Stella Collins Podcast Transcript

Melody Moore [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Secret Resume podcast hosted by me, Melody Moore. In this podcast we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped my guests, those which have influenced who they are as people and where they are in their work life today, or as I like to call it, their secret resume. Before we dive in, I want to tell you about something that I’m really excited about, about which is our being free membership. We’re developing an online community which is designed for people who are interested in personal growth. If you’re navigating career transitions, maybe feeling stuck or burnt out, or simply seeking more meaning in your life, then this is for you. Membership gives you access to a range of resources, a supportive community and monthly group coaching calls. It will allow you to explore what freedom means to you on your own terms. Head to www.liberareconsulting.co.uk being free to join the Waitlist.

Melody Moore [00:01:05]:
My guest today is Stella Collins. Stella, lovely to see you. I’m really happy to have you here on the podcast. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Stella Collins [00:01:17]:
Wow. Gosh. I’m Stella Collins. I’m currently chief Learning Officer and co founder at Stella Labs. I’m the author of Neuroscience for Learning Development and I think I’m most known for being a kind of real advocate for neuroscience, brain based, evidence based learning that really has an impact in the workplace. So really making sure that training, however it’s done, has an impact and gets people to, to do the jobs they need to do, to know the things they need to know. So it’s got kind of extended, the extended learning journey, I think.

Melody Moore [00:01:54]:
And I have just bought your book, so I’m very excited to get stuck into that because it’s exactly my kind of thing. So I’m very much looking forward to reading it. So let’s take a leap back in time, shall we? To. I think you said it was the, the early 90s we’re talking about and when you were working in it. So let’s start there, shall we?

Stella Collins [00:02:20]:
Yeah, well, I guess it’s even earlier than that because I actually started working it in the 80s. Yeah, I studied psychology at university and did a science, a science psychology degree. Got really interested in brains. When I left university I didn’t want to be a clinical psychologist and I didn’t really want to go into research. So I was kind of left looking for something to do. And at that time there were loads of jobs in it, so I took a job in the world of it, which I really quite enjoyed. I was quite surprised about it was so enjoyable, but where it kind of starts in terms of my connections to kind of now was I started to get interested in expert systems around the kind of early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. We had a research team that were looking at that and we were looking at how we could build those and they were just really interesting because they’re sort of early, early commercial form of AI.

Stella Collins [00:03:13]:
We didn’t manage to really get it going and I don’t think anybody really did. It was kind of, it was an opportunity to explore for people. But I just think there wasn’t the technology, there wasn’t the computing power at that time to do what we wanted to do. But it really interested my, raised my interest in how can we help people learn, but from a technological viewpoint. I also did some, some expert systems, not expert systems, sorry, some early E learning stuff. So it was kind of. Even though I was actually working in the technical world, I was beginning to have that interest in the learning world. And I also experienced some really terrible training.

Stella Collins [00:03:55]:
I kind of had not wanted to get involved in learning really because my experience in IT training was very poor and I would get back to after a two week long course. This is why I’m so passionate now about making sure that learning is impactful and is worth the time and money you spend on it. Because I go for a two week course and then I get back and think, but how do I use that now?

Melody Moore [00:04:18]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:04:19]:
So I kind of had this theory that learning wasn’t really a great experience, training wasn’t a great experience. So I was a bit reluctant to move into it. But I gradually kind of shifted into training. When I took a job that was called IT support, I’m training manager and I was like, well, I’m not going to do the training but I’ll just do the IT support. But I know how to do that.

Melody Moore [00:04:40]:
I’m really curious about. I also studied psychology and I’m really interested in your. Going from that into. Seems like an unusual move but I wonder if there was anything in the psychology that, that you would say, you know, I see some of that in IT or I applied some of that in it.

Stella Collins [00:05:04]:
So I think one of the things was because we did this module on AI, so it was the AI of vision. I began to see that, you know, computers weren’t just computer. You didn’t even have computers in schools or we barely had them at university when I was there. But I began to see that there were bigger things you could do with it, which was interesting. I Literally went into it because there were jobs in it. But of course, the thing with psychology is it’s an applicable everyday subject because you meet people and you work with people every day. So every day I was using some of the things I’d learned in my psychology degree and you know, now I was getting the chance to actually apply things like how do you help people learn, how do you communicate better with people, how do you understand where people are coming from so that you can kind of work with them better. So that’s what I loved about psychology.

Stella Collins [00:05:52]:
It’s such an applicable subject, you know, whatever your job is, if you’re working with people.

Melody Moore [00:05:58]:
Absolutely. And you, you know, very much talk a lot about neuroscience now. How much of that was in your psychology degree?

Stella Collins [00:06:09]:
A lot. Yeah, it was a science based psychology degree at Sheffield University and my final project was working on helping. It was actually a project that got, was published my name published paper on the superior colliculus and its impact on Parkinson’s disease. Wow. You know, it was kind of really, I mean we were working with animals and things, it wasn’t working with humans, but it was, it was a very science, neuroscience based. We were looking at brains, we were looking at how brains work, we were looking at what different parts of the brain did. And I just found that so fascinating.

Melody Moore [00:06:49]:
Interesting. And do you think there were. I mean, my thought would be that there wasn’t as much general interest in neuroscience then as there is now. Would you say that’s, that’s accurate?

