Beyond the Forgetting Curve: An approach to nursing development

"One week from today, you will have forgotten 90% of everything you learned in your last training session."

In this episode of Better Every Shift, Naomi and Tubi tackle the "Ebbinghaus forgetting curve" and the massive amount of energy wasted on professional development that never makes it back to the clinical floor. We explore the critical gap between becoming a clinical expert and achieving "adult development"—the level of maturity, professionalism, and team-player skills that mandatory training simply doesn't touch.

From the thousands of dollars in untouched nursing scholarships to the power of non-formal learning—like standup comedy, oncology massage, and managing a cricket team—we discuss how to take charge of your own growth. Whether you are a manager trying to keep your head above water or a clinician waiting for "permission" to grow, this episode provides a roadmap for making learning stick through intentional coaching and small, daily actions.

Key Discussion Points

The Scholarship Imbalance: Why significant study funding and grants are sitting unutilized and how to bridge the gap between expectation and initiative.

Adult Development vs. Clinical Expertise: Moving beyond "ticking boxes" to understand how to support your manager and your team with professional maturity.

The Power of "Weird" Learning: How Tubi’s interest in food and Naomi’s presenter mastery course provide more clinical value than traditional postgraduate degrees.

Finding Your Why: Exploring why healthcare clinicians are hitting burnout when their "North Star" for care conflicts with a rigid system.

The 30-Day "Critical Move": Why the first 30 days after a workshop are the most important for embedding new behaviors.

Facilitation vs. Presentation: Why ditching the PowerPoint for a "facilitated conversation" is the most powerful way to lead a team meeting.

What’s In It For You?

You will learn how to identify your own "pain points" as a starting point for development and how to leverage community roles to build professional skills. For managers, we share a novel coaching approach—the "angel on the shoulder"—that provides 30 days of daily prompts to ensure your team's training actually results in a "critical move".

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Intro: The 90% Forgetting Curve.

[00:02:00] The mystery of the unapplied scholarships.

[00:04:00] What "Adult Development" actually looks like in a clinical team.

[00:07:00] Non-formal learning: From oncology massage to standup comedy.

[00:12:00] Why clinicians lose sight of their "Why" and fall into burnout.

[00:17:00] Managers: How to leverage your team's interests for collective growth.

[00:20:00] Why PowerPoint kills responsibility in the room.

[00:25:00] The Brisbane Workshop: 30 days of "Angel on your shoulder" coaching.

Resources Mentioned

David JP Phillips: Presenter Mastery Course.

Simon Sinek’s Team: Finding Your Why.

Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: The science of why we forget.

70/20/10 Learning Model:

The Clear Shift Consultation Diagnostic Tool will help you clearly articulate the gaps in language that connects the clinical experience with the executive impact.

"Is nursing turnover eroding your bottom line? Stop managing the crisis and start leading the culture. Book a Strategic Consultation at bettereveryshift.com.au/consultation to turn your clinical culture into a measurable business performance indicator." 

Transcript

Host 0:01

One week from today, you'll have forgotten 90% of everything you learned in this podcast. It's called the Ebbinghouse Forgetting Curve, and it means that most of the energy and money we put into professional development is effectively evaporating before we even get back to the floor. If we aren't actioning new skills within the first 30 days, we aren't developing. We're just wasting time. Welcome back to Better Every Shift. I'm Naomi and I'm here with Tubi. We believe that your curiosity is your greatest clinical strength. And we're here to help you move from heavy information downloads to real facilitated impact. The challenge we're solving today is how to make learning stick. The problem is that managers are often keeping their heads above water and don't have the tools to support their team's growth beyond the mandatory checklist. This is important because true development requires a longer-term commitment to small intentional behaviours. Stay with us as we discuss our novel Angel on Your Shoulder Coaching Approach and how you can join us in Brisbane to start making your own critical moves. Professional development is something that comes up a lot in my work, and it's something I'm really challenged by. Both you and I have quite a sense that we want to develop ourselves and we spend quite a lot of time in that space. And lots of the nurses want to get better. Nurses do have good access to study funding scholarships, those kinds of things, which are really poorly utilized. Sitting in that executive space and seeing how many scholarships are not accessed, and no one's applied for it. I sit in another committee, it's today's the day, and there's been no local applications as of yesterday for good money. So I think we've got an imbalance around expectations about who's covering what is one of our really big problems.

