Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Today I’m only attending two sessions, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming a post to read. Albeit, it should be informative.

Session 1

For session 1, I’m attending Discover 7 Techniques to Enhance Learner Motivation (and 5 ways to avoid squelching motivation), and it started with a giveaway worth $20,000 of services, so not a terrible way to begin the morning. There are also clickers, so I think they’re overestimating everyone’s alertness at 8am…but we’ll see.

There’s a lot going on in this session – Becky is a fantastic presenter; she’s loud and engaging, and no-nonsense (it seems). Curiosity is motivation to acquire new knowledge; we want the brain to be prepared for long-term memory. People are better at learning things they’re interested in (or are curious about). Curiosity and extrinsic reward motivation create more effective learning experiences.

Curiosity has a significant influence on academic performance. – Becky Pike Pluth

Next up, Becky had us play a very loud quizzing game about curiosity, which was great, but I really hope no one was attending with a hangover haha. At the end of the game, we received a 60-day trial of  the same game developed by the Bob Pike Group.

How do you engineer curiosity? Becky provided a very handy workbook that has a ton of creative training techniques to enhance learner motivation. I wasn’t lucky enough to win any of the giveaways, but I’m alright with that!

Session 2

The second session I chose to attend was The Neuroscience of Change, with Britt Andreatta – Director of Learning and Development at Lynda.com – this one was a full house!

Change at work – Change is fast-paced, constant, and coming from all different places, all of the time. Your role/team/job/personnel/technology/processes may change – change is always happening!

Not all change is created equal, but the distinction is:

• How long does it take to acclimate?
• How much disruption is there?

Change is hard to measure because it’s personal for each of us. If we chose the change, it’s a lot different than having someone else dictate the change. There is a change curve, where there’s the current state, and current level of productivity of moral. When a change is announced, the change curve begins, and the change curve indicates how easily we can adapt to the change. What happens on the road to accepting, embracing, and supporting the change.

Change can be overwhelming, because change is happening all of the time, and individuals may have just accepted a 1 change, when they become presented with another change.

When we learn something new, an MRI can pick this up. The Basal Ganglia is responsible for habit formation. It takes 20 repetitions for a neural pathway to become created, and 40 repetitions is when the basal ganglia lets us take less energy to do the task. So if we’re doing something daily, the change will occur faster than if it’s something we only do occasionally.

We have a portion of our brain that focuses on failure: the habenula – this portion of our brain helps us make better decisions. It guides decision-making and action by restricting serotonin and dopamine. With this restriction, we feel bad for a period of time, which will prompt us to make a better decision at a later time, and when that happens, we will receive an increase in serotonin and dopamine/happy feelings.

When it comes to change, we should:

1. Help our leaders implement change easier, and help them understand that the emotional response to the change is not personal.
2. Be transparent about the change, and give people a heads up that the change is coming.
3. Problem solve instead of set goals – If we embrace change as a series of phases of problem solving, it turns on the rewards section of the brain.
4. Measure change fatigue – make it someone’s job to look at data points (e.g. marketing has had 3 changes so far this year, maybe we should roll out the next change to that department last instead of first).
5. Enhance adaptability – start with why, share the roadmap, create safety, have patience, celebrate milestones, encourage self-care, maximize mindful, and leverage learning.

Mindfulness allows your brain to reduce stress and change the structure of your brain. People who meditate for 10 minutes a day are less reactive to stress, and compassion also increases.

There is nothing that is happening in change that learning is not going to support. We can learn mindfulness, we can learn how to problem-solve, we can learn how to improve our emotional intelligence. This is a great way to end my experience at ATD 2016 – keep learning!

Keynote

I have been so excited for this keynote! It may have even swayed me to attend ATD 2016 (shhh). I’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong, and have watched all of Brene Brown’s Ted Talks (and have seen them used countless times in academic contexts at the university – my therapist has even recommended them)! Needless to say, getting to hear Brene Brown speak can only be considered an honour and inspiration!

Brene began her keynote by sharing her first professional love – her first real job: training; she was a trainer for AT&T. She also share her secret passion of becoming an MTV VJ on Headbangers Ball.

