(205) What I Had Never Realised About Learning with Anamaria Dorgo

(205) What I Had Never Realised About Learning with Anamaria Dorgo

Anamaria Dorgo, a learning specialist totally swept me off my feet with these amazing insights, models and ideas around learning. 

Some of the gold we covered: 

• How learning plays a role in constant change
• Perception and mental models – shifts through learning
• What social learning is and why it matters
• Key learning models – the spinning model! 

And so much more! 

ABOUT Anamaria Dorgo

With degrees in psychology and human resources, as well as being a true lifelong learner, Anamaria Dorgo creates engaging learning experiences for two global communities. She is the Head of Community at Butter, a platform for planning and hosting collaborative virtual workshops and meetings, and the founder of L&D Shakers, an international community of practice for L&D professionals. As a freelance Community and Learning Consultant, she is also advising companies and NGOs on how to build their internal communities of practice to boost their learning culture, innovation, employee engagement, and sense of belonging, as well as driving change from within.

CONNECT withAnamaria Dorgo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamariadorgo/

VIDEO of this episode:

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/sP-Trvv21SA   

ABOUT Katie Stoddart:

Katie Stoddart is an award-winning, international, leadership & performance coach. Katie started her career as a hydrographic engineer working at sea and she now supports business owners to thrive in their life & business.

As a keynote speaker, Katie frequently speaks at summits, conferences & podcasts. For her weekly podcast ‘The Focus Bee Show’, Katie interviews thought leaders, speakers and authors. 

Katie works primarily with entrepreneurs & executives through 1-1 coaching & corporate workshops on Focus, Leadership & Performance.  

CONNECT with Katie Stoddart, aka 'the focus bee': 

PODCAST: https://thefocusbeeshow.buzzsprout.com/

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestoddart

BLOG: https://thefocusbee.com/blog/

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheFocusBee

INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thefocusbee/

FACEBOOK:  https://www.facebook.com/thefocusbee

Transcript

[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Suddar here aka the focus b. And on this show I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.

[00:36] Katie: It's a real joy to have Anna Maria dorgo on the show today. Anna Maria is a learning and community consultant. She has built communities like L D shakers. She also works as a facilitator and a learning experience designer. She is a total expert on the topic of learning. Anna Maria, wonderful to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining the show.

[01:02] Anamaria: Thanks for the invitation.

[01:05] Katie: Excited to have you here. And as I was saying offline, I haven't had a single episode on learning as a topic. So I think we can really go into a lot of different directions here. The first thing I think would be a really good way to introduce this topic would be to look at why do you feel it's important for us to continuously learn and grow and develop?

[01:29] Anamaria: Well, I think it's pretty obvious and I don't want to go into the whole cliche. The world is moving faster than ever and the speed of change and all the headlines that we've seen basically ever since COVID came, maybe even before that, we are going through unprecedented speed. It's only going to get faster. The change in general, in not only the way we work and in the way our jobs are changing. We have heard, I guess, a lot of talk about AI and how it's disrupting all of the industries and what's going to happen with us and humanity. I guess we've been through a lot of cycles of big change and kind of pivotal changes that got humanity scared and we've moved through them. But the way to move past them or through them was through adaption. And you can only adapt if you're learning. So if you're aware of what's happening, very mindfully purposefully guide your way through that change in order to withstand it and not let it kind of.

[02:51] Katie: I.

[02:51] Anamaria: Don'T know if it puts you down, it's the right word or the right expression, but kind of thrive despite the change, right? And beyond the change and beyond work, I guess our lives are changing and even through the light of the pandemic, we haven't lived something like that and hopefully that's not going to be the case anytime soon. Being confined to our homes, not being able to leave our flats, so that required learning and adapting and being mindful of how do we feel. And I know that a lot of people went through a lot of transformations and a lot of AHA moments and so on. So there's just change brewing around and the learning is one of our strategies to adapt and make sense of that change and continue to live a prosperous, good life despite what's happening and what the environment is throwing at us.

