, yeah, I think it's something that we can all think about with this stuff. It's something that I'm constantly thinking about on this particular subject, because I think you are right. It is something that we all need to know more about if we want to really move our profession forward. Because, again, it's the base material that we're all working with is the brain and the neurons. And if we don't understand that base material, then there's always. If you don't understand the physical properties of steel, you're just not going to be a great architect.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:03]:
Like, you're not going to be able to design good buildings. And so the same is definitely true for our brains, I would say.
Lauren Waldman [00:31:12]:
Definitely. And I'd say as much as we have contextualized this whole conversation around learning, around the professional learning and learning and development, I think when you really pare it back, this is the opportunity that probably most of us out there were never given, which is just to learn about us, how do we work, how do we operate, and we're so lucky to live in the time that we do that we have access to all of these wonderful science system. You have access to translators, because the more that you learn about yourself and this happened to me, the more that I learned about myself and my operational system, the more I learned how to. This is how I coined the phrase join forces with it. Because so much of the marketing, before I started my stuff, so much of the marketing was in the narrative of control. You're this in your brain. I'm like, no, it's not about control. It's about harmonizing.
Lauren Waldman [00:32:05]:
It's about joining forces with it. And I think once we realize that when you understand these things, then if you're a learning practitioner, watch how everything that you do in your world gets significantly better. But like I said earlier, also watch how the conversations with your spouses, with your friends go see how more observational you are of the world around you and how much more empathetic you are to people. Because all of a sudden we've leveled the playing field a little bit.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:37]:
I couldn't agree with that more. I mean, I often tell the story, know, when I first got into corporate learning and development, so I left the military, jumped into SpaceX. I was just. Was, you know, super impostor syndrome. Didn't know what I was doing. And so I got into a lot of personal development. Did you know, like the Tim ferrisses and the Tony Robbins and that kind of stuff and that kind of rabbit hole of trying to learn not about others or how to teach others, but just about myself is what really led me to learning more about how my brain works and learning all that stuff. And I think it has definitely given me a big.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:23]:
I just couldn't agree with you more that the more you learn about how it all works, the more empathy you have, the more understanding you have. Just you become a much more acute, or not acute, astute observer of the world around you.
Lauren Waldman [00:33:40]:
Yeah. And I think when you break it down to the fact that us mere humans are governed by three pounds of brain that is governed by electrical and chemical signals that just allow us to do everything that we do, it's crazy. It's just crazy. It's absolutely mind blowing. And I think for as long as I'm in this career and as long as I keep studying, the simplicity of that will never cease to. It will always amaze me. The fact that you nodding your head, me smiling, me doing this with my finger, it's like a signal was just sent in my brain, and that's how all of us, all of us operate. And why not learn a little bit more about the operational system by helping you create the pages of it for yourself?
Matt Gjertsen [00:34:31]:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. It is truly awe inspiring how much we know, how much we don't know, and just the fact that it all works. I often say, if you ever need a reminder of how much farther humans have to go, just listen to scientists talk about neuroscientists talk about what consciousness is, because they have no idea. This basic thing that is us, we don't have a clue. It's pretty incredible to think about, and it can be really inspiring, and really, it teaches you a lot about yourself, makes you a better human being, makes you better at your job. So, with that, you already mentioned one podcast. I'd say, do you have a particular podcast or book that you would recommend? People wanting to start down this journey, where should they start?
Lauren Waldman [00:35:33]:
Joining forces with your brain is my instinct.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:36]:
Perfect?
Lauren Waldman [00:35:37]:
The one that I created would be my instinct. Yeah, perfect. Joining forces with your brain. And again, this isn't just about promoting the series, but it was the gap that needed to be filled. For know, there's. There's wonderful other courses out there. A colleague of mine who most might know out there in the learning profession, Barbara Oakley. Barbara created the learning how to learn series, and she was such an inspiration for me to create my series because I saw what she did, and it was brilliant.
Lauren Waldman [00:36:12]:
I wanted to take it that step further. Like, how do we peel back another layer of the onion to make this even more powerful? So Barbara's course on learning how to learn phenomenal, like I said, maya Shankar, her podcast, I think it's called the slight change of plans. I don't know if he's still doing it, but if you go onto the learning pirate website and you see one of my board members, Dr. Nick Hobson, who had a brilliant podcast called it's all a bunch of bs. I was a guest on it once. He's amazing. He is funny and tongue in cheek and all the things. And.
Lauren Waldman [00:36:53]:
Yeah, as far as David A. Sousa was one of the first authors that I read when I was my initial studies into learning in the brain. So David A. Sousa, how the brain learns. A great foundational base on that one, too.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:10]:
Perfect. Awesome. We'll definitely link to all that in the show notes because, yeah, to provide as many resources we can. That's awesome. So you mentioned a lot of this is about learning about yourself and helping you improve. So for you, what would you say is one skill that has helped you be most successful in your life?
Lauren Waldman [00:37:37]:
It's those metacognitive abilities. I think I underestimated the value of being able to catch my thoughts in the moment that they were happening and be able to redirect as necessary. And that could be for personal, for professional, for anything, really, is monitoring my own cognitive processes, but not just monitoring it, but then being able to direct and have a different course of action when necessary. And that happened as well. For regulating and monitoring my emotions and my feelings. That was a huge one, too, because once we understand how the connection between two very powerful parts of the brain, your executive function and your emotional processing centers work, that to me, was probably the most significant personal one, is how do I regulate my emotional response? That's going to consciously come out as a feeling that maybe I don't want that thing to come out. So then how do I down regulate that response so I can get my executive function back online faster? That was probably one of the best ones that I've ever learned. And it's a daily, by the way.