Stella Collins [00:07:02]:
Yeah. And even psychology, I mean, I would say to people I’ve done a psychology degree and they would just leap back and say, are you going to psychoanalyse me? And I’d have to explain. And even the neuroscience, when I first started talking about kind of how you can use your brain in a business context, that wasn’t a very common thing for people to really know much about. They were curious, but they didn’t know much. I’ve really noticed because over the last 20 years I’ve probably asked the question, what do you already know about your brain? I can’t remember how many times I’ve asked it. When I first used to ask it a, I’d get a lot of myths, huge number of myths. You very little. You know, I got one would sometimes be the answer.

Stella Collins [00:07:46]:
But now when I ask people what they know about their brain, you know, people do have some decent understanding and there are still some myths about, but there’s less of them. People are beginning to understand and know more about how their brains do work. And they’re more interested. Well, they were always interested in it. But I think clearly they’ve got more information now and when you’ve got more information, then you can start to get more curious because you can ask better questions.

Melody Moore [00:08:10]:
I think for me, what’s changed is people’s understanding of the fact that the brain can change and even, you know, with personality as well. When I was so I was at university in the early 90s and you know, the, the rhetoric then was your personality is pretty fixed by the time you’re 30, probably, but that’s not what people believe anymore. And there’s so much more understanding of, you know, I always say you can teach an old dog new tricks. And, you know, I think a lot of that has come from the, the neuroscience of understanding, understanding that the brain.

Stella Collins [00:08:49]:
Changes over time, understanding neuroplasticity and the kind of people already knew about neuroplasticity. In the 1950s there was quite a lot of work beginning to be done around that. It was a bit strange. And that was around kind of stroke victims. Very often it was people who’d had strokes and they began. At first it was like, well, you’ve had a stroke, hard luck, you’re how you are. And then some people began to realise that, no, if we work with people, they can begin to regrow those strokes. Neural connections, I think that work then starts to filter out into, well, if you can regrow them after you’ve had a stroke, then surely you can grow them anyway.

Stella Collins [00:09:26]:
And you know, the advent of scanning, you know, MRI scanning, fmri, that has really helped people understand that, yes, we can really change. It’s hard though to change your brain. Neuroplasticity is a complex, difficult, energy consuming process.

Melody Moore [00:09:42]:
Yeah.

Stella Collins [00:09:43]:
You know, press a switch and it changes. You have to put the effort, which is why learning is effortful, because you have to put the effort in to make the change.

Melody Moore [00:09:50]:
Yes. I was listening to a podcast just the other day about dementia because I have a personal interest. It’s very prevalent in my family and, you know, that’s what she was talking about. You know, how actually exercise has an amazing impact on the brain and, and on prevention of dementia, which was fascinating to me, made me get out there and think I need to go out and run.

Stella Collins [00:10:17]:
Yeah, really, it’s amazing. But even gentle exercise, even if you’re walking, doing yoga, any of those things, but exercise creates this neurotrophic factor which allows you to grow brain cells and particularly the area of your brain that’s particularly. And a proactive is that quite the word but relevant for is the hippocampus and that can grow brain cells. And if you use, if you do exercise, you create this brain derived neurotropic factor or you stimulate it and that stimulates new brain cell growth.

Melody Moore [00:10:51]:
Yes, that’s what she was saying that even 45 minutes twice a week, or two to three times a week is enough. And actually the more the better. I thought she was going to say actually there was a cutoff where it, there was, you know, decrease in returns, but she didn’t say that. She said actually the more you can do that the better and you know, it’s about getting your heart rate up and.

Stella Collins [00:11:14]:
Yeah, yeah.

Melody Moore [00:11:16]:
Anyway, sorry, I’m taking as a slightly off, different tack there, but it’s all related. It’s. It’s all about learning and developing. So. So you, you had bad experience then of learning in it. I was really interested in. You said, you know, two year, two weeks course. People used to do that, didn’t they? They go on a long course away.

Stella Collins [00:11:40]:
From the office, big fat dinners at night. Yes, that was training course. Everything kind of designed, go to bed late. Everything designed to make you forget, hey, you know, you would be, you’d have information thrown at you and I, because I was working in it. They were more practical in some courses but you would always be partnered with somebody who was always quicker than me at picking up the stuff. So they complete all the exercises and I’d just be left thinking, I haven’t got it.

Melody Moore [00:12:09]:
Yes, yes.

Stella Collins [00:12:11]:
Yeah.

Melody Moore [00:12:11]:
Now we’re fighting for 10 minutes with people. And, you know, I remember doing leadership programmes where people would easily go away for fun five days. They wouldn’t think anything of it. People didn’t have mobile phones or very few people did. So no one was getting called all of the time. It was completely, completely different to today. So you, you had your experiences of training in it, positive, negative. You went to the CIPD and had a, I was going to say a Damascus moment, but you had an interesting experience, experience there that kind of led you down a different path.

Melody Moore [00:12:49]:
Do you want to talk about that?