[03:49] Katie: That's such a good point and I never really put those words together. I do believe being able to adapt to circumstances and being flexible is hugely important and I also believe learning is really important, but I hadn't actually put those together. I believe learning is important because we continuously grow and that I think it actually makes us more fulfilled as humans if we learn new things. Otherwise we get into these same patterns and kind of get stull. I know that if I don't do training or read for a bit and I'm just operating my business, I don't know, it feels like something is missing. So joining like I did the L D Shakers community, going to those events, listening to a podcast, reading a book, going on a training, I don't know, it does something to the brain. So I always think of it from that perspective. So it was great to hear your thoughts on it. You also mentioned a bit offline before we begun the concept of social learning. So I'd love you to sort of describe what this is and how we can embrace this.

[04:49] Anamaria: Yeah, so just put very in a very basic way, it's the way we learn from others, from social experiences and we can learn together with them or we can learn by witnessing their learning process, et cetera, like observers of their learning journey. And it's a very natural way to learn. For us humans, we're rarely aware, but we're constantly learning socially from others. So we're learning from peers, we're learning from colleagues, we're learning from mom, from dad, from sister for every interactions that we're having our friends all the time. We're learning because we're immersing ourselves in different social dynamics and as we are immersing ourselves and trying to empathize with people and trying to kind of step in your shoes and understand what is it that they are doing and how do they see the world. Those whole dynamics and processes, they are impacting and they're impacting the way we see the world, right? So social learning is learning from others, whether that's an active or a more passive way and there are some very great ways to do that. And obviously I'm a big fan of communities, communities of practice learning communities where you're gathering together, people that are passionate maybe about the same topics, have similar interests and they are learning together. And I guess there's also communities out there where you're gathering people that are not necessarily passionate about the same topic but they go the same journey. Like for example, they're entrepreneurs communities or generalist communities. And there is this richness in those conversations, whether it's with like minded people and especially if it's with someone that thinks differently than us, where our perceptions or mental models are challenged so that's basically how social learning in very broad strokes works or looks like in real life.

[07:05] Katie: I love what you said about our mental models being challenged and also the shift in perception, because it highlights for me why I love social interactions this much is often I come out of them if it's a really rich conversation, just like speaking with you now, right. If I come out of a conversation, generally I feel like something has changed in my brain. If I've been looking at the same problem for two weeks and just thinking about it on my own and then I talk with someone, they might not even suggest something. They might not say, why don't you do this? But they might talk about something totally different or something similar in their business. And suddenly my brain will go, oh, I could do that. And so I often feel inspired, motivated. Of course it needs to be the right type of conversations. It's not all conversations all the time, but often if it's with a really close friend, if it's a really interesting person on a podcast interview, all these types of interactions, I always come out sort of buzzing with inspiration and new thoughts. And it's exactly what you said. The mental models are being challenged and things shift.

[08:12] Anamaria: Yeah, exactly. It's a great yeah. Every question anyone asks you or you're asking someone has the potential to shift something, to confirm something that you know, or to challenge something that you know and make you kind of change your mind or kind of question. Oh, wait a minute. I have never seen this quite like that. So let me think about it, let me ponder and let me reflect on it. So it's very natural for us. And maybe that's why we rarely talk about social learning, because I think that's we associate learning with something that we have an image of learning that we very much drag from school times or university study times, where there has to be a setting and we all need to be facing in the same direction. And there's a stage on the stage, and we observe and we're sponges. And then, if we're lucky, we have some cool assignments that we work on together with our peers. But maybe if you look back at even at your school or university times, at least for me, the most impactful projects and truly the projects where I actually learned a lot about myself were the projects that involved a social element were those group assignments where I had to make sense of the assignment and create something with very often strangers or colleagues, people that I knew very little of. And you're stretching, I feel when you're learning socially as part of a collective, you're stretching more than just the knowledge or the skills related to that particular topic. You're also challenging and stretching the way you adapt. Do you empathize? Are you a natural leader? Are you a follower? Do you have an opinion, do you voice it? If someone disagrees, how do you react to that? So I found those dynamics very hard. I found that part of as I was studying, very hard, but very fascinating because I was learning so much about myself. I said something, someone reacted in a way. And the more I did it, there was this impact in confidence, which I still see through my work with community. And for me, maybe that's kind of the biggest thing that I take away from this work with others is it can be messy and it can be confusing and it's hard and it's not easy and it can derail. But at the end of the day, if you stick with it, you develop so many more. I don't know if we should call them soft skills, but you learn a lot about yourself and about group dynamics and human dynamics. And those are skills that you can then transfer to any type of situation, to your negotiating at the market, to your pitching, I don't know, an idea, to your manager, or being thrown off guard by a question in a presentation or anything like that. So it's beautiful because it's often very organic and fluid. It's very rare to control the way we learn with others, especially if those others are changing and we don't know the people that we're learning with or working with.