Tubi 2:50

My first job was in the UK, and I remember talking to one of the senior nurses, the sisters, to her, I think I want to work in emergency. And she said, Great. And I said, What did you do? And so she proceeded to tell me she actually went and worked in another hospital for a year to get the qualification. She was very ambitious, she wanted to move really quickly, she wanted to know what she was doing, and that really inspired me. And so while I was there, I did a couple of courses that you had to ask to do, but you were supported to do. And when I came back, I realized there were still lots of gaps in my practice. And so I decided I'd do a postgraduate diploma, clinical nursing in emergency, and I paid for that myself, and I didn't get time off to study, and I still contributed because it was part of my course, contributed to the unit that I was working in by running in services and things that I was learning about because I was being marked on that. The way I was supported was encouragement from the manager, and she provided me with someone who was capable, and he was a really great resource for me. I don't think there's a lot of support for that adult development aspect that I so recently learned about. Where it's not just about am I becoming more expert clinically, but am I a good team member? Do I have a level of maturity and professionalism in my role? Do I support the team in the way it needs to be supported? Am I supporting my manager in the way they need to be supported? I think a lot of what we see is this sort of one-way traffic from the manager to the team, but actually, what could we be doing as a team to make the managers or senior staff life be a little bit easier? And a really simple example, I think, of that is asking the questions early, speaking up if you don't know what you're doing or you haven't done it before or you need some support. I think that kind of adult development is not only not addressed in any mandatory training, it's in many leadership training courses or leadership training opportunities. And managers don't actually even know themselves how to do that development with their team.

Naomi 5:18

Yeah, I think there's huge gaps. There's probably better access to the clinical content in that postgraduate space. There are more educators around on wards in most places, but they're not supported with how to do the doing and how to make the best use of their time, which is really challenging space for educators and managers to be in, to be trying to support people and not have those tools. I think you're right. We're not challenged on how do we perform in that team space. Maybe you do a clinical-based course like advanced life support, where some of those things are brought up, but in a very specific context. It's not the breadth of actually how do you talk to people at the end of the shift. Sure, you've got a clinical load, but do you have other things that should be happening here?

Tubi 6:11

We don't manage that very well. I agree. It's not easy to say I haven't done this before, I need help, and you clearly expect that I would know this, but I actually don't. Not only do we set up a situation where that becomes a hard conversation to have, we don't actually help people to have that conversation. Yep. We set up an expectation that actually knowing everything is the value, that curiosity is not the value.

Naomi 6:41

I'm really curious to hear what or where you've learned things that are outside of the clinical space that helps in the health setting.

Speaker 1 6:51

I'm super keen to find out where that's been for you. A lot of that, as happens with most people, came about because of things I needed to or wanted to know personally. So it started working in ED, watching the people come in, looking at their experience and making the connection between what they were living with from a disease perspective or an illness perspective, sometimes was about choices they'd made. Wanting to understand more about what are some choices I have about how I live my life or what I do with my life. I like food, I think about food all the time. So of course it started with food. What food would give me more energy, help me sleep better, stop my tummy from hurting, make my skin better, whatever it was that I was experiencing. So I think in the first instance, it was seeking to improve a pain point for myself or for my family. My oldest daughter had eczema from quite young, and I didn't want her to have to slather herself in steroid cream every day. So I wanted to figure out what other choices do we have. And that was really the start for me of just opening up my understanding of the choices that we all have in our life, seeking to understand actually understanding the body better by doing bow and therapy training and oncology massage training and layering that on top of what I already understood, and seeing the impact of things that I thought that's not gonna work, and it actually working and just being completely blown away, and that was my entry point. What about you?

