The Underlayer: Fear, Clarity & Personal Growth for Mid-Life Professionals

EP4: Sheila B. Robinson talks Stop Cramming, Start Remembering: Your Brain Called And It Wants Practice

• David Young | Sheila B. Robinson • Episode 4

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Episode 6: Learning That Actually Sticks — Why Your Brain Loves the Easy Stuff (and Why It Fails You)
with Sheila B. Robinson

What if the way you think you learn is the very thing keeping you from learning at all?

In this episode of The Underlayer, I sit down with teaching and learning expert Sheila B. Robinson to unravel one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves: that feeling fluent equals knowing.


It doesn’t. That warm glow from rereading and highlighting?
It’s a fluency illusion, and it’s costing you mastery.


We go beneath the surface of real learning to break down why the strategies that feel hardest are the ones that actually make knowledge stick.


You’ll hear:

•  Why rereading feels productive but produces almost zero retention
 • How retrieval practice, spacing, and blank-page testing train your brain to remember
 • The power of simple language and teaching concepts back to yourself
 • Why learning styles are a myth, but preferences still shape how you engage
 • How mnemonics, meaningful imagery, and the Feynman Technique boost memory
 • The surprising science behind “desirable difficulties” and productive friction
 • What Sheila learned from writing a book, and why struggle is the secret ingredient
 • How to use AI for quizzes, prompts, and feedback without outsourcing the thinking


By the end, you’ll know exactly how to turn information into skill: retrieve it, space it, & apply it until it sticks.


🎧 The Underlayer — Where the Real Story Lives.


 If this episode helps you learn better, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s studying or teaching, and leave a quick review to tell us which strategy you’ll try first.


Sheila's LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilabrobinson/

Sheila's Website:

https://www.sheilabrobinson.com/




The Underlayer YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/@the_under_layer

The Underlayer Podcast Website: https://www.theunderlayerpodcast.com/

David's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-young-mba-indy/

SPEAKER_00:

You are listening to episode four of The Underlayer, where the real story lives. I'm your host, David Young, and in each episode, we explore what's beneath the surface, the ideas, experiences, and insights that shape how we find clarity, alignment, and more energy in our lives. Today we are taking a deep dive into learning with my guest, Sheila Robinson. Sheila is a 30-year teaching and learning expert who helps coaches, consultants, and business owners turn their expertise into impactful workshops and courses. She's also a speaker, author, certified presentation expert, and a past president of the presentation guild. Sheila, thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_03:

You're welcome. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for all that, the P alliteration. Make sure I got all my voice going there with all those P's. I love it.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, you're a podcast host, so good diction is going to be important, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, so uh we chatted a couple weeks ago uh in kind of preparation for this, and uh you have a great background, very uh extensive background in teaching and and learning. And I was really fascinated as we were talking by the learning process because I think it's one of those things that there's so many ways to do it, and I don't know how many people get it right, but I think a lot of people don't. So hopefully we we can shed some light on better ways to learn, absorb information, and then ultimately obviously retain some of it, uh, unlike the way I did it, which was memorize, spit it out, and never remember a thing again. So uh just at a high level, if you could just kind of give us your like your kind of expert view on just learning overall, and then we'll get into the specifics.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, for me, learning is just such a great um joyful activity. Um, I have always gotten pleasure and excitement out of learning something new ever since I was a kid. And I don't know if it's that source of pride. Hey, look, I learned something new. Maybe I ran home from school to show my parents, or um, you know, even as a professional, I would I was really into professional development. My my first year as a classroom teacher, that was my first career. Um, I found out that teachers get to go learn more stuff after college. And, you know, that was just the coolest thing to to go learn something and then go back to work and feel like I'm doing something better, new, um, and you know, I'm more uh effective at my job and doing a better job for in that case, my students. But um part of what I learned, uh love about learning um as a professional as an adult is that like I picture people going back to their desks after attending a workshop or an online course, whatever, and thinking to themselves, you know, damn, I'm proud of myself. Look what I can do now. And, you know, show the boss the improved process or report or whatever it is that you're doing. And I just think that's the coolest thing. I mean, I want us to love our jobs, I want us to feel competent and confident at work, and you know, we spend a hell of a lot of time there. We should enjoy our careers. And I think learning, continuous uh professional learning is just one way to do that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I love that. And I think what you touched on there is important is being able to utilize what you're learning. I think that's a lot because I I've read a lot of books like personal, you know, self-help, personal growth type books, but I I would read them, I would absorb the information, but I wouldn't really do anything with it, and then you find that you lose it. So I think what you're talking about there is being able to take something that's very applicable to your job, career, and then starting to utilize because that's where your the real extended learning is going to come from because we can only remember so much, and then once if we're not using it, then obviously like at some point it's just gonna fade away and we forget it.