[11:41] Katie: Yes, and it also explains why so many of the coaching topics that come up with my clients is around communication and setting boundaries with other people, and how to give feedback and receive feedback, and how there's some topics that are directly personal, like dealing with overwhelm or managing your stress or your energy levels. But there are a lot of topics that are such and such colleague is this way, how do I remoteivate them or how do I lead my team more effectively? And it's all about what you're saying. They've picked up on something socially, generally in the work environment, because most of my coaching is work related. More than personal, though, it also comes up and often it's how to deal with different people, different circumstances, different topics, different situation. And it's all about what you're saying. So they are noticing things, picking up on things, and then they get stuck at a given point, like, oh, I noticed this and now I'm not sure how to address it. I'm not sure how to discuss with my boss changing my situation, I'm not sure how to work better with this. Colleague yes, I guess subconsciously I absorbed a lot of this information through my own coaching, my work and my reading. And I just intuitively am able to guide my clients on these types of topics. But it's what you're saying. We don't even realize that in these situations we're constantly learning. And that once we've managed to negotiate this, speak up in front of this person, be assertive, give them feedback, motivate someone, then we can do it with another person.

[13:20] Anamaria: Yeah. Yes. And this makes me think about a part of learning actually very crucial and sometimes we're constantly learning but we're not always aware that we're learning and the reason why we're not always aware that we learn, especially in social interactions or in what we call experiential learning. So experiential learning is me learning how to speak in public by speaking in public over and over and over again. And as I speak in public, stuff happens, I feel emotions, things go well, go on well, I put labels, I realize stuff, et cetera. And very often if nothing really super big or impactful happens, we miss the learning that we're doing every day in every type of interaction because we rarely stop to reflect afterwards on that interaction, on that learning, by doing, by immersion, social and so on. And we're not aware. So reflection actually surfaces that learning and makes it aware and also helps us link any type of new insights that we have as we go about living our lives with the knowledge that we have already gathered. So it helps us to link it there somewhere, like structure it, order it, and be like again, I think I'm either confirming something that I knew or I'm challenging something. And that challenges me to change my mental model of a certain reality that, until then was a reality. But now, surprise, it turns out it's not as I thought. So I'm going to make a mental note of that and go gather more data to see my map of reality, correct or not, we know that reality does not exist. Like I have my reality, you have your reality and so on. I guess as coach you have that. You tap into that a lot. It's about that. It's about how do I bring all of the learning that I have into awareness through reflection? So then I can go structure, order it and see, oh yes, it's a confirmation of something I knew or yes it makes sense with something that I knew before or no, it challenges that. Do I have to go now back into the real life and reapply that? Retest that, relaunch myself into another similar situation to see it's just we're constantly just gathering data to make sense of the world, basically. That's I guess, what learning is. And that's why it's so important, not only today, but since forever we're adapting as humans. But I guess that specifically in today's world, we need to bring in this awareness of the changes we're going through. And because the world is moving so fast and because we are moving fast and to me, I'm telling this to you, but I'm actually telling it to myself. Right. Again, I'm not good at reflection. I'm trying to get better at the reflection because the world is fast and we're moving fast and we don't carve time for reflection. And so at the end of the day, sometimes you talk to people and I ask people, what have you learned lately? What lights you up? What sparks your brain? And a lot of people, at times, I'm not learning anything. I'm not doing any progress. I'm not learning. And I'm like, you think you're not, but you are. You're just maybe not very aware of the learning you're doing. So, yeah, I can't emphasize enough the importance of reflection in this whole process of sense making of the world.

[17:45] Katie: Yes, reflection is absolutely key. And it goes back to what I was saying in coaching. When people come up with their challenges, they're also realizing them, right? Because just voicing them, just having someone, whether it's a coach or mentor or peer or in the L d. Shakers group or in a community, when someone says, what are you struggling with right now in your business or work? Or what sparks you up? What's going well? What have you learned? When people start to ask you, it makes you reflect. But obviously, if you have a daily gratitude journal or a daily journaling practice or whatever it is in those moments, or when you go for a walk, for instance, in those moments, you have the opportunity to self reflect and actually look back on what you learned. And I have in my daily planning, I have a daily planner and a daily review. Typical coaching stuff, right? But my daily planning is just three main outcomes, a couple of other tasks, and what will I do after work to celebrate? And then my daily review is, how focused and energized was I? What did I achieve and what did I learn? So I have it every day, and I can tell you that answering how focused and energized I was, super easy. What I achieved or did, super easy. And then when I'm like, what did I learn? I swear, more often than not, I'm just staring at the screen.

