Learning is Changing – How to Take Advantage of Learning Strategies Today

The (Powerful) Memories of a Moment.

I was driving in Michigan on Saturday morning and a saw a plate that looked like the one you see here. Unless you lived in Michigan 50 years ago, this plate won’t mean anything to you. But in 1976, leading up to the Bicentennial celebration of our country, the state of Michigan created a plate just like this, but “76” was in the place where “26” is now.

Seeing the flash of this plate (because I was passing the car when I saw it), brought back a flood of memories. Suddenly, I was an 8th grader/freshman in high school. I could see that plate on vehicles I remember (including a pickup I was already driving in the road as a farm kid).

For ten minutes, I was in nostalgia land, and for two hours I kept looking for another copy of the plate to look at.

Why does this matter to you?

Because memories impact how people feel, how they process an experience, and therefore, how they respond – even if they aren’t aware of it.

I could stop there and let you apply it yourself (and please do think about this for yourself and others), but let me give you one example…

The performance review.

As a leader, if you give performance reviews, regardless of your preparation and skill in doing them, people come into those meetings with experiences and memories (on average, likely with more pain than pleasure), that will impact how what they say, how they respond and the general outcome of this meeting.

This doesn’t mean our efforts to improve them don’t matter. The better prepared you are and the more you focus on helping them, the better the meeting may be. Just remember that you alone aren’t making the meeting great or helpful. And every “better” performance review meeting people have experienced improves their overall memory bank of those meetings.

Recognizing the power of memory to impact results is one nuance that can improve our performance and our ability to help others improve theirs too.

Learning is Changing – Here’s How to Take Advantage of Learning Strategies Today

The way humans learn isn’t changing, and yet it seems everything about how humans can learn is changing. This seems like a paradox, and yet importantly, this is a case where two things can be true at the same time.

Understanding and applying this paradox can make a big difference in the results you get as an individual who wants to grow and succeed. Acknowledging both organizationally can drastically improve the growth and development of everyone in our organization.