SPEAKER_03:

That it's so true. It that the use it or lose it principle is really true. Um, I actually had an experience, I I knew the principle, but I accidentally proved it to myself. Um I'm a keeper, so I have loads of files that are probably really, really outdated. I was organizing one day not too long ago, and I pulled out a folder from a conference I attended like 10, 12 years ago, and there were my notes from the workshops. And one workshop uh was on data visualization, and I was using data and making graphs and doing all of that in my work. So I really loved the workshop and I went right back to work and applied all those principles. The other workshop was on project management, and I remember being really interested in it and really into it. Great workshop. But I never did project management in my work at that time. And so I never went back to those notes, I never used that material. And 10 or 12 years later, I'm looking at my own handwriting thinking, I have no idea what this is about. I don't even get it anymore.

SPEAKER_01:

Completely new.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, didn't use it, didn't retrieve it, which is uh actually the key to uh retaining what you've learned, um, never retrieved it, so yeah, it's gone.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I totally feel that. I mean, when I think back to high school, like the thing that I know the most is typing, because I took that as a junior and I've mostly typed the rest of my life. So that's that's what has stuck, right? But if I hadn't if I had gone 20 years and never touched a keyboard, then you'd be like, oh, and then I'm back to hunting and pecking. So it's just simply through repetition, um, most of the rest of the stuff, because I I don't use a lot of it, you know, it's gone. It would probably come back if I studied it a little quicker. But yeah, it's just it's amazing how fast we can lose it. What so that so the way I learned, and no one taught me this, just the way I did it, like if I was preparing for a test or a speech or something, like I would just I would go over it and rehearse it, study it, and I would memorize it to the point where I could just recall it. I would get to the point where I could just as I was taking the test, I could visualize my notes, so I could just find the picture in my head and I could just start reading them from my head. Like that's how thorough I would know it, which worked, and I was a pretty good test taker. It took a lot of time and effort. But I found then that once it was over, like it was mostly gone. Um, like if you two weeks later, if you start asking me questions, I'd be like, oh, I don't know, because it wasn't like right there. Um and I'm sure a lot of other people have done like something similar, but it's not a great way to learn. Is that how common do you see that? And what are better ways to kind of get the information to where you it's a little deeper?

SPEAKER_03:

That's that's so true, and a really good question. So recent recent research in the science of learning has uncovered that we are pretty terrible judges of our own learning. Um, and there's a lot of counterintuitive feelings and experiences that go on. For example, um you felt very comfortable, you read reread your speech, and then you were able to do it, but then it's gone, right? So we are um victims of what's called a fluency illusion. When we reread our notes, it's comfortable, it feels right, that feels like the right thing to do. But as we're rereading our notes, we're feeling like, yep, got it, got it, got it, know it, know it, got it, right? Um and it feels great, it feels very fluent. But if we were to continue to test ourselves, so you get yourself to the point where you can perform once, and that's retrieval. But if you tried it a week later, would that speech still be there? Um a month later. And the harder work for durable, long-lasting learning is in retrieval practice. It's in testing ourselves. It's in taking a blank sheet of paper and saying, Do I really know it right now? Could I write it down? Could I say it out loud if it's practicing first speech? Um and doing it over and over again. Less rereading, more retrieving.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that reminds me of like kind of teaching, like they always say, can you explain it to like an eight-year-old or something? Um, but if you can take it and practice, could it could I could I take someone who doesn't know anything about what I'm trying to learn or what I am learning, and then could I talk to talk about it without looking? Could I just talk about it, present it, teach it, whatever, in a way that makes sense to someone who's like, I don't know about this. And I think that's I never did that, but as I'm saying it out loud, I think that would have been a better way to prep. Like I'd have done it with a roommate or a fellow student, although they would obviously know the material. Same principle would apply, though. You could practice, articulate it, because I think talking about it in a way that you're trying to get someone to understand forces you to do more of what you're talking about. Retrieval, it sets in deeper, it isn't just pure memorization where, like, if I see that question, I know the answer. It's a lot different than can I explain the concept behind it.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. And there's a lot that that um comes into play there too. Now that actually um has a name too. It's often referred to as the Feynman technique, um, named after the famed uh physicist Richard Feynman, who was as famous for his teaching strategies as he was for his physics. Um and uh he said, you know, explain it as you would to a 12-year-old, or some of us say, explain it as you would to your auntie at the barbecue who doesn't know a thing about your field. Um, it forces you to take advantage of the vocabulary that you have and to retrieve and to be able to translate, right? So you could spit out a fancy definition from memory and not know a thing about the concept.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_03:

But to explain it in your own words really forces you to do that deep processing that we need to do in order to uh retain what we've learned.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's like the old quote, I would have written a shorter letter, but I ran out of time. Um it is so much more difficult to distill it down and and speak about it in simple terms. That takes much more knowledge than what you're talking about, like, oh, I memorized it, I can spit out this long, fancy definition that I've just I've just memorized, but don't ask me any questions about it because I don't really know anything about it, right? So it's a different it's a different level of of understanding when you can simplify it and talk about it in a way that's more like you said, like a anne who's not studying or a smaller kid or whatever. Um it forces you to think about it and speak about it in a different way that I think gets back to better understanding and certainly longer uh holding on to the material.

SPEAKER_03:

And you're integrating it. You're integrating this new knowledge with your prior knowledge. Um so inside our brains, we have all kinds of schemas, we have these ways in which we've encoded knowledge. Um we know that uh, for example, apples tend to be round, they tend to be crunchy with white flesh, but they could be red or green or even yellow because we've been exposed to all of those. Um but let's say um you were raising your child and you only bought red apples for your household, never any other kind. When your child encounters a green apple, that's new. They may not know what that is, but eventually you'll help them integrate that with their prior knowledge. So they're expanding. Okay, so this is round and crunchy and white flesh, but now I understand that apples can come in red and green.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03:

So that's how we learn things and integrate with prior knowledge, and that um is one of the many ways that knowledge gets encoded and and consolidated and kept up there.

SPEAKER_00:

No, that makes a lot of sense. Um what and that kind of leads me to the next point. We talked a little bit about this a couple weeks ago about the learning styles. So one of the things I was taught as I was going through school and I'd read about in books were you know, uh this kind of concept of that we all we have one learning style. So like you're a visual learner, like I need to see a chart, I need to see graphics in order to understand it. Or I'm an audio learner, like I need to hear it, whether it's an audio book, or I just need to listen to a lecture, um, or I'm a doer, like I have to, I have to perform whatever I'm learning, right? And you and I talked, and I've read since that that has mostly been debunked. We're we're all capable of learning in different ways, but there isn't we're not just one and then none of the others work, right? So talk a little bit about that. I think that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. So the learning styles um theory or ideas were really popular when I was teaching in the classroom, and and we were sort of pushed to find out whether your kids are auditory or um you know, kinesthetic or visual learners and teach to that style. Um and I have to say, even at that time, I was I was skeptical and I thought if learning styles is a thing, wouldn't I want to teach to their non-dominant learning style to help them develop other ways of learning? Because we don't want to go through life saying I'm a visual learner and if you talk, I'm not gonna ever understand what you say.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_03:

We uh so the learning styles research has largely been debunked. It doesn't help, it doesn't improve learning, is what they've found. That said, we absolutely have learning preferences. So if you think about it, the various things that you learn, it's very likely there are going to be times when you say, I really prefer to read about this topic versus I want to watch a YouTube video. Um there are probably times in your life where someone has said, Let me show you how this is done, and you're like, no, no, no, just hand me the thing so I can feel it and do it myself, right? Because your brain is saying, I need to feel it and do it. Um you know, think about putting together furniture from IKEA. Some of us are gonna rely more on the pictures and some of us are gonna rely on the on the words. I'm a words person when it comes to that.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm a no, I'm a no-install furniture person. It's my brain, I I cannot. My brain just simply can't do it. My wife can do it. It's fascinating. We can do it together because she leads and I follow. I don't know what it is, but I yeah. If I was on my own, I'd pay somebody to do it. Like I just I can't do it. I just do not have my brain, just can't. I just can't.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, that's me too. I have difficulty with visual, spatial, 3D perspective, all of that.

