Learning through Experience
How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’s work explores. As we navigate through life, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.
In this season of the “Learning through Experience” podcast, Dr. Heidi Brooks focuses on one of the most impactful ways to learn through experience: learning with mentors. Join her on a journey as she speaks with some of her mentors and they reflect on what brought them to where they are today in their own work, life, and play.
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Heidi Brooks
Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Bio
Heidi Brooks teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations.
Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management. Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She is a lifelong experiential learner; you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.
Episodes
The Power of Creating Learning Spaces
I have a very clear memory of chasing Robin Rose down the hallway at college and asking her: “How can I be like you when I grow up?” I was fascinated with the way she invited people to step into learning through personal experience. Since most of my idea of learning involved lectures and assignments, this approach was refreshing and evocative. Discovering the power of learning through reflection on experience was a fundamental shift for me—and I never turned back. In this conversation, we discuss learning laboratories, the need for risk, and how leadership is, at its core, an art form.
practice, Practice, PRACTICE
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.”
How Do You Actually Notice Your Life?
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.
A Quick Check-In
In order to learn through experience, our doing needs a good pairing with reflective inquiry into what’s working.
Orienting Towards Courageous Community
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 Kimsey-House, who eventually became my personal coach, teacher, and dear friend. Karen helped me see how I could amplify the power of learning through the experience of my academic world filled with books, papers, and expertise. In this conversation, we discuss the power of reinvention, how to hear and heed your own truth, and the importance of creating spaces to craft understanding.
The Scariest Book I Have Ever Read
I got to know Parker Palmer because I reached out to him after reading his classic book Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. He is an educator and activist who has penned over a dozen books. He is also one of the gentlest and kindest people I know—but the ominous relevance of the story he tells in his book scared me. Come learn why in this episode.
Learning Outside of the Classroom
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.
Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and ‘Learning through Experience’
In kicking off this podcast on “Learning through Experience,” Dr. Heidi Brooks wanted to invite us all to wonder how we trace a line across transformational learning experiences to the way we show up in the world today: How do we apply our learning? To delve into that question, she takes us to her own learning experience. This first season of “Learning Through Experience” is a set of conversations with Heidi’s mentors with an eye to this question: How do we apply what we learn through experience with our mentors?