Her research lies in courage and vulnerability, and first began her vulnerability research by researching shame, before she realized that shame was really vulnerability. She shared her publisher’s failed attempts at choosing an appropriate book cover for Daring Greatly – an elephant ass would never appear over her name.

What story are you telling yourself right now? Most people I know, at some point, have been committed to a shame narrative of “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not successful.” Whenever you feel as though you’re over your head, you go to that shame narrative. But you need to see the struggle through the trees. See it for what it is.

Emotion gets the first crack of making sense of a difficult situation. – Brene Brown

Be honest before you let your emotions create a narrative. If someone does something you perceive as being negative/passive aggressive/etc., speak with the individual first because the story your emotions are making up, may just be that – a story. You need to empathize with that individual and understand where they’re coming from.

Courage is teachable, but it is not easy. If it was easy to teach courage, everyone would be brave all the time.

The most terrifying emotion we experience is joy, because we feel as though it’s time-limited. That the joy will end. We’re inviting disaster. These feelings aren’t true – they’re how we self-protect.

We need to show up at the arena, and not sit in the cheap seats. We need to show up and dare greatly. Try new things, be vulnerable, take off the armour, show up, and just be you! Shame, scarcity, and comparison are season ticket holders in the arena, and they will always be there. The only thing you need to have when you enter the arena is full clarity and values. Empathy and self-compassion are the most important seats in the arena, because we’re always entering looking for critics.

Braving:

• Boundaries
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Vault
• Integrity
• Non-Judgement
• Generosity

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. – Henry James.

This keynote was just what I needed! It was incredibly inspirational, and I really need to try and be more empathetic with myself to breakdown my internal narrative. Brene has motivated me to get moving on somethings I’ve been holding off on – and I’ll try not to get myself too far underwater, but if I do, I’ll ask for help.

Session 1

For the first session, I attended Virtual Presence: Inspire and Engage in the Virtual Classroom and Beyond. Where hopefully I will glean some good information for an upcoming project I’m working on, for my own professional development when it comes to public speaking, and when it comes to making effective recommendations to faculty members at the university for conducting their synchronous sessions.

The session kicks off with several questions:

• How many of you have forgotten about a virtual colleague in a mixed in person/virtual meeting?
• How many of you have video conferenced with someone who was not camera ready?
• How many of you have facilitated a meeting, remotely, and wanted more organized participation?
• How many of you have left a webinar or presentation early because of the presenter’s unique vocal quality?
• How many of you felt uneasy because you don’t know how your content is landing?

Virtual presenter, Kate Nugent, begins with a story about how she always crushed it as a classroom trainer, but how in her first virtual training session, she fell flat. How do we make impact with virtual presence? Virtual presence allows you to connect authentically with virtual audiences, so they feel included, engaged, and inspired.

We need to work harder to include people in a virtual session.

vPRES Model:

Virtually…

• Present
• Reaching Out
• Expressive
• Self-Knowing

Sometimes we need to push people a bit, and make it easy for people to put in the extra effort to participate. Try different platforms and devices, and make requests of others to put in extra effort to join you on the preferred platform. Your IQ would be better in a virtual meeting if you were stoned versus multi-tasking.

Be present – Focus on the now, being flexible/adaptable, and be aware of what’s happening in the virtual ‘room’.

Presenting tips – Take a deep belly breath before picking up the phone and when you find your nerves taking over, and strategically eliminate distraction – close all applications and hide devices.

Reaching out is about building relationships of trust, virtually. You can do this by asking questions that solicits opinions. Ensure you’re exercising your listening skills, and show empathy.

Express yourself with voice, body, and face, and ensure your message is aligned with these expressions.

Self-knowing – Ask a colleague for feedback to build self-awareness, and set your self up for success by preparing – send an agenda in advance.

Sometimes you have to channel your inner middle school teacher to guide users through the steps.

Session 2

For my second session of the day, I chose to attend Using the Science of Attention, Willpower, and Decision-Making, with Julie Dirksen…because it’s Julie Friggin’ Dirksen, and a pretty interesting topic – although, I might get reamed for blogging while listening haha.