[19:00] Anamaria: I'm like, super hard.

[19:01] Katie: What did I learn? What did I learn? Sometimes I can see it. Sometimes it might be I learned that I prefer doing my calls in the afternoon than in the morning. Something like this, right? Or I learned that. But sometimes I'm just like, god, I have no idea. And so challenging myself to reflect on the learning. And mostly I don't like that question. Mostly I'm reading, and I'm in sort of I generally do my daily review five minutes really fast, just dong doom, just to make me sort of check. And what am I grateful for? So it's what am I learning? What am I grateful for? Grateful for is easier because there's often been at least one really nice moment, right? Even if it's interview, a coaching session, a walk outside, a lunch, that's easier. But what have I learned today is.

[19:46] Anamaria: So hard because we rarely have these conversations. I guess we have more conversations about what are you grateful for? And what do you like in your life? And rarely we have the conversations of what have you learned? What have you learned today? And again, my mom used to ask me when I was coming back from school, what have you learned today? So it was always kind of when you ask people, what have you learned today? It's hard because, well, I haven't read really anything new. Again, it's linked to this process of it has to be something new that I'm adding. It has to be something this big AHA moment, this splash on the face with wow. And I don't know if there's anyone that has these things every single day, right? So there's some days you have it, but other days is just you really need to dig deeper to see what is the learning that you had made about yourself. And again, you can even tap into emotions like how has my body felt today? And have I learned? Or is that data telling me something about myself? So that could be a good indicator, but we often just go directly into, well, I haven't really read anything new and I just had some meetings and I did my work, so I haven't learned anything. And it's also definitely I can understand why it's hard to ask yourself every day, what have you learned? So for me, for example, what I've learned, a practice that I've learned that is helping me a lot and I started it last year in November, is to have what I call it an accountability partner. So it's just a really good friend of mine who happens to also be a coach. She's wearing that hat as well at times when we have our calls. But for me, we're always meeting every Monday evening for an hour and we just chat about things. And those sessions were very helpful because it's just exactly your point. Earlier, some of your clients come to you and simply the fact that you allowed them the space to talk about things, insights are coming, questions are being answered, et cetera. So that time that I have with her, with that accountability body, which can be anyone, anyone you really trust and anyone that you feel that is holding that space for you and depending what you feel like, do you want someone to empathetically be there for you and constantly pat you on the shoulder and give you the support? Or do you want a kick in a butt or do you want a good mix of those both? Because then you really have to be careful what type of accountability partner you're looking for. I looked for the kick in a butt because I went there with a purpose, a goal, something that I wanted to learn, something that I wanted to bring into awareness, something that I wanted to make changes in my life. And the fact that I know that Monday evening I have that time to go back to that topic, that particular thing I'm learning about or I'm working on, it's proving tremendously helpful and it's my moment to reflect. So probably I'm not reflecting at the end of the day what I've learned today, but when I meet her, I reflect on what is it that I learned and what is it that I actually did and why haven't I done, more or less and so on. So that's the sense making process, that reflection process with someone. So that's something that worked for me. And I'm super grateful that I kind of gave that a try because it's truly proven. I see change happening in a couple of months and it's awesome. And that doesn't mean that change wasn't happening before. But again, I wasn't aware of that change because I wasn't surfacing it into my awareness strong enough or often enough.

[23:56] Katie: Yes, 200%. It reminds me of one of my closest friends helped me and held me accountable for fitness because I was going phases. I did Lost and then I went down and she used to be a personal trainer and so she really held me accountable. And I asked her in, I don't know, three months or so. And then after that I didn't need her anymore. And since then it's been very regular. Sometimes I still skip, sometimes it's a period of a month where I prefer to do long walks than exercise and I listen to my body. But this has been a year and a half, I think, since she started to hold me accountable. And in that year and a half, I've never been this regular with exercise. So what you're saying with accountability, partner, whether it's a coach, whether it's a really close friend, whether it's a mentor, I think there's tremendous power in it and because like you said, also the reflection, it makes you reflect on it. And I used to tell people it's great having a coach, even for the moment before the coaching session. Because I know that when I have a conversation with my coach, I take half an hour before and I start to think, okay, so what do I want to focus on? Why am I getting stuck? What's what I want to discuss? And you take that extra moment, right, to ask yourself those questions to make the most of the session.