Stella Collins [00:12:53]:
So, yes, so I went to, I had this role that was the IT support and training manager, but I didn’t really want to have much to do with the training. I’d taken on an inspirational trainer and I thought, well, she can, she can do most of that. I was beginning to learn from her, but I thought I should at least, you know, attend a conference or start to find out. The IPD conference. Lots of grey suits, lots of Kind of quite dull stands. It was when CIPD was still very HR orientated and there was a big pirate ship full of pirates. Well, that’s pretty innovative and useful. I kind of just was drawn by curiosity and I went on board and found out that they were trainers and they were using what was called accelerated learning to train financial skills.

Stella Collins [00:13:39]:
And I thought, well, if you can use that to train financial skills, you must be able to use it to train IT skills. And for a long time what I’d wanted to do was kind of do something with IT skills, try to change them. So basically they were actually looking for associates. So I kind of, it was about the time I was ready to quit the job I was in anyway. So I quit the job, became a freelance trainer, went and joined them, began to learn a lot and their company didn’t actually last for that long. But I got really interested in the accelerated learning, which was based on an evidence base. I mean, I’ve adapted it since, you know, to kind of add more of the science in, but it had an evidence base and it was just incredibly practical and worked.

Melody Moore [00:14:21]:
And talk about accelerated learning because it was a term that was around a while ago now and you don’t hear people, I don’t hear people talk about it very much. I remember being in love with it. I thought it was a fabulous idea and applying a lot of it, but just say what it means to you.

Stella Collins [00:14:41]:
So I think what it meant to me was switching. You know, sometimes it’s called, it’s called flip classroom, things like that. Now it’s about making sure that the learner does the work because it’s their brains, their bodies that have to change. They have to make new habits, they have to build new memories. And it was much more about what can we do to create an environment in which people do things rather than an environment where we lecture at people or it’s not quite relevant to them. You know, immediacy was important. It was relevant that it was in context, that it was, you know, something they needed right now and that it was exploratory but still guided. So it wasn’t quite like some of the exploratory stuff where you just randomly wander and find things.

Stella Collins [00:15:26]:
It was guided, you know, you had a purpose, very outcome orientated. You know, what’s the. That was the question, you know, what do you want people to be able to do? And then how can we go about helping people do it? I think one of the big challenges accelerated learning had was the name. And it came, I think, from language Learning originally, I think that was where it was first sort of initiated, as far as I know. And this accelerated learning, I think in a business context, people just thought, well, people are going to be able to learn faster. And in the business context, that meant. So we can go from two weeks to, you know.

Melody Moore [00:16:02]:
Yeah, two days.

Stella Collins [00:16:05]:
What it meant was that people would learn better. And you do accelerate the learning process. But what it didn’t kind of explain was the learning process is long anyway.

Melody Moore [00:16:14]:
Yes, yes. And it’s interesting, then you say that people are called, like, things like flipped classroom. They’re all just evolutions of that idea of. I mean, it seems crazy to think of that now, that that was a radical idea, that people had to actually do something in order to learn.

Stella Collins [00:16:34]:
People have still not necessarily got that clear. They might quit, but it’s not happening.

Melody Moore [00:16:40]:
No. One of the challenges, I think, is that I notice is that people get sort of. It was the word flipped that made me think of it flipped into that idea of a classroom and they get taken back to their school days and so they have an expectation of that particular style of learning where they’re told and they write things down. And it’s almost like a holiday to go on a training course because you’re not having to actually do anything. But also, our evaluation techniques also reinforce that because we ask people basically to critique a programme, we don’t ask them what role they played in that learning. So there’s something very. The power balance is wrong for me.

Stella Collins [00:17:35]:
We ask them at the wrong time as they finished, you know, an event. When they. Yeah, they’ve had a holiday, they’ve probably been fed well, you know, it was a break from normal work. And so, yeah, they think, yeah, that was quite good. And also, they’ve never, not necessarily experienced, consciously or formally experienced, better ways of learning. So they think, well, that was good. That seemed, you know, the lecturer was quite interesting, the trainer was interesting. They asked us a few questions.

Stella Collins [00:18:02]:
You know, it was. It was good. But we asked them just as they’re leaving. We don’t ask them three months later when they’re back in the workplace. What are you now doing that’s different? You learned in that training course. And that’s when we should ask.

Melody Moore [00:18:15]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:18:16]:
And get proof of that as well.

Melody Moore [00:18:18]:
Yeah.

Stella Collins [00:18:19]:
And be involving, you know, people’s managers, peers, customers. Have you noticed that there’s been a change here? I mean, for some things, it’s sales, it’s kind of obvious, but, you know, there’s lots of. Lots of tasks people do at work. That is not. It’s harder to track that. But that’s what we should be asking. That’s what we should be testing.

Melody Moore [00:18:39]:
Yes. And you said to me earlier that you do training impact assessments. Is that the right phrase?

Stella Collins [00:18:46]:
Is that impact audits?

Melody Moore [00:18:48]:
Ah, there we go. Training impact audits or training audits. Is that the kind of thing you’re doing when you do those?

Stella Collins [00:18:57]:
Yeah, we’re looking at, you know, for a start, have you got, have you got any, any. Have you got any outcomes in the first place? And what are your outcomes like? And are the outcomes what we call transfer outcomes? Have you decided what you want people to be able to do? Because if you know what people. You want people to do, then you can measure are they doing it now, how are they doing it now, are they doing it later and how are they doing it later? So that’s the first thing to kind of ask. And then we start looking and it depends on kind of the level of audit we’re doing. But we can look at it from a kind of a bigger cultural level, you know, have you got. Well, I think whatever we do, we always ask, have you got a strong learning framework in place? Do you have an evidence based framework that goes across your entire learning environment that says this is how people learn? And very few organisations have that. They’ve picked a bit here, they’ve picked a bit there, and some people don’t have any, no framework at all. And I think that’s really important.

