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.