Julie begins her session with a bit of a rant on micro-learning. She wants to spend a bit of time talking to the concept of ‘if we make it smaller, we can squeak in under the ever-reducing attention spans of our users.”

She hypothesizes that instructional design has a primary responsibility of ruthlessly managing cognitive load. She follows that with a brief tutorial of cognitive load – which I developed a Storyline interaction for way back in the day – check it out here!

We’re flooded with data at any given time, and the act of attention is deciding which data is important to you at any given moment in time. The information processing model is essentially a data filter for our minds. Is the data important? Is it not? That’s sensory memory. Working memory allows us to hang on to data for a little while. Long-term memory involves information that sticks around for the long haul…maybe not forever, but for awhile.

• Segue: I recently watched Patton Oswalt’s most recent comedy special on Netflix, and he had a great bit where he talks about how he can remember radio jingles he heard as a kid, but regardless of how many times he’s taken infant CPR training, he can never remember whether he’s supposed to press on his daughter’s chest first or blow in her mouth first. Julie’s discussion on sensory versus working versus long-term memory.

How long is the average attention span? It’s debatable. There are types of attention: voluntary, involuntary, or habitual.

There are tons of cues out there to emphasize where we should pay attention. For example, environmental cues or social cues, and these cues depend on the audience. She talks about hyperbolic discounting – when do you get a reward and how does it effect behaviour?

We don’t want people to have to pull out the two-minute video on evacuating the building. – Julie Dirksen

Doodling to reduce attention drift – This is productive when it comes processing information. Your brain is staying engaged, without having to drift. I do this often when sitting through intense meetings, and I find it quite helpful; however, I also feel guilty when others can see me doodling.

When it comes to decision-making, we’re looking for some sort of emotional pull that tells us whether something is important or not, and these pulls are also what tells us if something is worth paying attention to.

The power of defaults impacts how we make decisions. For example, countries who have the ability to opt out of organ donation, but it’s the default. These individuals seldom opt out of organ donation because of the power of defaults…

When you’re provided with fewer choices, you’re more likely to make a decision versus when you’re presented with many choices. Your cognitive load has been reduced by the presentation of fewer choices.

To reduce cognitive load, try to: improve readability, do user testing (where are people getting stuck, expending extra effort?), make choices easier or harder depending on the behaviour you want to see, let people choose where they would like to start (e.g. choosing from a menu versus locking down navigation), make it as short as possible (but not shorter), create a sense of immediacy, don’t strip out the emotion (emotion tells us that things are important), tie the information to the learner’s experience, and keep decisions short and relevant.

Keynote

The keynote this morning was incredibly inspiring. Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, spoke with us about leadership and why some organizations thrive, and others fail.

Session 1

First off – I got to meet Patti! So that was awesome – we led the charge on searching for session 1, eating lunch, and attending session 1.5.

I had intended to attend Your Brain on Creativity: The Secrets to Making Creativity Work for Your Business, but couldn’t for the life of me find the exhibitor’s session! And I wasn’t the only one. Ah well. It gave me time to wander around the expo and pick up some materials.

The next session I wanted to attend, 10 Practical Principles for Creating Impactful E-Learning, was full…so we stumbled across the hall to sit in on What Caused it? Techniques to Isolate the Effects of Your Programs, with Patti Phillips.

Results are important, but my mind does not work well when confronted with Return on Investment (ROI) speak. Initially, my pants were confused off. She explained the ROI process, identifying some guiding principles and results-based solutions. Techniques were provided to isolate the effects of programs, which seem very comparable to techniques used in most academic research (using control groups, trends, input, etc.).

Full disclosure: I had to leave the session – there was too much math, and there were other sessions that were more closely aligned to my business.

Session 1.5

I ducked into How to Boost Your Career Well-Being with Beth Cabrera, and came in just in time for a 2-minute meditation…MUCH more therapeutic than doing math. Phew! The first portion was about mindfulness, and how to incorporate it within your career. The next part was about gratitude – intentionally looking for what is good and taking note of it.