[25:07] Anamaria: That's so spot on. I have the same whenever I know, oh, I'm meeting her this evening. So immediately my brain goes to where it should go. What will she ask me? What was my homework? What did I had to do? And that's wonderful. There are some people that are really talented at reflection. That's their default mode. And I think in general, if I were to oversimplify and super generalize, there are some of us that learn a lot by doing and immersion and drawing yourself at it and just giving it a try and let's see how it works. And there are other people that are reflecting a lot, they think a lot. They spend a lot of time in their head making sense, anticipating, making plans, going back to things. I'm the former. That's not my default. And I think both if we're too much into the extremes, we're both missing out. If you're too reflective and you do not apply, learning will never happen. Learning actually doesn't happen through reflection or as you reflect. I think you always need to have a real experience in the real world. You need an event, you need something to trigger it. You need to see yourself act, react, et cetera. And through reflection, yes, you're making sense, you're linking, you're bringing it through awareness. You can learn something. But the trigger, if we wouldn't do anything, if we would simply stop doing stuff, our learning would be very much defined or confined to our past experiences. It's very hard for me. I'm reflecting on my past experience, right? I can't reflect on something that I haven't done. I can imagine it. But that's imagining it doesn't make it real. It doesn't mean that that's how I will react or that's how things will happen. So if you're too reflecting and you're not applying, you're missing the trigger of the learning to see, am I capable of am I actually doing this? And gathering the data that you need for reflection? And on the other way around, if you're like me and you're in this constant doing, you might be doing doing all this stuff, and at the end of the year, like, okay, so what have I learned? Well, I don't know. Wait a minute. Let me just gather my thoughts, because there was a lot of doing and a lot of stuff, but what have I truly learned? So being at the extreme, it doesn't do us service, and I guess it's a bit of like it's a constant flux. You go, you apply, you come back, you reflect on it. And then if we look at learning theories, and there's a quite famous one from Kolboff Experiential Learning, which says exactly that you need to have an experience in real life, you then stop, you reflect on it, you bring it back, you digest it as you go, making sense of it. You conceptualize it, you link it with stuff. You know, you're building a mental model, you're changing one. You're learning. That is the learning. That's the thing that suddenly I know or I don't know. And then with what you know and don't know from the doing and the reflection, you go back into the doing, and you repeat the cycle, and it's like, oh, can I do better next time? And then you're doing it again. Then you're reflecting, gathering data, changing stuff, perfecting, improving, okay, let me do it again. And that's quite a famous learning model that it's proving very helpful just in real life, in the way we learn ourselves, or in the way we support, guide, nurture others, to learn as well.

[29:03] Katie: I love this concept with the doing and learning. And I'm like you. I'm the doer more than the I've worked a lot on self reflection since my career as a coach. And, yeah, there's so much wisdom in this, in doing both, like you said, not getting stuck on one extreme, which can be easily done, but also I'm realizing a lot of things through what you're saying. First of all, that one of the reasons I get stuck isn't because I haven't learned anything, but probably I've learned too much. Right? Not exactly huge epiphanies, but right. Just through our conversation here, I've shifted a few things. I reflected, okay, my definition of learning is biased from school. There's also all the social learning that I don't think of that comes into my coaching, et cetera, et cetera. So there's probably already 20 things or 30 things that are clear bullet points. If I really thought about it and I reviewed all of it, I'd be like, oh, yeah. And so it's more lots of kind of micro and some are bigger than others. Learning throughout the day, that's one thing. But then the other thing that I realized was that probably we yes, underestimate, again, the learning that we do. And that's why it can be hard to actually figure it out because we're so caught up in doing it and we're so caught up in going through our days in the way that we do that we don't sort of realize it. And I also thought about how when I review my day or I review my week, very often I review my calendar, right? So I'll look, okay, I had this call, this call this coaching session, this get to know. But actually what would be more interesting when I do this rather than think, oh, yeah, that was a great achievement, or that was a really nice moment. So often my brain goes towards achievement or gratitude or both. So it's either something that I feel proud of because I don't know, a sales call that turned into a yes, for instance, or something. And it can be both, can be achievement or gratitude, or it can be like, oh, that was a lovely lunch with a really close friend of mine. That was fantastic. Right? So my brain goes, achievement, gratitude, very focused that way. And if instead I looked at each appointment, maybe that's a bit heavy, but two or three during the day and think, in that moment, what did I learn? Either through what the person was saying, like, you with what you're sharing information, or through my own reaction, okay, I got triggered by this word, or the person was a bit late, and at first I was annoyed or just noticing my own reaction to the circumstances. And that would be more interesting, I think, than, yeah, your achievement. Okay, gratitude is nice, and it's nice to remember a nice moment. But how often. Do we think of our weeks and our months in like milestones, achievements, nice moments we're grateful for, if we have a gratitude practice. But how often do we think of them in terms of I learned something with this person or in this circumstances, this blocked me or I realized how inspired I was by this or that book. And we don't often or I know I don't often think about our life in this way. When we review a whole week, for.