Naomi 8:44

I like food, but I don't know that it's helped me with my learning for me. It's people, it's always been people, and so anything to do with understanding people has been a driver for me. I also like to understand the systems that I'm in, so I was really fortunate our service had how we manage financial things in a government setting, which was super useful. That leading people, understanding people, those things have always captured me. That's where I head. I've done a lot of really weird things, partly because of my simulation interest, debriefing, those kinds of things. What I haven't done, and I'd love to do, is stand-up comedy. The thought of it terrifies me, but I think it would be really useful. I have done a presenter mastery course with David JP Phillips, which I just love. Um, doing a course this week with Simon Sinek's team on finding a why, which it it's with a whole group of people that are mostly nothing to do with health. Most of it is people doing weird and wonderful things that I would never think about. And understanding their context and how that relates to the things that I see is just so powerful. So I actually don't think those formal courses necessarily are better than other things. It might be that you step into managing a cricket team. Why I don't pick something more interesting, I think, than cricket. It might be that you're stepping into that space and you're learning, you might become the treasurer of that. Just stepping into those kinds of roles, board members, learning those skills will only benefit you in your other roles. But I've done a few of those kinds of things where being part of those community groups has given me skills that I wouldn't have otherwise got.

Tubi 10:44

Finding your why is really interesting, and I think from a health context, for a lot of people, that's really clear but not nuanced. So they haven't done the thinking around it. They go, Oh, I want to help people or I want to contribute, but they haven't actually dug down done the five whys on their why. Why do you want to help people?

Naomi 11:12

Like this is one of the ways that I enter into courses. So my goal in doing this is not so much about helping people find their why necessarily, like that will be part of it, and the process is fascinating. It is the I want to get better at sitting and just listening and not saying anything, and the structure of this process will help me to do that. As a consequence of that, I will absolutely be able to help people find their white, and I'm super excited about it after one day of a very intense programme and lots of homework to do tonight. But that's probably not my immediate goal. My immediate goal is actually to give me better skills more generally in the way that I coach people, the way that I ask questions, the way that I sit longer is my goal at the front. Generally, I want to help people and I want to help them grow. That's my gig. But this initially is actually more about developing my skills for that rather than that as the end point.

Tubi 12:28

Which fascinates me because all the coach training I've done, why is a question you don't ask very often because it can be one that can be really hard to answer.

Naomi 12:39

Yeah, it's interesting. So part of the process is actually you don't ask why. You get to why, but that's not the question that you ask. Yeah. Because it's it's quite confronting.

Tubi 12:49

People in healthcare lose contact or sight of their why, and instead of becoming a North Star for how they make decisions, how they provide care, how they engage with the team, how they make relationships, whatever, they lose sight of it, and then it all be feels a bit purposeless.

Naomi 13:11

Completely. And in fact, there were two other people in the group that have come from a healthcare background, and both of them describe huge levels of burnout, not just in themselves but in colleagues, and they could see it because of the tension in people going to healthcare because we want to be helpful. There's so many challenges against that. Our system makes that very difficult. We've got limited resources, we don't see that we are able to deliver what we want to deliver because of workload, patient flow, funding, all of those things that are just more and more difficult. Or as we talked about with Renee Thompson, that the team is not on our side or undermining what we're doing, those things are the reasons that we get into burnout because we're in conflict. That's super important for healthcare teams to realise, and I think that is something that has shifted in the last five years, that lots of healthcare services are really struggling to match what clinicians want to deliver as their why with what the service is trying to deliver and how they're trying to deliver it. Until we bring that back together, we're in trouble.

Tubi 16:12

What resonates with me is that through that adult development process, you refine your why and it becomes in the context of what's my role, how do I bring myself to that role within the context or the scope of that role. I think a lot of the care people want to provide is based on an ideal. It's not based on reality, it's not in the context of safety or appropriateness or what's reasonable or what's achievable. I think I wanted to talk to you about was the entry point into non-formal uh learning.

