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Learning Through Experience

Leadership isn’t just what you know—it’s how you show up. Learning Through Experience is a Yale School of Management podcast hosted by Dr. Heidi Brooks. Each episode explores how leaders learn through the moments that matter: meetings, relationships, decisions, and dilemmas. Drawing on guests’ wisdom and questions from listeners, the show turns insight into practice and transforms life into a learning laboratory.

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Heidi Brooks

Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Heidi Brooks
Bio

Heidi Brooks teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations.

Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management. Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She is a lifelong experiential learner; you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.

Episodes

  • Podcast
    Season 1
    Episode 1
    Duration 09:10

    Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and ‘Learning through Experience’

    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.

    Episode art for Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and 'Learning through Experience'