[32:12] Anamaria: Example yes, again, I think we're constantly observing and again confirming our mental models or on the contrary, confirming I'm not sure if that word or like we're challenging them. Right. I guess the thing that makes it sometimes harder to be aware of the learning we're doing is the fact that maybe we do not sit to take a moment and plan for that learning that we're learning every day, in every conversation, in every interaction. Clearly reading an article, watching a video, whatever. That input that comes our way has the potential to shift or confirm. So we're learning all the time. But if I would sit now sometimes, as in today, I didn't woke up to say, oh, today I have a goal to learn X-Y-Z or Today I want to learn and I want to be very mindful of my active listening skills. So that's this goal that I'm setting for today. And so in the three calls that I have today, I'm going to be very mindful about that. I'm going to be very mindful of how present I am. How am I listening? How am I paraphrasing? Do I build rapport empathy. Am I really there? Am I in the service of the person and all that. Right? So now, because I have an intention to my learning, at the end of the day when you sit with your notebook, it's going to be much more easier to see what you have learned because it's not suddenly, what have I learned today? Well, I've learned, let's see, because you anchored yourself and primed your brain to observe yourself and to gather data points related to one particular girl that you had, which is to improve your active listening skills or listening empathy skills. It's going to be so much easier at the end of the day to look back and to be like, have I done it? No. Did I do better in one call than the other? Why? What was it? Was it the person? Was it the conversation? Was it because I was tired? Was it before for lunch? And what were the factors? And then suddenly you start reflecting on the real experiences that you had with learning. And that's kind of like you close the loop so you're reflecting and then you're trying to make sense. And by the end of the day, you draw a line and be like, I notice that before lunch, I am actually much more present or more grounded into the conversation than after lunch. Or I know that if I am stressed because I have a task to do, I'm less present and I'm listening less to that person in the call. So then I have to be mindful about that, et cetera, or find a mechanism to grout myself before the call. So then you're building strategies, right? That's the sense making. So you're building your strategies, you're drawing circles and you're like, okay, so tomorrow I'm going to focus again on the same task, except for now I'm going to try this thing. So I'm going to probably ground myself with the five minute breathing meditation before each call. And I want to gather data points and see, okay, by the end of the day. Is that helping or not? Is that confirming infirming? How do I build that skill? Now this takes me to because we talked about Cole and the experiential learning and so on and this actually got me thinking of an amazing, amazing learning model. I don't know if it has a name yet or not, but it was brought to life by someone I met, Shakers, an amazing person. His name is Trian Puma. Trian, if you're listening, you're awesome. He has done amazing work with learning and especially experiential learning and alternative learning. He founded an alternative university in Romania a couple of years back, was active for years in that space. And he's a bit of an activist against the usual educational system that we all knew back then. And sadly, science in certain places still is today. And so he kind of added in a way to this cold expert like you're doing, you're reflecting, you're making sense, you're gathering data points, you go back to doing and it's this spiel in between. I'm reflecting, I'm doing, I'm reflecting, I'm doing. And he added actually his model looks like a spinning top. And as the spinning top spins, the axes are the learning and doing. And in order for the spinning top to spin, you need both. You need reflection to boost the doing and doing to boost the reflection and so on, right? So you need that. But on the other side you also have this side of the spinning top. You have the top and this is where you give the spinning top speed, right? This is where you give it speed and then it spins on a tiny little thingy at the bottom of the table, right as you're spinning it. So the way he defined this, what's the engine? Where do I actually me as a person, how do I boost energy into my learning process? And his take on that is this helicopter view of exactly detaching from learning and looking at it from the top. And he actually calls that going into the tower. So you're going somewhere up and you're thinking you're planning your learning very much strategic. What is it that I want to learn? Where am I going with my learning. And if we were to take, I don't know, presentation skills, is my goal as I set up in this learning process to improve my presentation skills? Is my goal to have better presentations at work whenever my manager asks me to share a project? Or is my goal to become a toastmaster