Learning through experience is an everyday practice — as Bill Torbert knows well. In this episode, he speaks about the power of surrendering to the part of us that is quite a "numbskull."

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In this episode, family systems experts Phil and Carolyn Cowan talk with grace and wisdom about their process of confronting aspects of family dynamics that they experienced but did not wish to pass on. If there's one thing you take away from our conversation, let it be this: pay attention to your story.

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In order to learn through experience, our doing needs a good pairing with reflective inquiry into what's working. Now that we're halfway through the first season of "Learning through Experience," I wanted to pause and take time to walk the talk. In this "check-in" episode, I share a bit of my reflection on what I am learning through the experience of podcasting.

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In this episode, I spoke with Karen Kimsey-House about transformational learning and how to reinvent yourself. When I was coming out of my PhD studies, I was wandering in my own wilderness, trying to find my way. Wondering what else I could do besides clean my house to avoid my dissertation, I enrolled in the Coach Training Institute. And that's how I met Karen, who eventually became my personal coach, teacher, and dear friend.

Karen is the co-founder of the Co-Active Training Institute. Today, it's the largest in-person coach training organization in the world, delivering courses in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Karen has been my personal coach, my teacher in a long-term immersion leadership program, a dear friend, and most importantly for the context of this podcast of Learning Through Experience, a mentor.

Key Topics:

03:19 Co-active coaching: The client-centered coaching process that coaches the person, not the problem, and believes that we all have within us what we need to thrive in this world;

10:48 Reinventing yourself: Difficult times and missed opportunities may be calls to learn through experience and maybe even reinvent yourself;

17:33 Get curious about the process: Discover what works for you on your journey of life, what allows you to quiet the world and hear your own internal voice;

22:01 Redefining leadership: Moving away from a certain kind of leadership that doesn't harness and unleash our full human potential;

24:03 Transformational learning: Creating a learning system that changes the operating system of people and allows them to see the world in a fundamentally different way;

33:25 Racial justice: Sometimes the best thing you can do for DEI is to be as curious as possible about our differences and be willing to engage in difficult conversations.

Additional Resources from Karen

Book: Co-Active Coaching: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work and in Life by Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl, Laura Whitworth

Website

In this episode, I spoke with Parker Palmer about the connection between teaching and learning, healing the heart of democracy, and following the path of integrity.

I've been reading Parker J Palmer's books for years. He's the author of 10 books about education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change. Three of these particularly resonated with my own experience: Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. and one of them stood out as the scariest book I had ever read.

Parker J. Palmer is also the founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal.

Key Topics:

03:33 The interplay of aging and vocation: How to keep learning through experience with the limitations that come with age;

09:38 The connection between teaching and learning: Teaching as an expert with relatively static knowledge versus teaching as a more dynamic process;

13:34 The community of truth: How we know what we know and the validity of our knowledge;

19:53 The scariest book I had ever read: Why this book resonated so deeply and prompted a perspective shift around leadership, epistemology, faithfulness, and effectiveness;

29:12 Putting wheels on ideas: Creating a vehicle that will allow other people to ride an idea and reshape it as they go toward destinations of their own choosing;

35:43 Following the path of integrity: Despite our greatest ambitions and clear intentions to live a life of virtue aligned with our values, it can be hard in practice.

Additional Resources from Parker

Website

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Not everything we learn in college comes from the classroom. When you think about learning and insights that have mattered most to you, you may find that the most powerful associations include people, events, feelings and places. Barbara Tannenbaum and her living room came easily to mind for me when thinking about when and where I learned through experience. Barbara taught one of the most popular courses on campus. So why the living room image? Barbara would invite some students into her home for gathering circles in her living room — and I feel lucky to have been one of them. Her living room — outside the walls of my college classrooms — is an important marker in my ongoing learning journey.

I love how we all have the chance to learn outside the classroom (because that's most of life). In this episode, we discuss power talk, removing linguistic anchors, and why when we have more voice, we welcome more beauty.

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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.

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