Stella Collins [00:19:53]:
It needs to be an evidence based framework. You need to know order to help people learn. You need to know how they learn. And you were just talking about the kind of, the power dynamics of IT and leaving learners without the skill of learning. Why would anybody who works in IT or accountancy, why would they know how their brains learn? Of course they don’t know that and they don’t really need to know that. But if you give them some insights into, and you can do it through very simple things, you give them some insights into, you know, how you really learn as opposed to how you’ve learned so far at work. Most people have learned more on the job because that’s where they do the practical doing stuff. Yes, from training courses.

Stella Collins [00:20:38]:
So, yeah, we look at that kind of framework, we look at the processes, other processes supporting people to put their. Whatever they’ve learned in the formal pieces, to put that into practise. Are there, you know, support people. Have they got coaches, have they got managers who support the training? Is the environment, when they go back to work actually conducive offering them opportunities to practise. Yes, because they still need to practise. Just because you went on a training course doesn’t mean you came back as an expert. You’re just a newbie.

Melody Moore [00:21:09]:
Yeah.

Stella Collins [00:21:10]:
So it’s that whole environmental thing. So we look at all those things and kind of talk about, you know, what organisation, everybody’s doing something well, so we don’t start with, you’re doing it all wrong. We always start with, this is good, this is great. Do lots more of this, stop doing this, whatever it is. And if it’s, you know, if all they’re doing is content delivery, we’ll stop just doing content delivery. You can still deliver content, but make sure that people are able to pick that content up and use it and take it further than just the content. And then, you know, there’s some stuff that we say you do need to start doing some new stuff.

Melody Moore [00:21:46]:
Yes, yes. Some of the most impactful learning I’ve done as a facilitator, as a consultant, is where we very actively got the managers involved. And what was really striking for me was obviously it had a really positive impact on the participants, but actually it was almost training by stealth for the managers and some of the managers. In fact, all of the feedback we got from the managers was as positive as from the participants. And I had managers say to me, you know, I took this thing that you gave me to do with my participant and I used it on myself. They used it to think about their own career and I’ve used it with all of my team as well. So there was a, you know, this amazing byproduct of getting them more involved and actually stealthily teaching them how to be a better manager, certainly around development and development conversations. But they mentally thought they were going there because of their participant.

Stella Collins [00:22:55]:
But I think it’s really important that we recognise for managers, you know, they’ve got huge pressures, they’ve got pressures from above, they’ve got pressures from below. They’re really. They’re really squashed. They have a tough time. And if you’re, you know, enthusiastic, you know, kind of ambitious, young employee has just gone on the course about AI, and you know nothing about AI. That’s slightly threatening because you’ve either got to say, you know, I know nothing about AI. Teach me. Which is a great thing to do.

Melody Moore [00:23:26]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:23:26]:
Or which is more likely, I haven’t really got time to find out what you’re doing, or they’re actually feeling threatened and they think, well, I don’t want them to do Anything more because, you know, I’m threatened. My role is threatened here. So actually I don’t really want them even to. I’m not saying they do this consciously, but I think there’s that fear of I’m going to look like. I don’t know what somebody who’s, you know, more junior than me knows and therefore that threatens my role as a manager.

Melody Moore [00:23:54]:
Yes. If their self image of a manager is someone who is an expert, expert in everything that they manage, it can be very. Yeah, absolutely. It can be challenging for them if their image of a manager is that they shouldn’t know everything.

Stella Collins [00:24:07]:
And that’s much better.

Melody Moore [00:24:09]:
Yeah, much more comfortable.

Stella Collins [00:24:11]:
A lot of managers, you know, they’re not given the support they need, the appropriate training they need to help them realise that your job as a manager. I can still remember I was given this training, support and IT support and training manager role. And I thought I had to know everything. So I did employ some people. No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t at first. At first I was trying to do everything, only not the training, I was just ignoring it. And one day I went to my manager and I said, who was the md? I said, I’m really struggling here, I can’t do everything.

Stella Collins [00:24:42]:
He said, I’ve been waiting for you to come and say that. I said, I think I need some people. He said, yes, that’s exactly what you need delegate to. I thought, oh, yeah. But he could have accelerated that process by giving me that information, by helping me with that earlier on in the year.

Melody Moore [00:24:57]:
He was clearly off the you need to learn it for yourself perspective. So you engage with the pirates. You worked as an associate for them, they weren’t around forever. You then carried on working for yourself, presumably. And you are going to talk about someone called Ann Grindrod, am I saying that correctly? Grindrod, yes. I missed out the R. I wasn’t looking. So tell me about why she was so important.

Stella Collins [00:25:32]:
So she was somebody I met through this company. She was also an associate and we got on very well. I mean, I got on well with everybody. I met him up. But she had a big project coming up in government departments and she was looking for some people to work with her. So she was looking for kind of associates, but she didn’t want to be. She wanted collaborators rather than associates. So we just began to work together on some projects, mostly in government departments.