of my area? Or is my goal to speak at TEDx next year? Because these goals and the way you will approach your learning process and your strategies to get there will be totally different. If what you're going for is to present better next week in front of your team or to speak at TEDx next year, those are totally different. And then once you know your goal, what Trian says is that you're deconstructing that and you're kind of like creating the path. So I think that in order to get there, my first thing should be to do this. So this is what I take into the doing this first little step, and then I reflect, and I gather I do again, and so on. And if at any moment I want to know if I'm moving in the right direction, I go back to the tower. I go back to my plan. It's like, all right, so now I'm at this public speaking thing for three weeks, for a month. Where am I on my do I need to adjust something? Am I moving fast enough, slow enough? How do I feel about that? What are my strategies? How do I learn? Do I need a mentor? Do I need to take a course? Do I want to ask my colleague to constantly give me feedback after each presentation? What are my strategies to get me there? And that's something that Cole doesn't have in the action. There's never really this moment to I want to stop, and I want to detach, and I want to know, am I going in the right direction with the speed that I want to and making the progress that I'm expecting to? And so that's the energy. If I have a plan, if I know where I want to go, and I set strategies and constantly go to the tower and be like, okay, so where am I? Now? Let's adjust a bit. Okay, now do reflect. Do reflect. Do reflect. Pop. Okay, now where are we? Are we moving closer? Et cetera. Which makes so much sense when you think about it, right? When you think about it and you think in the way you learn, that makes so much sense. And then here's where my mind was absolutely blown by Triangth model. And I studied psychology, and I'm working in learning, and I worked in HR, and I never really made that connection, that click. Now you ready for it. So the tip of the spinning top, the thing that actually it's the surface where the spinning your whole learning process, it hits the ground. That's what stabilizes your learning process. And he has a great name for this. He calls this the roots. And the Roots is exactly that what is grounding you in the learning process. So why do I need to be grounded in the learning process? So here's why. If you ever very mindfully intentionally learned something and you set a goal and you went for it and you tried, and so it's very likely that you failed and it's very likely that you failed several times that you didn't move fast enough, that you felt that you're not making the right progress. And that's where learning is hard and it's messy and it's frustrating and it's not a walk in the park and it can be very demotivating. It can impact our self esteem. We can think that there's something wrong with us because we don't get it and we don't improve and I'm not talented and so on. So you have this whole emotions that are coming with it. And Traian says we cannot talk about learning if we do not talk about learning resilience, if we do not put in mechanisms for ourselves. When it's hard, when I want to give up, what will I do? I start on this journey, what will I do when I reach a roadblock? What will I do when it's getting hard and I want to quit? How do I take that? Because sometimes I actually do want to quit, but how will I know that it's actually I want to quit? It's time to fold this and move on. Or if it's just the fact that I'm too hurt from the experience of not being at the level that I expect to be. And then he talks. What are your mechanisms? It can be, as you say, as easy as what grounds you. Is it nature? Is it taking a step back for a week from that thing and not thinking about it at all? Is it music? Is it meditation? Is it friends? Is it something else? You're putting it on ice and you're doing something. So how do you build your resilience when inevitably learning will get hard? So now when you think about it in those four elements, it kind of makes sense. I want to learn something and I'm going to come back to this in a second, in maybe a reflection or insight that I had as I'm talking to you now. So, see, I'm learning as I'm sharing what I've learned from Dryan, I'm giving a boost. The energy that I'm giving to my learning journey is through the planning, through the tower. I'm going somewhere. I've kim goss. I've deconstructed. I know if I need videos, I need a course, do I need a mentor? Do I need a coach? What are the instruments that I need to get me there? Then I go into doing in the reflection. I go in the fraction going reflection up in the tower, doing reflection and so on. And whenever I feel depleted, whenever I feel that I need some rest whenever I feel that I'm frustrated and so on. What is my roots? How do I go back to the roots in order to replenish, regeneralize and be able to again, go back to the tower, reshuffle, readjust my map, my plan, my expectations, go back to the doing, go back to refraction and so on. Doesn't that make the most sense in the whole world?

