A bi-weekly roundup of neurochemical learning cocktails May 17 - May 30 This Brain Juice Is Worth The Squeeze, TwiceWhat do you know about the neurochemical, acetycholine? If you forgot your Behavioral Neuroscience notebook at home, here's the refresher: acetycholine (ACh) is a chemical released in the brain to help neurons wire together. Research indicates that it helps with alertness, focus, binding certain synapses together, and suppressing other synapses from binding. It's Brain Gorilla Glue. When we engage in learning and aren't super stressed, our brain splooges ACh and starts making neural connections. Neurons that fire together, wire together. The more ACh, the path gets clearer and easier to navigate. The more times you put a layer down of Brain Gorilla Glue, the path gets wider and connects to related paths. After 10,000 hours of intentional practice and gallons of ACh, you've turned a dirt path into a bustling highway. That's how you learn to juggle, or do improv comedy, or recite a poem, or interpret body language. Making this more practical, two of the more effective ways to lube your brain with ACh in the workplace is Group Training and 1-1 Coaching. (Learning nerds and neuroscientist learning nerds, I know this is gross oversimplification but run with me on this. Sources cited at the bottom of this newsletter.) If you've ever sat in a classroom with a bunch of people or stuck around after school to meet with the teacher, you can visualize these two experiences. If you've got a great teacher, you can learn a lot in one format and you can learn a lot in the other format, but like peanut butter and jelly, combining the two is far greater than the sum of their parts. Here's how these formats drive effective learning: Perks of 1-1 Coaching
Perks of Group Training
When you pair 1-1 personalized coaching with social learning environments, you're learning in the fast lane:
The next time you are doing a little learning, see if you can find ways to get 1-1 attention and talk it out with some peers. A TL;DR from the CROAfternoons, like most people, are usually my refactory period. -Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer The Summer of Strength ContinuesIn the last TL;DR, not one but TWO people asked for more Strengths images specifically featuring CRO Roman Noodles: From now until September 1st, the Team Strengths Accelerator is $500 off the regular price. Use these long summer days to foster more trust and collaboration in your team! Did I mention that the Team Strengths Accelerator combines 1-1 coaching and a group workshop? Hmm, wonder why...
ROCK TUMBLING UPDATEMy last supply of rough rocks (sodalite and red quartzite) went into the tumbler a few weeks back. In about a month or so, they'll come out and then I'll be fresh out of rocks. What a tragedy...but I never let a good crisis go to waste. Now's the time to figure out what should be my next batch of rocks to tumble. I've narrowed it down to five types, linked them to images, and used AI to tell me the woo woo behind them:
I will end up picking two: Rock Hudson and Rock Lobster are awaiting your decision. From the brain of a guy who generates dopamine when thinking about rocks, Dan from Learn to Scale Opt-out from the newsletter | Unsubscribe from all emails | Update your Preferences | | www.learntoscale.us, Boston, MA 02119 PS. Magic Eyes were made on MS-DOS? PSS. A newsletter that talks about neurotransmitters needs to cite its sources. Here's what I referenced while assembling this TL;DR:
|
Entrepreneur, Professional Learner, & Proud Failure. Writes about sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship from the eyes of a learning and development nerd. Lead teams, manage people, scale a business, and learn better through the biweekly irreverent newsletter, the TL;DR.
A bi-weekly roundup of opinions from your secret cabal of AI advisors July 12 - July 25 Advice, But 5x Better Last week I was grappling with a range of tough decisions and because I'm a total nerd for AI, I was talking it out with Gemini. I journaled out the context, jotted down my personal thoughts, and uploaded a few files into that chatbox. After the AI went brr, it basically told me what I wanted to hear. This is a common AI problem: they're designed to be syncophants. However, with this...
A bi-weekly roundup of putting your strong foot into your mouth June 28 - July 11 Misplaced Strength Whenever you do any kind of personality test with a team - CliftonStrengths, DiSC, Enneagram, etc.- you suddenly "know" your colleagues in a new way. That knowledge is powerful and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Armed with that data, it's hard to not adapt and change your behavior, whether you mean to or not. While personality inventories can foster understanding and better...
A bi-weekly roundup of ways to make your recurring leadership meeting more epic June 14 - June 27 Ride or Die: The Four Horsemen of Agencies The strength of an agency lies in four key areas: Sales, Account Management, Operations, and Leadership. Each one is a powerful force, a "horseman" that can either lead you to victory or trample you in the dust. Since it's the Summer of Strengths at Learn to Scale, we've hopped on the horseback for each core function and explored how each role's...