SPEAKER_00:

Um wrong piece in the wrong slot with the wrong washer and nut combo. Yeah, just hard pass for me. Just just I've learned I've tried enough and I failed enough that that I just scratched that from the list of what I'm gonna ever know.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and you know, there's a there's another point to be made there. We we have all kinds of beliefs about what we're capable of learning and what we're not capable of learning. Um I tried to learn code, as in like coding in statistics, and you know, even the first introductory lesson was over my head, and I've decided I am just never gonna learn this. Even in college, I I um all but failed the computer language class whenever I took because I just didn't understand code. Um but somewhere in me is the thinking that if I really if that were a goal and I said, I'm gonna make myself learn this, I think I could. And I think you could. If you said like I want to spend the rest of my life assembling furniture, and you could. I'm I'm guessing that you could. Um, but there are other things that we you know, we think, you know, I'm good at languages, I pick things up very easily in this area or that. And and that's true. Again, we have lots of preferences for what we learn and how we learn. And that's fine.

SPEAKER_00:

No, it's a good point. I mean, it's the whole like, can I do it? Probably, do I want to do it? No. And that was a big problem for me throughout my career because I was making career decisions like that, where it's like, can I do this job? Yes. Can I be good at this job? Probably. Do I want to do this job? No. And I would still do it. So it's it's along that same line. Like, I think a lot of us, like, we're like you said, like, if I really, really wanted to learn it, like I could I definitely get a lot better. I don't know if I can be competent. Same thing with your code, right? Like, could you really learn it? Like, sure. But like there's some things I think you just have to be like, that's just not for me. Like, I'm just I'm just not in. Because your your interest level, your energy level, like you're you feel like you're forcing it. And I think the more that you try to force it, at least for me, like when I try to force things, like it takes me so much longer. We were joking, or there was like a meme or something, like how many times in school did you read like a page of a textbook and you couldn't like you didn't know a word on it. Like you just you literally your blunt your mind literally just went blank because you had no interest in it. So you're you're reading the words and thinking about like 15 other things, right? So we were we were joking, and I think that's it. Like when you don't have that interest and energy in the subject, I think it just makes it like a hundred times harder because you're forever to learn it.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, my my latest learning journey for fun is I'm learning watercolor painting. I have no background in art, color theory, anything related to that. I just decided it looked cool, and the way I'm learning is I'm consuming a zillion Instagram reels and YouTube videos and trying to follow them. Now, I could buy a book and read about it. I could delve into color theory, but you know, I'll decide maybe later if I want to do those things. But especially when we're learning for fun, um, you know, it's great to just say, I'm gonna learn it at this level, versus if I have to learn something for my job, that's a whole different level of learning. I may have to go a lot deeper. I have to make know things that I don't necessarily want to know, but need to know.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it also puts a lot more time pressure on it. Like if it's a career or job type thing, you typically have to learn it, you know, in a pretty short period of time. Whereas if it's more of a hobby for fun, right, take your time. If you have to skip a couple weeks, no big deal. If you don't get something done, it's like I'll come back to it when I can. So that also takes some of the pressure off, which then that gets into like when it's more fun and there's less pressure, you're typically gonna do better than like a half, like I have to do this in the next you know, insert amount of time here. What um what would you advise someone? Like if maybe it's a maybe you're a student, uh younger, you know, high school, college, or an adult trying to learn something relatively new, um, like how would you advise them on kind of tackling it? Would it be identifying your preference? Would it be mixing it up? Um, would it depend on the subject? Like, how would you kind of coach or advise them on like the best way to go about it?

SPEAKER_03:

Great question. It is less about how you learn. So whether you pick up a book or a or an audio book or a YouTube video or you go to a class, that matters less than what you do with it, what you do with the new information in your brain. And that's where I would say to people, first of all, it's gonna be hard work. You really want to learn something that's very new, different from a a lot of what you've learned already. Um it's really hard work. I it's like going to the gym. If you just show up and sit in the doorway, not much is gonna happen. And if you only do the easy stuff, not not much in the way of results. The best way to learn to keep what you've learned, to integrate it with your prior knowledge is to retrieve it. And that is read a book chapter, listen to a book chapter, take a module of a course, whatever it is, some chunk of learning, close it down, don't look and take out a blank piece of paper or blank document and ask yourself what do I remember? What were the main points? What are the key ideas I need to understand? Like you said, how could I explain this new concept I've just learned in my own words?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

These are the hardest things to do and the most effective things to do.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. I think the own words is really important because that's where retrieval really comes in. Um are you familiar with Jim Quick? I was thinking about this as you were talking there. Do you know who Jim Quick is?