[44:44] Katie: It does. It's a really interesting image to have in your mind as you do that right, because one specific thing that well, I love the fact that there's both roots, which is anchored, and vision, which is from above. But one thing that I find super interesting and important here is that it puts the focus more on the process of doing and learning, doing, learning and keeping the wheel spinning, than on the goal. And I'm a very goal oriented person, but I believe happiness comes from enjoying the process. And so I constantly try and shift from, okay, I know what my goal is, but am I enjoying the journey to get there? Because otherwise there's no point. Of course there'll be hard moments, hence we need the resilience. But if it's, let's say, a pure vanity goal of an amount of followers, and let's say like, it's Instagram, and I don't particularly like Instagram, I use LinkedIn a lot. Am I willing to every day spend an hour and do reels just to grow my Instagram account, just to have a goal of like, loss? And I'm like, does that make even sense? No, I neither like the process nor really need the goal. And so it's a matter of looking at I constantly shift back to the process. But the process is that learning and doing and keeping the thing spinning. So I think that's particularly interesting because we go to the tower to look from above, just to sort of set the direction, but then we come back and we do the learning and doing. And that's what actually matters. So yes, absolutely. So what's your insight before? Because just a couple of minutes left.

[46:12] Anamaria: The thing with a vision, right? And the fact that in his model that sits kind of at the top, that's where you actually take the spinning top with your fingertips and you set it into motion and if you don't touch that at all, it will stop eventually. And then my insight compared to what we just talked with, like we're going about everyday learning stuff. But if we do not have a goal, if we do not steer in a very self directed way and there's a self directed learning as well, which is another concept that's very important, if we do not steer that process, we might feel that we are not learning. And it's hard at the end of the week or at the end of the day to be like, what have I learned today? It's because how should I know? What have I learned if I haven't set out to learn anything? And we know that our brain works very based on energy. Our brain consumes energy and wants to restore energy or keep energy, right? So that therefore, it automizes a lot of the things we're doing to save energy. And so learning, it's a very energy intensive process for the brain. And so the brain has so many stimuli around, so much. Learn everything, every conversation, every email, everything we're doing, it's learning. But if I do not tell my brain from the tower with a specific, this is what I want to learn, this self directedness awareness of what is it that I want us to focus on this week or this year or this half a month brain. The brain will block out all of these beautiful little tiny learnings coming from all over the place because it wants to preserve energy. So the spinning top, the tower, the vision, the direction, is what actually is telling our brain, no, this thing, it's important, it's worth investing energy for this thing. That's what we're setting out. That's why we work with goals. And the brain will focus on that, and we will see that, and we will learn, and we'll bring it into awareness, and it will block everything else. That's why, at the end of the day, it's hard to say what we've learned. If I didn't set an intention for my brain to observe something, to observe and observe something, it just preserves it blocks everything and says, like, no, we don't want to learn that. That costs us energy. So that's the insight that I had as I was explaining the model to you.

[49:01] Katie: Yes, it's true that if we don't set out with that intention and with that sort of focus and paying more close attention to the different aspects, then it'll be a lot harder to notice them. We might still be learning, but we won't realize it as much. Anyway, that was such a wonderful note to finish on. It was absolutely fascinating. Love this model. Love their learning and doing, and love also what you said about what actually is learning and all these misconceptions. We're sort of blocked in a school frame of mind, and in the end, we're learning all the time. So thank you so much for being on the show today. I absolutely loved everything you shared. I have the feeling we could have continued for hours. I think there's so much more on this topic.

[49:45] Anamaria: Time flew by. I thought we're actually 20 minutes in. I was like, what? No. I was like, I've talked too much. No, thanks for having me. I had a blast.

[49:55] Katie: Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And yes, have a wonderful day. Thank you for tuning in today.

[50:01] Anamaria: Thank you so much.

[50:06] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Be show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback, so let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment. What was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.