Emotion is the Currency for Learning

Why do some lessons stick with us for years while others disappear almost immediately? In this After the Whistle segment, Zach builds on a lesson from his conversation with Maryland Basketball's Josh Chambers about the role emotion plays in learning. Zach discusses why information alone isn't always enough to create engagement or change and how emotion influences what captures our attention.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There's a lot of coaches and leaders that are going to spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about what they want to teach. But it's also important to consider how do you want people to feel while they're learning from you? If you've ever walked away from a meeting wondering why didn't that message stick or why didn't anything actually change, it's not always because the information was wrong or unhelpful. It might simply be because it never became emotionally meaningful to the person on the other side or to the learner. Because the experiences that we remember most, they're not always the ones with the best information. They're the ones that actually make us feel something. And those are often the lessons that we're most likely to recall when the moment calls for it. So today on the podcast, I want to explore the role of emotion in learning and how to ask the right questions to get the people that you serve to feel an emotion that actually helps them take action and change. Hey, before we continue, I want to extend a simple invitation. The heart of this show and really all of my coaching work is about helping coaches, executives, and leaders develop the mindset and systems to win not only professionally, but also personally. I offer a free coaching call where I can help you unpack a variety of situations that show up in my work with those that I serve. So if you're trying to level up your program's culture, looking for creative ways to develop your staff, if you're feeling stretched or burned out by leadership, trying to build a better system for how you train the mental game with your players, or you just simply want a space where you can be honest, unfiltered, and stretch, I'd love to connect. Even if working together isn't the right next step for you, my goal is to help you leave with greater clarity, a practical direction next, and useful resources. So if that sounds valuable for you or someone you know, visit the link in the show notes. I really hope you all enjoyed uh my latest guest conversation with Josh Chambers. Now, Josh, uh, as I shared in his episode, is the Maryland men's basketball program's director of process. And there were a lot of different moments within our conversation that stood out to me, a lot of different opportunities for this, like kind of after the whistle segment where we kind of build off of one of our guest conversations and we kind of slow it down a little bit and spend some time. Um, I kind of add my own thoughts and experiences on something that they maybe shared. One point in particular, though, that I wanted to highlight was how he talked about intentionally designing learning experiences for their players built around emotions. Here's how Josh described it.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

I think uh we try to uh take complex ideas and make them clear, memorable, and emotionally resonant. And um, so for example, like this year, uh we give out quote shirts, and those are um just specifically for our players and our staff. We only make 30 of them um and they have a life lesson printed on them. Um and and that'll come, that life lesson will come organically. Like it could come in the last media time out of a game at Purdue. It could come in a film session in October when we're putting in our first baseline out of bounds play. It could come in the summer when you know a player ends the workout being vulnerable and sharing something they learned or or something that went they went through their life uh recently. Um and so uh one of the ones that we brought uh that we gave to the players this year uh that I think really resonated on me just because uh I was in a season of life where I needed that message and and and was powerful and impactful to see it uh latch on or have sticking power with the players too. Uh the quote was the giants you face won't change, but you can.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So as I shared during the live conversation, his emphasis on storytelling and leveraging emotions for teaching reminded me of a uh a well-regarded concept that can be attributed to uh sports psychologist Peter Hoberell. So a quote that has become attached to him that I love is that attention is the currency of performance. Where we direct our focus will largely determine our ability to perform and execute. As I've shared before, I think focus will actually drive flow and our ability to sustainably produce peak performance. Now, over the years, though, as I've spent more time kind of studying the science of learning and designing mental performance systems for athletes and coaches, I found myself adding another layer to it, almost like expanding on his idea. So if attention is the currency of performance, I believe that emotion is the currency for learning. So one of the books that has shaped my thinking around this is a book called How People Learn by Nick Shackleton Jones. Now, in it, he introduces this concept of what we call um affective learning design. And the basic idea is that effective learning experiences aren't simply built around the information that we as the teacher want to deliver, but it's built around what people actually care about emotionally. So part of his philosophy and framework highlights how essential