SPEAKER_03:

I don't think I know that name.

SPEAKER_00:

So he um I don't know what his main claim to fame is, but I know him as he's an author, but I've seen him talk about he's like a memory guy, like how to remember things. And I remember I think I was stuck in like a car dealership, like get my car serviced, and it's killing time. This has been several years ago. Um, and I haven't really had a chance to practice it because I haven't like had to learn a lot the way I did when I was in school. But he had his the way he described this when he was talking about it would apply to learning, especially new, if but it really applied to note-taking. I'd never heard anybody talk about this. So he was saying, like, let's say you're whether it's reading a book or listening, it doesn't matter. You take your notebook and you draw a line down the middle, and on the left side, as you're absorbing the information, you're taking notes like we were kind of trained to do, right? Like important topic, important parts, definitions, what like whatever, normal stuff. And then pause. And on the right side, after you've taken so let's say you've taken this left-hand side, traditional notes, on the right hand side, you read it back and you write, how would I how will I use this in my life? Or how will I apply it? Or how is this relevant, right? And so the way he described it was, yes, this is fine, this left-hand side is fine, that's what we've been taught. But if you take the time to add a little take a little bit more time with this right hand side, it really helps you start to be like, oh, I could use it here, right? And if you and if you kind of do so, you didn't you end up, if you did it correctly, or the way he described it, you would still have your regular full sheet of notes as if you wrote normally like all the way across, all the way down, but you would have it divided into this traditional way and this kind of his way. And I always thought that was really interesting. I've never really had anything where I like could apply it, but I think that's similar to what you're talking about with use using your own words and how will this really how can I apply it to really keep it.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. And and so that technique, um, it almost reminds me of something called Cornell notes, where you also divide the paper and you take all of your notes on one side, and the other side you develop questions as if you were going to test yourself on the material later. And then the idea is that you would fold that paper back and just ask yourself those questions and see if you can answer them. Another form of retrieval. Um, and again, it's about integrating new knowledge with prior knowledge, it's about elaborating, understanding where this new knowledge fits in, how it fits, how you'll use it or apply it, what what sense you're making of it, why it's important to you. It's all of the things. And, you know, again, it's like running around the gym doing all the different exercises, right? Because you have this whole body that you need to get strong. You're not just gonna lift one dumbbell with your left arm and and be done.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Um, so learning is complex. There's there's still a lot that we don't quite understand in terms of the mechanisms and why certain strategies work.

SPEAKER_00:

That's why we have AI now that can tell us everything.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. And and one of the conversations people are engaging in right now is um at some of the studies that have already been done. You know, is AI making us dumber? Are we offloading um all of our cognitive effort into AI, having AI answer all our questions?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

And some people are saying no, hang on. You learned long division in school. When's the last time you used it, right? And there's a calculator right on your phone.

SPEAKER_02:

Right.

SPEAKER_03:

Um, are you dumber because of it? And we're thinking, probably not. Or we've been Googling answers to questions for how long now? 20 years more? Um so uh so I don't think that's making us dumber. So while we're offloading some cognitive tasks to AI, right? So write me a draft of this email where I have to have a challenging conversation versus me sitting down and taking an hour just getting the words right.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_03:

But guess what? I'm using mental effort in lots of other places. Right. So uh I think we have to be careful in you know, letting AI do the work for us and accepting what it gives us without question. Um there are a lot of places where AI is still hallucinating. Um I I did the simplest thing. I I wanted to find out uh an actor who was doing a small part in a movie. And the AI response was totally wrong, and I knew it. And but yet it looked so real, for example, that if I didn't know all the other actors, I I would have said, Oh, well, that's the name of that person.

SPEAKER_00:

Sounds like she immediately goes to IMDb for everything we watch because she has to know who everyone in the show is and where she knows them from. And she spends most of the first episode. I think she misses the first episode of most of what we watch because she's just looking at IMDb, and so by the time that 45 minutes is over, she's like, Got it. I know I now know how I know everything and what happened.