Naomi 16:56

I assume you're talking about hospital type courses.

Tubi 17:01

Could be, but it could also be just how you continue your own development. Oh yeah.

Naomi 17:07

I hunt and find things. I'm always looking. My challenge is different to most. In my challenge is which things have I said that I want to do that I actually need to not do. I could very easily put a lot of my time, energy, and money into development because I just love that learning, messing with stuff, trying to make it work. I really get a lot out of that. So I'm often in that space. So my way into that is really stepping in. I think it's probably more useful to look at how managers can support our clinicians into that space because I think that's where we're struggling. And not everybody is like me or you with that. I'm actually just going to do it regardless of what supports around. In saying that though, there is value once you have identified that you want to do stuff, you absolutely need to talk to your manager and you need to show the initiative that I want to go to this conference. Can you support me to do this? It means then that they're much more likely to invest. Sure, I'll set your roster up. Sure, I can't give you funding for this, but actually, next month we're sending a team to go and be on a stand here. Why don't you go do it? Because you've shown interest, you're much more likely to. So I think that's a really, really important step, and it has always served me well, even if managers are not able to well support it because of other restraints, and even the managers, which I haven't had many, but the managers that don't get it, it certainly hasn't cost me anything to do that. It's well worth doing. For managers who've got people that are not growing as quickly as they want or not investing in that space, it's really important that as part of those performance plans, meetings that you're having with one-on-one, that there's a discussion about what is it that you're gonna do in the next six months. Here's the things that we've got freely available, easy to get you to. I want to allocate you some days, but I want to allocate ones that are relevant for you. What are you gonna do? This is what I expect in return. I want you to help develop this policy up, give a presentation to the junior clinicians, or give feedback to the team leaders, or whatever it is, setting those things up that that's actually an expectation in your team that we expect that you're dipping into these things. One might be a clinical thing, the next one might be a people leadership component or a business element, financial policy development, that sort of thing. You've got people moving across those things, and you've planned with your team that you've got people stepping into each of those because they will come back with some ideas to the team. Those are some of the really key things that managers can do to support teams in developing and let them know that that's the expectation.

Tubi 20:20

One of the things I've recently drafted, which we'll be sharing at the workshop as a resource for attendees, is how do you leverage when money is tight, how do you leverage off the development and training people are doing to so that they're sharing it with the rest of the team. And we use a 70, 20, 10 blended learning model in our organization. I talk to managers a lot about how do you have those development conversations so that you're setting people up well for the year. And part of the 70% is if you're interested in a podcast or a book, or you saw a TED talk recently, share it with the team and let's create a journal club or let's allocate 15 minutes in a team meeting to actually share the link with people and let's have a facilitated conversation about what did you learn and what did it mean to you. I think one of the things that I carried for a long time, I actually had two and a half years off when we lived in America and I didn't work. If I could just read a book because I was interested in it, I discovered there was a lot in other materials that was very transferable back into health. By looking purely for nursing, medical, psychology, whatever material, you're actually missing out on some really important things. So for me, the portal into learning, which wasn't the case then, it was books or articles, but now it's podcasts and TED talks. One of the steps that managers miss is leveraging off those people in their teams who are interested in things, who are doing some things like that. And part of their development is learning how to share it with other people. Managers are missing that step, I think. Yeah.

Naomi 22:13

Yep, completely actually setting that intentional time. However, you choose to do that. If that's a regular, we do a journal club, George, you're delivering that this week, Fred, you'll do it the week later, Lily, you're the week after, or you've each got 15 minutes in this session. And support them with the tools to do it because they may not have the confidence to run it themselves. But get them to step into that space and make it little, don't make it this big thing that they have to develop. Set it up as a conversation. Maybe you set it up that they just come, they haven't prepped anything, but you ask some questions about it in front of the group and explore what they would do about these things now.