Stella Collins [00:26:02]:
And I just learned so much from her and I think she learned quite a lot from me too, because she was a really experienced trainer, she cared. So. So Much for people. She was incredibly caring and very professional, very organised, very. And very reflective, analytical and reflective. So I learned a lot from her. And one of the things we did was a project where we went around the country for about three months doing these bite sized sessions, this particular government department and decided they wanted to just upskill everybody, but just with little, you know, nuggets of things. So we used to do these two hour bite size.

Stella Collins [00:26:44]:
You might have been two and a half, three hours bite size sessions. We’d do three a day. Yes, it must have been two hours, two hours, three a day. And usually you were doing different ones each day. But it meant it was like the perfect apprenticeship for somebody who was relatively new to actually delivering, designing and delivering training. Because I had to go in every day and kind of give the, you know, the initial setup spiel. And we had it really well planned. So, you know, we did introductions, we got people to think about what approach they wanted to take.

Stella Collins [00:27:15]:
But we had to accelerate all these things that you would do in a longer training course. We had to accelerate it so that we still had the psychological safety that we needed to run these short courses. But we kind of accelerated it. So it was really good learning to what’s the main minimum you can do for the maximum impact. And I just learned so much from her. Her enthusiasm, her ability to give really good feedback. She was very good at sort of saying, you know, this was fantastic, but this is what needs to change. And we worked together for a long time.

Melody Moore [00:27:48]:
And what did you focus on? I’m interested in this rapid creation of psychological safety. What were the kinds of things you.

Stella Collins [00:27:56]:
Were doing to create psychological. We would do things like, I mean, they were such simple things. When people arrived, before they arrived, we’d set everything up so they walked into a room that looked welcoming, warm. We used to really think about what, what’s the room setup we want? So we never had boardroom tables, we never had horseshoe tables. We got with the tables as much as we could. But if we did have tables, they would be sort of circular tables with people sitting kind of cabbage. So we thought about the room layout. So when they walked in, they felt welcomed.

Stella Collins [00:28:26]:
We had posters we’d just create, like flip charts that said welcome and we’d write everybody’s name on them. So they walked, see their names? We, as they walked in, we were there to greet them. I’ve been to plenty of training courses where you walk in and you think, who’s the trainer here? Ann had worked a lot with people who were struggling to get work. And she said, always, you know, greet people and shake their hands and look them in the eyes. You can learn a lot from that. So we would, you know, we would very deliberately greet them as if they were, you know, an honoured guest. And then we had it immediately. So instead of that going to sit down and kind of be looking around quietly, we had an exercise immediately for them to do that paired them up with other people so they immediately had a kind of somebody else to buddy with.

Stella Collins [00:29:10]:
And then whereas in a long course we’d have done that thing of, well, how would we all like to work together? What would you like? What do we expect from you? We took the ideas that were pretty much always the same and we just said, look, these are what. So we used to present them, we used to present them as laminates. We didn’t even have PowerPoints out at this point. We would sometimes use PowerPoint. We present them as laminates and say, these are the things people ask for, you know, that we’re listened to, that everybody listens to everybody else, that we can ask questions when we want. Does that all work? Yes, let’s agree. And then we just put them up as posters on the wall so people could see that agreement was psychological, agreement was up and visible. And then we would really quickly initiate conversations with people.

Stella Collins [00:29:54]:
So instead of it being us talking, it would be, you know, so what do you, what do you want to get out of this session? We know what we’ve been sent to give you. So that we already had them saying, well, they knew what they were coming for. It was time management or did one, you know, feel the fear and do it anyway. And lots of decision making things like those kind of like small, you know, business type activities. And so we’d asked them what they wanted to get out of it, so they were immediately thinking for themselves. But okay, so there is something in it for me. It’s not just I’ve been, I’ve been all those things, I think inspired to help have people feel quite open. And we used to get, in two hours, we used to get some very interesting insights from people often come back to us and confess, not share with.

Melody Moore [00:30:42]:
Us.

Stella Collins [00:30:44]:
Quite difficult things sometimes.

Melody Moore [00:30:46]:
Yeah, yeah. It’s remarkable how much you can achieve, isn’t it? I’ve done a developmental trauma training, three year training and we do lots of, have done lots of practise sessions and you know, a typical session would be an hour, but actually we were practising technical 10 minute sessions, 20 minute sessions, 30 minute sessions and it’s Remarkable. Now, admittedly we were working with each other and you’ve got that psychological safety already there. But it was remarkable how even in a 10 minute session, you could do something really meaningful and you can do it too.

Stella Collins [00:31:26]:
So, you know, I would still run, if I’m running a digital session, I still do that same personal. Building that psychological safety at the beginning, building the trust at the beginning, sometimes revealing something, not life’s deepest secret, but just revealing something personal about you. Gosh, I had a terrible trip to work today because I fell over and tripped. Being human.

Melody Moore [00:31:52]:
I liked what you said as well about the apprenticeship because I’m a firm believer in a lot of reputation repetition. That’s how you really. I mean, I guess it’s this idea of 10,000 hours, you know, this. That’s how you become really good at something, is you practise a lot. And I’ve seen, you know, former colleagues who get bored doing something too often and kind of zip off and do something else. But actually for me, I work for a small consultancy initially and we did a lot of, of the same thing. But God, you got good at it.