She had us write down three good things:

• Hiking the mountains in Breckenridge, and getting to share that experience with people I care about
• Meeting new people within the e-learning industry
• Finding a session that’s more closely aligned to my career and personal interests.

She explained that an organization had individuals do this (writing down good things), for 3 weeks, and noticed increases in levels of gratitude and happiness. She discusses how doing this activity can help reprogram your brain to intentionally scan the environment for good things. You can easily change the tone of a meeting by starting a meeting going around the table to talk about one thing they’re excited about. It sets the tone for gratitude.

If we create a culture of gratitude, individuals will become more successful, because they will be surrounded by positivity. Looking at a situation like grocery shopping, you can look at the negative of having to go to the grocery store (the act of shopping), but you can reframe the situation by appreciating that you have the ability to go to the grocery store, and have the money to purchase healthy food.

She talked about strengths – focusing on our strengths allows us to become happier, feel more successful, and have a sense of meaning and authenticity – you’re doing what you naturally do best. You will be more efficient, and it’s good for overall performance.

Strength spotting:

• Enjoyment – We love doing things we enjoy doing
• Ease – Something is natural to do and comes to you with ease
• Energy – What we do energizes us
• Advocate – Push yourself to use your strengths more

Once you figure out what your strengths are, and save them for when you don’t have as much energy (e.g. after lunch, when you’re usually more tired).

Locate complementary partners. Find people who have strengths that complement your strengths, and partner with them to create extraordinary organizations.

Recognize the impact you make. If you didn’t wake up each day, people would be missing out on what you offer! Understand your importance, even if you feel small in a very large world. To recognize impact,  complete the following:

• Task:
• Who Does This Help?
• Who does This Help?

Essentially, you will be able to see the larger landscape of who you’re helping by doing task x/y/z

Modify tasks or change interactions to use your strengths to best help others to make their lives better/easier.

Session 2

The final session I attended today was Women in Learning Leadership: Lessons From the Field. I like listening to others talk about their experiences, and this session had an all-star panel: Cammy Bean, Jane Bozarth, Trina Rimmer, Koreen Pagano, and Pooja Jaisingh.

This session began with each panelist identify themselves and their learning backgrounds. All panelists are all heavily weighted in technology. Cammy asked the audience “how many of you feel imposter syndrome?,” which was a great question, because I know I certainly feel that way sometimes – it kind of ties back to the last session, and the concept recognizing your impact. There are many days when I feel unsuccessful, and unqualified, but on many stages I’m overqualified and even considered an expert. It makes me truly realize that I am a successful woman, and I really need to recognize the impact I have on my clients and readers.

Many panelists spoke about exhaustion, sacrifice, and being taken seriously. I can definitely empathize with these feelings. My first year of business was incredibly exhausting, and I sacrificed a lot of my social life when I was doing my graduate studies, writing books, and starting my own business. Being taken seriously is something I still struggle with – when I first started out in Instructional Design at a corporate gig, I found it hard to get clients to take me seriously, but I think this was less because of me and more because of them and the hierarchy. Now that I run my own business, my clients take me seriously, because if they don’t, then what’s the point of working with me?

Pooja identified a huge challenge: staying on top of the latest technologies. As learning leaders, there’s added pressure to stay on top of the latest technologies, and because technology is constantly evolving, it can be exhausting to stay on top of technology!

When looking for a mentor/boss/ally, most panelists don’t want to be told what to do, they need more of a guidance-based motivation to do the task at hand. Not directions. They look for managers that aren’t looking to take the easy way out, are straight forward, and who want to make progress. Great managers are those who enable you to become your best self (professionally or independently).

When interviewing, women tend to hide portions of their personal lives (e.g. having children or being afraid to ask for the compensation they deserve), but it’s important to be upfront, and if the organization doesn’t support you or want to pay what you’re worth, is it an organization you really want to work for?

You want to work with people who look up to you, not people you need to prove yourself to. – Koreen Pagano

Overall impression: This was a great panel session, and I certainly think that many of the experiences discussed can also be applied to men, so the panel wasn’t only of interest for women – it’s a shame that more men weren’t in attendance (but shout out to all those who were!).