Tubi 22:55

You could set it up as an interview. I think people, when they get asked to do an in-service, I think what we've traditionally done, and still what a lot of people do, is I have to do a presentation for 40 minutes. Yeah. Oh.

Naomi 23:10

No.

Tubi 23:11

Welcome to the world of facilitation. You're just starting the conversation, you're creating the little seeds that might steer the conversation, but actually the people in the room, nobody's a blank slate. Everybody comes with experience and capability and expertise, and invite them to share that. That's the most, I think, the most beautiful and easiest way to facilitate.

Naomi 23:39

Absolutely. I delivered a lot of PowerPoint presentations. But as soon as you put up a PowerPoint presentation, Presentation, you completely take away all of the responsibility from everybody in the room to contribute or to take responsibility for taking that out once you've put up a PowerPoint. If you don't bother with the PowerPoint and you have it as a discussion, it's now an us conversation. What are we going to do, which is so much more powerful?

Tubi 24:08

One of the things I talk about in the training that we deliver is all the way through the session, and then I hold them accountable at the end. Yeah. What of what you've learned today is going to be your critical move in the next week? I'm really moving away from those really super intense, information-heavy download kind of experiences towards more facilitated conversation, time to self-reflect, opportunity to practice in the room, but then also that advice around where to start, who maybe to start with. I learn a new thing, I'm going to try it on you. Is that okay? Can you give me some feedback once we've finished?

Naomi 24:55

My kids have been well tested on.

Tubi 24:57

Yeah. Getting people to think before they leave the room, before they go back into that really busy environment, what's going to be your critical move after twelve?

Naomi 25:06

The thing that managers can do if they've got team members that have been away at a course is a really powerful thing saying to that person the next day, what's stuck with you with that training? Or where's there a gap for us? Or what's one action that you're going to take? We have some tools that we use in our training because so much training is about what happens in the moment of that workshop. And the workshops, if you're in a room with you and I, it's exciting, and people want to be there and they're going to learn a bunch of things, but we know that sadly, despite how awesome we are, that there's the Ebbinghouse forgetting curve, and after a week, people are only remembering 10% of all the good things that we taught them, and so we can fill millions of things, but if they're only remembering 10%, they're really only actioning a smaller amount of that. We have some tools to get people to actually embed very, very small things the day after the day after the day after for 30 days, and with some coaching, which we know has a bigger impact. Managers can step into that space and actually do some of that very simply, but doing it even more intentionally where we do it every day just for those little behaviours to set up those things that are not hard but just that little bit of extra friction than what we want is a really useful thing. So I'm really excited about sharing that some more.

Tubi 26:45

And it really follows up from. So a lot of the time we might have a manager who'll take us aside on our first day back and go, you know what really resonated with you? I want to hear about those things that landed for you. But sometimes we don't. Sometimes we've got a manager who might just be trying to keep their own head above water and their level of interest in your development is pretty low, and they're not going to ask you that question, and you might have left the workshop, you know, full of excitement and motivation, which that's wet ebbed away really quickly, and now there's something that can actually take the place of that really keen colleague at work who's gonna check in with you every day for 30 days because I never had that. I don't know if they exist, but who's just gonna keep you on track and on target, which I think is so exciting. Obviously, there's a self-responsibility component to that, which is you've got to do it when prompted. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Naomi 27:48

Yeah. I have loved this conversation, and I would love us just I'd love you to give a bit more detail about what we're doing in Brisbane.