Stella Collins [00:32:31]:
And for me, you know, yes, it was the same topic every day, but it was always different people. So that different because they were the input as much as we were. Yeah, it was always different. The only challenge I used to have was we used to do a memory session, how to improve your memory. And if you did three of those in a day, about halfway through the second session you’d think, have I already said this? Another group, I’m not quite sure. I’d usually admit to it and say, have I already told you this or not?

Melody Moore [00:33:03]:
It was a test of your memory. Love that. So a huge amount of. What do you think she learned from you? You said you learned a lot from her. What do you think she was learning from you?

Stella Collins [00:33:15]:
She learned a lot of science from me. So she didn’t have a science background. So I think she got much more interested in the science that I already. She was already interested in the brain, but she learned from me. I think she learned some creativity from me. I would kind of instigate things that perhaps she wouldn’t have thought of on her own. But we were creative together, I think. And I think she learned that she was a very controlled sort of person and everything had to be planned and strategized.

Stella Collins [00:33:49]:
And I know a really good example is as we were doing this for some reason, I have no idea, I can’t remember why now, but I decided I wanted to write an Article for training journal maybe. They were asking for articles. And I thought, well, I could write an article. And she said to me, how can you write an article? You know, what makes you qualified to write an article for a prestigious publication? I said, well, I can write, I know about the topic, I can do it. And I think that was one of the things she thought, oh, okay, you know, you can be. You don’t have to be absolutely perfect all the time. You can have a go.

Melody Moore [00:34:22]:
Yes, amazing. So one of the things, and I guess this crosses over probably different time periods in your life is you’ve lived abroad a lot. You currently live abroad. Well, abroad to me. It’s not abroad to you, is it now? But you lived in lots of different places and you said, that’s a really core part of who you are, has influenced you. Do you want to tell us about that?

Stella Collins [00:34:49]:
So as a child, even as a young adult, I mean, I did not leave the UK until I was 20 and I went to France on a hitchhiking holiday with my boyfriend who became my husband. So I’d never let. So, you know, we went on holiday to Wales. So I’d never been abroad. And when we first sort of set up a home, family, what have you, I had no intention necessarily of living abroad. It was. Wasn’t something that interested us. But as we kind of done all the standard things, you know, go to university, get a job, have children or get married, have children, get another job, we just began to think we need to do something different.

Stella Collins [00:35:24]:
And we just decided together that we fancied living abroad. So we planned and went and lived in New Zealand for four years, which, with our two small children, which was just a huge change, a huge shift, incredibly exciting, really uplifting. And I think from that, what we learned was a, if you want to do something and plan it, you can. And. And that idea of, you know, if I say I’m going to do it, then people hold me to it and they seem to believe it more than I believe it, you know, that was that kind of, whoa, this is a bit. People. People really think I’m going to live in New Zealand. So I think.

Stella Collins [00:36:04]:
And then the ability to adapt, be resilient when things aren’t quite like you were expecting, and then we eventually came back from there, which also was a learning. It was learning from that too, because then you learn that you can see the progress you’ve made in life because you’ve had a sort of a gap, it’s given you a shift. So you see that. Oh, actually I’ve. I’ve changed in that time. My friends are still kind of doing the same things and actually I do things differently now, that kind of thing. And then, yet then we moved to Spain because we wanted to.

Melody Moore [00:36:41]:
Why did you go to New Zealand? Why? Why New Zealand of all places?

Stella Collins [00:36:46]:
We didn’t speak any other languages so we thought we have to go to an English country. We didn’t really fancy America. We thought Canada might be a bit cold. My husband was working for an Australian company at the time and didn’t want to work with any more Australian. I mean just terrible, kind of, you know, randomised. We didn’t really know because you couldn’t search the Internet in those days to find these things.

Melody Moore [00:37:07]:
No.

Stella Collins [00:37:08]:
So it was just based on a hunch really and we just thought New Zealand seemed like a nice place.

Melody Moore [00:37:14]:
And what made you come back or rather you went to Spain but what made you come back from the other side of the world?

Stella Collins [00:37:21]:
Ties with home and family. Ties with family and old friends. We made a lot of new friends in New Zealand with ties, I think and the fact that New Zealand is so far away from the rest of the world, it’s a very young country. So there was no history, there was no. It has a culture but it’s, you know, it’s quite a short, short lived culture and we just missed the kind of, you know, we missed history, we missed family and we missed being able to easily go, you know, in Britain you can go to Europe. Well, you used to be able to go to Europe really easily. It’s got harder but you can get it very easily and very quickly. Even in Britain we have our own cultures, you know, Wales, England, Ireland, Scotland.

Stella Collins [00:37:58]:
Yes, different cultures. Whereas that wasn’t the case in New Zealand. It was a great culture but it was, we kind of done it. I think I still. So you kept a fantastic place.

Melody Moore [00:38:10]:
Yes, I’ve never been and I really want to go. It’s definitely on my list of places I’d like to go. The thought of the long flight though.

Stella Collins [00:38:17]:
Just.

Melody Moore [00:38:22]:
Then you went to Spain. You said you went there just because you wanted to. You didn’t speak Spanish or you did.