emotions are and how feelings are to many aspects of our life, all the way from not just how we perform and how we learn, but even within our language. So one of my favorite examples of this, if you've ever moved into a new house, um, whether it's something you're renting or you bought a new home, and as you move in, it takes us a long time to eventually get to a point where we feel comfortable calling something our home. And the reason that he um uses this as a prime example is what it represents is that home isn't a representation of a physical structure. It's a feeling that we have. So home could certainly be the actual physical home that you live in, but it could also be when you say home is living somewhere in like a certain region or a certain town, or it can feel like home when you're with someone. So once I began to understand this, the role of emotions in our language, and particularly with behavior change, I think it started to reveal different moments in life where this shows up on a pretty regular basis. One common example that gets referenced is just to think about the news. Now, unfortunately, uh, if you scroll through not only the news on social media or you still watch the news on T on television in some form, you're gonna hear a lot of statistics that are not pleasant, that are oftentimes negative. Like the news is usually very skewed towards um not things that are obviously not the most uplifting, oftentimes. So you might hear something like, oh, millions of dollars uh in properties have been damaged because of a flood or because of some natural disaster. Hundreds of people have been affected by some sort of emergency or some sort of outbreak or something like that. But when we hear these numbers, like they just they don't always move us, they don't always like register. They're they're facts. But the news though, what shifts for us is when they start to talk about an individual or they start to tell someone's story. For example, if all of a sudden they talk about one particular family or they talk about a child, um, suddenly we now feel a lot more engaged in it. The facts become a lot more personal to us. And that's just within a news example, but this same thing applies in um much lighter examples too. So, for example, our son Grayson, like many toddlers, loves Bluey. And I've watched plenty of episodes with him. Um, but there's one episode in particular that has always stood out to me because it was playing in the hospital room when our daughter Oakley was born. And I remember sitting there, like holding Grayson, seeing uh Oakley, looking over at her with my wife, and feeling like just like this sense of peace. Um, so I not only do I remember the episode, most importantly, like I remember how that felt. And so now, even to this day, like I can promise you, anytime that episode comes on, one, it's like very peaceful, like the message, the story behind it is beautiful, especially if there's any of you who have young kids and you've watched Bluey, I I think this particular episode is is quite calming. But what has stood out for me, I would say, is something it gives me, it reminds me a little bit of like Maya Angelo, who has like the famous quote of like, people will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. This can show up in multiple forms. And uh what I love about this, whether we're talking about the news and media, or whether we're talking about the things that stick with us or our kids, things we watch, is that emotion will influence what captures our attention. And when it does, then it becomes extra meaningful to us. And then ultimately that's what we'll recall later on. So let me shift this just for a moment to maybe make it more clear and transparent from a sporting lens. Like if you're a leader or a coach, how do you use this? So I was talking to a friend recently who um is a mental performance coach uh and does a lot with coach development in uh a pref particular professional sports arena, and we were discussing how to create more meaningful learning learning experiences for coaches. And this is really simple and basic. But one of the things I said is like I would always start with some form of, well, what are the biggest challenges that you're running into? Not only does this question help you gather useful feedback, but it also will help you locate emotions that are at the core of the people that you're serving. Nobody loses sleep over things that they don't care about. Nobody experiences stress around challenges that feel irrelevant to them. So when somebody's encountering stress, frustration, uncertainty, excitement, those feelings tell us where people are already invested. And if you know where people are emotionally invested, now you know where learning has the greatest opportunity to happen and actually be transformative in a way where it actually prompts somebody to change and to act. So if we were to kind of distill or, or the way I think about it is if I were to take all of what Nick Shackleton Jones kind of argues in his book, don't start by asking, what do I want to teach? Start by asking what problems are my people trying to solve. And then design things like your meetings, your learning experiences, your resources, your stories and conversations around those problems. So this week, whether you're leading a team, running a meeting, teaching a class, or coaching an athlete, don't just think about the information that you want people to leave with. Ask yourself, how do you want them to feel? Because attention may be the currency of performance, but it's emotion that is the driver for learning. And if you want your message to last long before after a meeting ends, don't just teach the lesson, design an experience that people remember.