SPEAKER_03:

I think she and I could be good friends because I do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00:

So funny. Um, I actually you're um there was a post on LinkedIn. This is maybe a month or so ago. Uh, it was a mom who was writing about her daughter who I think was in high school, maybe early college, but she had they had really embraced AI to help her study. And so they had were really praising like putting in study plans and asking questions, practice exams. There was all these different ways, which I hadn't thought of because it just I just haven't done it. My kids haven't really done that. But um, I thought that was really interesting, like as a as another way to prep uh figuring out you know what you know, what you don't know, testing yourself without you know, again, having to you know do it on your own, which would have been hard, you know, prior. So I think that type of stuff is really interesting. Um, but yeah, you do have to be careful, like you said, it's that doesn't always give you great information. I used it um my oldest son ran into our garage door last week, and so as I was getting quotes, I was running all the quotes, like the detailed the dollars, but what I was getting for it, and I was throwing it in GPT and copilot because I wanted to see is this a good deal or not. And that was really interesting. My wife was like, Oh, I wouldn't even have like thought about that. I was like, well, it's just another tool we have to evaluate the value. Um, so yeah, so I think for things like that, and many things, like it's just like you said, it's another tool. It doesn't replace anything, it's not gonna write that email for you, but giving you the draft, some words you might not have thought of or would have taken an hour to think of. Now you have the the baseline, now you can tweak it, make it your style, move it in and out, and then send it. So yeah, I'm I'm totally down with that.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. AI tools make great writing partners, and as you mentioned, they do make good learning partners. So you can ask AI tools to um say, I've just learned about this, prepare a quiz for me, um, give me some test questions. Uh um, and you know, I haven't tested it on something like, let's say algebra, right? Give me some quadratic equations to solve, and then maybe I upload what I solved and it can analyze. I don't know um how well the various tools will do with that. I hope they would do well. But uh yes, I think some of the um you know middle school and high school teachers are probably realizing that AI tools can be a great help in that respect. Um and not uh maybe we don't go to like blanket bands on AI right away before we discover how they can help. You know, same thing when we adopted laptops, same thing when we adopted calculators in the classroom, right? We had all of these struggles with new technology, and we'll continue because we're resistant to change.

SPEAKER_00:

We don't we don't like we don't like things that we don't like like things that disrupt. Um you mentioned earlier about being a lifelong learner yourself. That's I'm kind of the same way. Uh learning is one of my top five Clifton strengths. And I just like I I will just find something that I'm interested in and I'll just take a deep dive on it. Like I remember I got into I think it was right after COVID, maybe a year after, and I was bored. Uh and I took like this deep dive into cyberstrap. Security. Like I didn't know anything about computers or networks or security, but it was just like a fascinating subject. I was seeing a lot about it, you know, in online feeds and whatnot. So I was like, hey, let's just see. So I ended up taking a couple of courses. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. It was really fascinating. I learned a ton. I didn't do anything with it, but it was just, hey, let's just find out. And I think we could all be served by having more just curiosity about whatever, right? If you're just if you're interested in something or something strikes your your curiosity, like just take some time. Like don't ignore it, right? Like explore it. See where it leaves.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely. If you're excited and curious about something, so when you were learning about cybersecurity, I'm guessing that you were engaging in retrieval practice several times a day without sitting down to do it. Right? You're you're doing something around the house and you're thinking about those things that you learned and you're turning them over in your mind and you're processing and and uh integrating. So it was happening naturally because you were curious and excited about the learning. So the harder work is when we're not as curious or personally excited. When we do have to learn something, let's say for a course we're taking that you know leads to a degree program. Um, you know, we'd never we didn't love all of our courses. Um but the but the hard work is happening even when we're not recognizing it, if we're engaging with the material and processing, right? My watercolor is getting better because I get excited to take out the paints and the paper and the brushes and go do it. So of course I'm retrieving all of the principles that I'm learning about pigment and water and brush strokes and all of that. Um so yes, it it's not hard for me to learn right now because it's happening more naturally. So for me though, like retrieving what I learn in a book, I read books that I enjoy, nonfiction, and I close the book and it's gone. I take notes on the book and it's gone. Unless I do the really hard work of retrieval and making sure it's there.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that I that totally feel that. When I was a kid, um newspapers were very popular, and my grandfather he loved the newspaper, and I would go over to his house, I would grab the sports page, I would memorize the sports page in about 15 minutes, I'd read all the articles, I'd have all the box scores memorized, like I just observed it was just it just came in and it didn't leave. And then if you had handed me like the metro section or lifestyle or the front page, you give me like two hours with it, couldn't tell you anything that was in it. Because I was interested in sports and I wasn't interested in much else, and it makes an incredible difference.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely, absolutely. That's why people um with whatever interests that they've had lifelong can recall facts that just haven't come up for them in a long time.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Um, so all that you learned about cybersecurity, um, if you're not doing anything with it, if that excitement fades and you're no longer thinking about it, retrieving it, using it in any way, a year from now, two years from now, there might only be just a few key facts left in there about that topic.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

It's the use it or lose it principle again.