Stella Collins [00:38:27]:
We did, we didn’t go to Spain straight away so we, we went back, came back to the UK and we were in the UK probably. You know, our kids went through senior school and things like that and then we went to Spain basically because our kids had grown up, they didn’t need us on, you know, an everyday basis. They were starting to buy their own houses, things like that. And we just thought, we’re ready for an adventure again. We’d been to Spain a lot. My husband had worked in this particular. We moved to a city called Borgos in northern Spain. He worked there.

Stella Collins [00:38:55]:
We both kind of fell a little bit in love with it and we just thought, I mean, it was partly because of Brexit. Whilst we can still go easily without having to apply for these, let’s take an opportunity and go and do it. I was already starting to work a bit digitally. I’d worked to home office for years and years and years and, you know, digital learning was beginning to start to be something. So, you know, I knew that I could probably run my business and start to run some digital training.

Melody Moore [00:39:22]:
And now you’re in Belgium now, right?

Stella Collins [00:39:24]:
Yes, because whilst working in Spain, I had a client in Belgium. So I did a learning audit for him and then we got some training for his team and we got talking and basically, long story short, we decided to form a business together. He’s very entrepreneurial. I valued his entrepreneurial skills. Always wanted the opportunity to grow a business a bit quicker than mine had evolved. Mine was, you know, nice slow growth associate model. I wanted something more exciting and so we. But he was in Belgium and had an office and things like that that we could use, so it seemed sensible to move to Belgium.

Stella Collins [00:40:05]:
Covid hit so it didn’t really matter where I lived. I could have stayed in Spain but Covid hit and we grew the business.

Melody Moore [00:40:13]:
Amazing. I thought you were going to say it’s because of the chocolate, but.

Stella Collins [00:40:16]:
Oh, that is, yes, yes, chocolate are.

Melody Moore [00:40:18]:
Obviously big incentives, that’s a reason to stay. And what do you think? If we think about your career and learning as a top topic, what do you think living in those different countries has taught you about learning something?

Stella Collins [00:40:34]:
I kind of already knew, but it’s even clearer is that the process of learning is very similar. Certainly within the European based countries I’ve lived in, what goes on in people’s brains is similar. So in terms of learning that people resist change and change is difficult, but when encouraged to see the value of change, then people can do it and that sometimes things are difficult and challenging and complex, but you can learn from them. And I think one of the things I’ve really learned and I have a lot of kind of expat friends here in Belgium from all around the world and one of the things we all talk about is once you’ve learned something, it’s really hard to go back. So once you’ve been and lived in another country you can go back to your home country. We did. We went back to the UK for quite a lot of years, but you’re never the same. You change.

Stella Collins [00:41:37]:
And I think you’ve changed more than the people who stayed and didn’t. You have more experiences, your life is enriched. Just going to the end of the street is a very different experience to what you have when you live in your hometown or, you know, an English town that you’re used to, a British town that you’re used to living in.

Melody Moore [00:41:55]:
I did. I lived in Canada. You’re right. It was cold for a couple of years and yeah, I feel that it was a really important part of my career as well as my life experience. Even though what I was doing there was nothing from a sort of progression, status, perspective, but just learning how different organisations did things. I learned a huge amount.

Stella Collins [00:42:25]:
It was interesting and I think the one thing that I’ve really, really learned, and this is, I’m not sure, is it Madagascar or something? Peoples is peoples. Wherever you go in the world, people, they’re not the same. Of course they’re not the same. But, you know, people want to want to work, want to meet people, want to socialise, want to learn. People do want to learn.

Melody Moore [00:42:50]:
Yeah, yeah, I saw. It was ages ago now. There was. What’s he called, the guy who owns Headspace Andy. Something he put on Twitter. I think it was, you know, I think he thought it was profound. He said, what have you learned today? You know, the implication being that people haven’t learned. And my response is, surely everybody learns every single day.

Melody Moore [00:43:19]:
I can’t think of a day that I’ve had that I haven’t learned something.

Stella Collins [00:43:23]:
But I think there’s a difference about whether you’re conscious about your learning or unconscious about your learning. So many things unconsciously, you know, habits that we pick up, whether they’re good, we’re not aware we’re learning them. I’ve just had a brand new granddaughter. She’s absolutely wonderful.

Melody Moore [00:43:38]:
Congratulations.

Stella Collins [00:43:39]:
And she’s already, you know, and I was there with them for 10 days. In the 10 days, she began to learn the diff. Well, she learned to be. She began to learn the difference between kind of night and day. You know, in the day I come downstairs and there seems to be quite a lot of light and buzziness and at night it’s quite dark and yeah, I still get fed, but seems different. You know, in 10 days she’s learned that, but she’s not consciously learning that. That’s. Now she’s learning and I Think those habits and, you know, reactions to people, our, you know, some of our personality traits, we learn them without being conscious of learning them.

Stella Collins [00:44:17]:
And I think that’s why conscious learning and understanding how learning happens is important, because if you see yourself repeatedly doing something, you can think to yourself, I’m learning this pattern and maybe I don’t want to learn this pattern. Maybe that’s what he was talking about, the kind of.

