Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and ‘Learning through Experience’

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We are overloaded with so much information that we become full of ideas but too often lack the time to reflect, practice, and enact wisely. Ideas are not enough—we cannot run life by syllabus and read our way through—we have to learn our way through much of the experience of life, and integrate information as sensemaking to help us get better as we go.

I’m Dr. Heidi Brooks, host of Learning Through Experience. I believe that we could upgrade life and face an unknown future with more confidence if we had the capacity to learn our way through experience. So I want this podcast to offer some ways to learn our way forward.

Given the podcast format, it might be challenging - I can't simply tell you what learning through experience is, I want to show you, to offer you an experience. I am certainly doing that myself as I learn through experience how to podcast on this topic. I am hopeful that we will experience it together.

In this first season, we looked at the experience of mentorship, an experience based on relationship. This was a set of conversations with the people who mentored me (oh so long ago!) with an eye to this question: How do we apply what we learn through experience with mentors?

Key Topics:

00:00 The WHY behind the podcast: Why do we need to learn from experience? Why experience in itself isn’t enough?

05:51 Learning through the experience of teaching: Discovering what people are hungry for through one of my first experiences as a teacher at Yale.

07:42 The paradox of Learning Through Experience: These episodes aren’t about teaching, they’re about experiencing something together, reflecting, noticing what resonates, and learning from within.

Read an automated transcript of this episode.

About Learning Through Experience

We all want work—and life—to be better. So how do we make it happen? How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’ work explores. As we navigate the everyday, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.

Almost all adults work and experience organizational life. Work is the common connector; it dominates where we engage with the world and where the world engages with us. And for Dr. Brooks, it’s a canvas for the great re-imagining of our humanity. So, what can we do every day to help create an experience of work that people want to be part of? This everyday leadership invitation goes beyond deliverables and tasks into thinking of work as a space that we co-create.

Season Three of the Learning Through Experience podcast echos Dr. Brooks’ course structure, centered on interpersonal and group dynamics. Even at Yale, there is a place for learning through experience—not just books. The answer you seek is not on page 4. Watch and listen as Dr. Brooks meets with colleagues and authorities in their fields about transformative experiences that shape and shift how we learn and listen, feel and connect, reinforcing that experience precedes thinking that challenges our paradigms and assumptions.

In order to challenge the status quo, we need to have experiences that open us up to learning. Are you ready? Join us for Season Three of Learning Through Experience.

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