Tubi 28:11

You touched on the mandatory training that happens. There's not a lot of training, which is around adult development, which continues for our whole life. It's not around developing managers, developing people leaders and people managers. And so, what we're actually going to focus on is some of those things that we don't get taught that are vitally important for managing a team and managing yourself. Like there's a really big gap, I think, where we don't we want to do the best we can, and this is part of um my lifelong love of learning is I want to do the best I can, but I know I've got some gaps, and so we're gonna fill some of those gaps, and some of it is really helping people be aware of themselves, regulate themselves, be aware of others and cultivate relationships. That's very emotional intelligence, but this is a very different approach in that we're learning how what we need and what's important to us from an emotional perspective. And for a lot of people that can be scary, but it's a very pragmatic way to better understand yourself and to just start to build um awareness on what emotions are important to you, what emotions you don't you want to feel, but you might from time to time. And and by understanding that a little bit better, you're effectively bringing into the light because the fact is they always have influence. Often we're not aware of them or we don't understand them, and so they're in the dark and we're at their mercy. Whereas when you bring them into the light, you give yourself some choices. So we're gonna cover that. That's a I think a critical thing we need to be learning uh in primary school, but none of us are. So we're gonna bring it to you, um, and you'll see how practical it is. And talking about transferable, you can share that with anybody, it doesn't just have to be colleagues. We're also gonna talk about curiosity as a leadership superpower, and I cannot understate the importance of curiosity, and we're gonna look at it through advocacy and inquiry and the coaching approach, and the coaching approach is based on the work of Michael Bunga Sania. His uh motivation for sharing coaching was um to make it more accessible and more achievable for more people, and he really wanted people to be using it. So we're gonna share his really simple, can I just say, highly, highly effective approach to coaching. You're not gonna walk out of there with a um, you know, an international coaching federation level one qualification, but you are gonna walk out of there with some skills you've practiced and that you can repeat really easily. And then the other thing we're gonna talk about is the piece of feedback that nobody discusses, which is how we receive feedback and what happens in the moment for us when we receive it, which is why it's just so difficult, even when we have the feedback. And the second part of that is how we receive the feedback determines how we give it. So being aware that we don't all receive it the same way, how do we then cultivate a culture of feedback in our team and having that conversation? And you're gonna leave with how to have that conversation with your team and a lot more resource and goodies beside. Do you want to talk about the additional bits that are going to come after the workshop?

Naomi 31:46

So there'll be some pre-work before you come to the workshop. So when you get to the workshop, we can just go straight into the real meaty stuff, which I really enjoy. After the workshop, we are going to tap on your shoulder every day with reminders about what are you implementing, how's it going, what's working, what do we need to tweak. So you're going to get some coaching from a little angel on your shoulder that's got some words for you each day, and that lasts for 30 days after the workshop. The impact of it will last a lot longer than that big moment that happens the day of the workshop. Part of the benefit of the workshop is the team that you're in the workshop with people outside of your organization. Bring along some from within your organization. Other people that are doing these things differently, seeing the same problems as you, but have maybe come up with different solutions, which is really so powerful. Four weeks later, we're going to have a follow-up as to where are we at, what was easy to implement, what was hard, and what other things do you need. So that's going to be a really nice way to round it out. And that will be online, so you don't need to travel for that one.

Tubi 32:59

I'm really excited by the format that we've come up with because I think that pre-work, it's going to be achievable. It's okay. We're not going to give you too much, but it's just sowing some seeds and giving your brain and yourself time to absorb a little bit of information in the words of the people who have done the work, which I think is really important. And then our um workshop is going to be really uh interactive. We really want you to be ready to contribute, ready to um meet and talk to each other and share challenges, share solutions. We're gonna have lots of practice because we want you to walk out of there, you're not gonna have mastered it, that's not possible, but we want you to walk out of there feeling like I can keep giving this a go. The electronic coaching tool is groundbreaking. I don't know anybody who's doing that. Um and and then to catch up four weeks later and just to hear how things are going and just to help you tweak what you're doing so it continues to be effective for you. Um I'm very excited to see how that's gonna work out. So don't delay though, because there's only what there's only 20 spots. And there's there's lots of nurses in Brisbane, not including the ones coming into town for the age.

Naomi 34:35

It's gonna be fun.

Host 34:40

Thanks for listening. You can check out the show notes and find lots of further resources at vetereveryshift.com.au or via the link below. If you enjoyed today's episode or would love further information, we would love you to subscribe.