Lauren Waldman [00:38:56]:
This doesn't just happen overnight.
Matt Gjertsen [00:38:58]:
No, absolutely. And that's what I was going to ask. Out of curiosity, did you have a particular practice that you use to develop that for yourself?
Lauren Waldman [00:39:08]:
Multiple practices and finding the meditations that worked for me and building up my ability to meditate, because, remember, that's not easy either. We just expect people to drop in to a YouTube channel and boom, you're in. You're in meditation. It doesn't work like that. There's so many things that can irritate you, just probably like they did, like just even finding something that resonates with you and that's an ongoing practice for me. And why do we meditate? Because it calms the emotional processing centers of the.
Matt Gjertsen [00:39:42]:
Yeah.
Lauren Waldman [00:39:43]:
So that was one daily practices of harnessing my own attention and being more present and being more mindful of what I am giving my attention to so that I know if I'm supposed to be focused right now, speaking with Matt, doing this podcast, then everyone who you've seen walk by, who I can see in the reflection, and me being able to still stay focused on you, or recognizing the fact that I've been watching too many people walk by, which I haven't been, but then being able to redirect that, again, these are daily things. But it took so long to change my own behaviors and habits and create those very subconscious reactions, bringing them to a conscious awareness in order to be able to change my behaviors and my habits.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:32]:
Yeah. On that note about it definitely is a practice. One thing that helped, that takes time. One thing that helped me is I started with just simple five minute meditations, keeping them really short. And I think early on, you have this idea that, okay, when I'm meditating, there's lots of different types of meditation. I was doing breath work where you're just kind of focusing on the breath, and it can feel like a failure if you don't stay focused. But the reframe for me, exactly. The reframe for me is really the whole point is that you get distracted and then bring it back, and then you get distracted, and then you bring it back.
Matt Gjertsen [00:41:10]:
And so when you get distracted, that's actually what the exercise really is, is getting those repetitions of bringing the attention back on what you're supposed to be focused on. Thinking from that perspective just kind of helped lower the bar, I would say, in how I was feeling about meditation.
Lauren Waldman [00:41:34]:
And there's so many other ways to go about training the attentional networks. I often give the example. I love the forest. I love nature. I love just taking strolls and taking the moments to look up. Look at the leaves, and you might look a little bit crazy. Oh, well, look up at the leaves. Just stare and look at the leaves and just watch as they float away in the wind.
Lauren Waldman [00:41:59]:
Look at the shape of them. Look at the difference of colors. Play where's Waldo? As you're walking down the street. Look for very particular things as you're walking down the street. These are other ways that we can train those attentional networks to guide us to focus when we want to a little bit better.
Matt Gjertsen [00:42:15]:
Yeah, we're closing up, but super just to bring it back to something that we mentioned that we talked about before, this idea of training yourself to focus and then thinking about that in the terms of training other people. So do you think it's important to, in learning design, are you just purely thinking about from a design perspective of how this is all working together, making sure I'm helping them focus on something? Or do you spend time trying to remind people or teach people how to focus or what to focus on before you get into the actual learning?
Lauren Waldman [00:42:54]:
So this is the absolute beauty of scientific learning. Design is you can be explicit or you can be implicit and you can hide these things within your design so that people are actually cultivating the skills without even recognizing it. They just think they're doing an activity or a practice or whatnot. In the meantime, we are guiding those attentional networks, and we are practicing over and over and over again throughout the duration of the learning segments so that they have, believe it or not, if we tested them at the end and we could see visually and auditorily, like, yes, you actually have cultivated a stronger sense of focus because now you're able to guide your attention, and we can embed that into the design itself, or in tandem, we can teach people, which is, again, I hate to go back to joining forces with your brain, but the series was scientifically designed to do just that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:43:54]:
Nice. Excellent.
Lauren Waldman [00:43:55]:
So there's going to be things that you'll be able to see and things that you won't be able to see.
Matt Gjertsen [00:43:58]:
Exactly. It reminds me, I listened to a talk from, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he used to be the head of Disney imagineering, and so he designed the world of Pandora at Disney World, and the whole talk was about narrative design. And he said how in the park, there are no signs that they designed the park, so that everything just made sense. When you needed to use the restroom, you just knew where the restrooms were. They didn't need signs for where the restrooms were. That was the goal, anyway, of the design process, which just what you were just saying kind of sparked that as a memory of mine, because it sounds very similar. You're helping people learn the lessons without learning the lessons in some ways. Excellent.
Matt Gjertsen [00:44:46]:
Well, final question, to close out. We've been touching on this in a number of different ways, but if you had to explicitly call it out, what do you think is the biggest opportunity for talent and development organizations to do better?
Lauren Waldman [00:45:05]:
I think it's in the. Well, I'm going to say two things. First of all, stop one and dunning. It. Stop it. One training session, one guest speaker is not going to do it. It's just not going to happen. That's the first one that I would say and the next one is develop this curiosity.
Lauren Waldman [00:45:30]:
But then take action on the curiosity. Don't see science as something that's just cool and interesting. See it as something that can actually help bring value to your entire organization. Use the curiosity as something called your springboard. But please, you got to take action. You got to take action. So do a little bit better on the action, a little less talking, and I think we're going to see a better, brighter, evolved learning and development. The whole industry.
Matt Gjertsen [00:46:02]:
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for taking the time today. I know you're super busy. This was really great. I think we went to some places that I wasn't expecting, so I'm really excited about and thank you so much.
Matt Gjertsen [00:46:16]:
Have a great day.
Lauren Waldman [00:46:17]:
You as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:46:19]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. As a reminder, if your team is struggling keeping up with the training development demands of your organization, we want to help. Better everyday Studios is a full service instructional design team that can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below. Have a great day. Bye.
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