SPEAKER_00:

For sure. No, that's good, that's a good point. What um so I know you've you're an author. How did you use the learning process? Like when you were writing, had you written before? What was that? I'd like I'm curious about that process. Like, what was that like?

SPEAKER_03:

So my first writing efforts were blog articles. Um and uh very early on, um, I was on Twitter and I met someone on Twitter, a stranger, who said, I'm interested in survey design, and there are so many bad surveys out there. Who's interested in writing about this topic? And I had just started blogging, and I was a program evaluator um in part, and I was interested in survey design, so took a chance on a stranger, and we started writing blogs together. Well, we realized that our collective knowledge maybe made for a few short articles, and we started digging into the research. Um but what happened in that learning journey is that interest led to exploring what we know, reading more about the topic, writing about that, which meant in our own words, these were before the days of AI, so no help there. Um then we started doing conference presentations together, and that was a whole other level. Like we have to pull our knowledge out to create those. And then eventually we proposed a book to a publisher and thought, well, we've got all of these blog articles, all of this experience presenting that accounted for maybe two and a half percent of what's in the book. So again, it was a huge learning journey to devour. I have maybe 25 textbooks on surveyed design and countless research articles that um so it was a journey of reading, taking notes, distilling it into our own words, chapters, organizing. So there's so much revisiting the material when you're writing a book, and there's so much rereading what you wrote and reorganizing that that that retrieval, that practice is there. And again, because I was in the thick of it, it was really in my head all the time. So um, so that kind of learning journey was really hard. Um but you know, if if you were to go out and write that book on cybersecurity, you would feel that you would say, you know, I have this much knowledge and now I'm gonna consume you know ten times that and I'm gonna distill it into a book. It's a lot of brain work. Um and and all of that hard work will result in some more durable learning. So I could talk to you for a few hours about designing good surveys with no notes, right? Right. But it's taken years to get there. Um, there's a name for that too in the literature. It's called desirable difficulties. We rarely want things to be difficult in life, you know, especially in in our culture, we want everything to be easy and fast. Learning is a desirable difficulty. And the more effortful learning is, the better it is, the more we're likely to retain and be able to integrate and use our learning if we put the work into it.

SPEAKER_00:

No, that's interesting. I've never heard of that term, but it makes a lot of sense. And you're dead on with the the we have become completely too comfortable. Um temperature, like temperature comfort, uh delivery comfort, instant food, streaming. Like it's all at our fingertips, right? Um, and so yeah, that's a whole nother we could do a whole nother show just on that alone. There's a book called The Comfort Crisis. I'm drawing a blank on the author's name, Michael something. Uh it's a good read if you haven't read that. Um, but uh part of it is him going on this adventure in the extreme temperatures, which is cold and like getting used to that and doing it on purpose and putting himself out there and then it's a whole thing. But um, but yeah, we definitely we for whatever reason we do, you're right. We want it to be easy. But sometimes I wonder once we get into it and it's not easy and we push through, I think there's definitely there's so much more reward there, right? When we have to work for it, it's harder, we overcome it, we get there. That feels better than just like, oh yeah, it was super easy, it took me like two days. But then I don't know, I feel like it's it wears off.

SPEAKER_03:

But yeah, for some things, like you don't expect to go to the gym once and you know, win a bodybuilbuilding competition or you know, go to the gym once and be set for life, right? Build your muscles on a Tuesday and you're good to go. Um you know, we expect to have to work hard at something like physical fitness. And we've we always accept that that's not gonna be easy. But yet for learning, I think we want it to be easy and and maybe we're not as good as at accepting that for learning to be durable, long-lasting, effective, I can 12 more adjectives, it is also hard work and it should be. Yeah, it's not supposed to be easy. Um, and in fact, if it feels easy, it may not be durable and long-lasting.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great point. Uh, as we wrap it up here, if someone is getting ready to tackle a new project, they have to learn a bunch of information, or maybe they're in it and they're really struggling uh to grasp it, to retrieve it, um, the things we've talked about, give them like one or two tangible takeaways, like, you know, focus here, do this. This will um maybe not solve your entire problem, but at least get you like back on track or on a track that can start moving you forward.

SPEAKER_03:

So I'm I'm gonna offer two. One that we've talked about a lot, which is retrieval practice, getting out that blank page, making yourself pull out what you think you know, which helps you identify the gaps, right? It leads to better rereading or studying because you know what you actually know and what you don't yet know. So engaging in that retrieval practice and doing it often, making yourself push through the hard work. The other technique is called spacing or distributed practice. And what spacing is, is instead of saying I am gonna cram three hours of study on Friday to be ready for Monday's thing, space out your learning. So retrieve for 20 minutes today and another 20 tomorrow, and then do it a few more days, then start spacing it out. Skip a couple of days. So really start with a very long runway. Skip a couple of weeks, skip a couple of months. If you really want to learn something durably, space out your retrieval sessions, um, and you'll find that that learning will stick with you. And try it on something small. I'm gonna tell you a very small one. I needed to learn the three names of the roads that are the entrances to my favorite park. I always know them as one, two, and three. I never learned their names. I realized one day I have to internalize this. I've got to get this learned. So I made up a hand gesture. It's a very effective way of learning. First road is called canfield. I held my hand up as if I were holding a soup can, canfield. Second road, pond road. I thought, all right, flat surface, nice little pond. So I wave my flat hand around. Third, Hopkins Point. I put out my two little fingers, hop like a bunny. Silly, stupid, whatever. I practiced later that day a couple of times, canfield, pond road, hopkins point. Did it the next day a few times, started spacing it out. That experiment was maybe three or four years ago already, and those are solid. I can recall them whenever I want because I retrieved and I spaced it out. That's those are my two best techniques.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that, yes, for sure. But I think the the image though, like I I think I might be able to remember them now just simply because of the images, right? The can, the the pond, and then the the hopping. So I think any if you are stuck on something that you're like, I should be able to remember this, you know, attaching it to something. I do that with uh with addresses. Like sometimes I have a really hard time, like I'll get the numbers, the sixes and nines switched or five, whatever. Um, I'll think of like famous athlete jersey numbers or some like score that's like meaningful to me, and I'll attach the the address to pick, oh, it's like Joe Montana and Michael Jordan, whatever, 1623. That's made up, but then I don't have to think I don't have to think of the number anymore. I can just be like, oh, those two jerseys. And so I remember I think it was my oldest son who was in seventh grade, he got his first locker, and it was like six numbers, and he was having a really hard time. He was just like, I can't get it. So we just did at that time, we just did famous like NBA jerseys, and so we eventually got it, and it was like, oh, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and like whoever, Charles Barkley, it doesn't matter. And then that was it. Then he remembered him because he like couldn't remember the numbers, but he was like, Oh, the jerseys, because it meant meant something to him. So I think that's a really great way to end the show. Is like if you are struggling, like think of something visual that's meaning something, and that helps too, right? You don't just have to memorize like road one is this, and I have to remember that, right?

SPEAKER_03:

You're attaching it to something you already know, integrating it with prior knowledge, and using a little memory trick. And memory tricks are great for memorizing discrete facts like a set of numbers or a set of names. So, yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. I think there was a comedian, he had somehow done that with all the precedents, and he did like a whole I could be making this up, but I don't think I am. But I I feel like he did it, and then he would test, but the and so but the way that he did it is he had a he had somehow assigned, you know, from one through whatever, 40 at this time, it's probably like 42 or 44. Um he had us he had assigned like a visual image to each one, and so he wasn't he hadn't memorized like the fourth president was X, it was like whatever, four is this, who is this person? Like, but he had done it like you know times 40, uh, which I always thought was really cool. Uh but yeah, it's a great that's a great idea. What if people want to learn more um about your workshops or your teaching, your writing, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you? We'll put it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_03:

But if you want to plug um where to find you, if people are interested, um absolutely um much of what I do is professional development workshops and training. I teach people to create their own workshops and courses, and I love working with people in that way. My website is my name, SheilaBrobinson.com. As long as you spell that right, you'll find me. I'm also very active on LinkedIn. Again, Sheila B as in boy, Sheila B. Robinson. I have a common name, so need that middle initial to uh distinguish myself.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'm with you there. Um thanks so much, uh Sheila, for coming on. Love the conversation. Um, great tidbits on learning and looking forward to getting this out uh in a couple weeks. So thanks so much for your insight and time.

SPEAKER_03:

You're so welcome, and thanks for having me and wishing you the best with future episodes, too.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you.