Melody Moore [00:44:35]:
Yeah, maybe, maybe. Yes. I think you’re right, though. And I think a lot of. A lot of things that we do, we don’t realise are learned. That’s one of the things that the developmental trauma therapy has taught me, is how much of what we think is really part and parcel of us are things that we learned when we were really young. And we think it’s part of our personality, but often it’s not. It’s just we learned that was the right way to behave.

Stella Collins [00:45:09]:
One of the things that’s underestimated in terms of behaviour is our. Is the environment and our ability to kind of accept and conform to the environment we see in front of us. And that’s how people like Derren Brown managed to, you know, trick people and convince.

Melody Moore [00:45:25]:
Oh, amazing.

Stella Collins [00:45:26]:
Yeah, you know, amazing kind of psychological environment, but a physical environment as well. You know, for instance, you don’t go into your average canteen and dance on the tables, but if you’re at the Hofbrau House in the Munich Beer Festival, that’s what you do, you dance on the tables. And it’s. That kind of. The environment shifted and makes it perfectly acceptable to do. And there’s quite a lot of interesting research around how our personalities are certainly influenced by the environment we find ourselves in and what other people around us are doing.

Melody Moore [00:45:59]:
Yes. And I think that sometimes why you hear people say they are a different person at home and at work and, you know, I’ve seen people who are, you know, you can be different from meeting to meeting because it’s who you’re interacting with that that causes that. And I think how that works the other way is a lot of leaders that I meet don’t realise that they’re causing the behaviours in their team. So they are perhaps making them feel anxious and that’s affecting their nervous system, which is then affecting their ability to think sensibly. And so they’re creating a. And they don’t realise they’re doing it. They’re creating an environment where people cannot perform at their best.

Stella Collins [00:46:53]:
And that’s why I talked about at the beginning, you know, going into a Training room and looking at it and assessing. Is this training room reinforcing that school environment or is it enabling people to feel like we’re part of this? So, you know, even things like one of the things I used to do was put the PowerPoint at the back of the room. So it’s put at the back or the side or somewhere so that it wasn’t the full focus of everything. It was like a huge difference that made people feel uncomfortable, but it was just something that shifted the thinking in the room. And I think it’s those. And with managers, they usually sit at the top end of the table.

Melody Moore [00:47:30]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:47:30]:
If you’ve got that sort of table.

Melody Moore [00:47:32]:
Yes. And it creates. Yeah, it creates something. Yes.

Stella Collins [00:47:37]:
Which we can create a more balanced feeling there because everybody. Everybody has the same size square.

Melody Moore [00:47:45]:
Yes, that’s true. Thought about that? Yeah, absolutely.

Stella Collins [00:47:50]:
Research on that, too.

Melody Moore [00:47:51]:
Oh, really? Oh, how interesting. So tell me. We’ll come to your final person in a moment, but I’m really curious as to how you think training has evolved, you know, perhaps for the better and maybe for the worse over the years that you’ve been involved.

Stella Collins [00:48:14]:
So I think the advent of really blended learning, where now we can, you know, we can really harness, you know, the technology and the ability to come together and to collaborate. Whether we do that face to face or whether we do that in religiously, I think that is a big benefit. I think that’s. That’s really helped. That’s not to say we don’t still want face to face training, because I think there’s a reason for having that too. And that’s, you know, about human connectedness. We do still connect better. I think when we’re face to face.

Stella Collins [00:48:44]:
That may change as we grow to be more, I think, where the challenges. And of course, I can’t not mention it, can I? You know, AI is really going to shift that ability for people to learn for themselves, so long as they understand enough to be able to critique what the AI is showing them. So I think the challenge we have that, you know, if AI can tell you anything, but of course, if you haven’t got any background knowledge, you can’t validate whether what it’s telling you is, is correct or not. So you’re having to look for. You need to look for multiple sources, you need to be able to critique it, which is why people are talking about, you know, it will improve critical. Or it could improve critical thinking.

Melody Moore [00:49:28]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:49:29]:
Teach people to think critically.

Melody Moore [00:49:30]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:49:31]:
So I think it’s going to have a positive impact. I Think it’s bringing back that ability to just ask the question at the moment you need it with a form of learning. If you can retain and use the answers to that.

Melody Moore [00:49:42]:
Yeah. I mean, that’s just in time learning. It’s been a phrase that’s been around for a long time.

Stella Collins [00:49:47]:
Time. And I think where we’re challenged is, I think will make this work is the advent of, you know, the LMS with all this content, all this information and I can see where that came from. Yes, it’s great to give people free access to stuff, but it’s completely overwhelming. People don’t know what to choose and once they’ve chosen it, what do they do with it? Then it doesn’t. You know, we were talking about practise. The value of practise this. You can’t learn something just by watching. I mean, I always ask people, how did you learn to ride a bike? Nobody learns to ride a bike by reading a book, watching a video or doing a piece of E learning.

Stella Collins [00:50:24]:
You have to do it. And that’s the same with any. Any skill, any behaviour you learn, you have to do it. You can get information.

Melody Moore [00:50:30]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:50:31]:
But unless you use that information, you use it to start making decisions, you use it in some way. It’s just information.

Melody Moore [00:50:38]:
Yes.

Stella Collins [00:50:39]:
So that is one of the disadvantages and I could make that worse because of course it’s now really generate tonnes more content, validated or not. And I think what we need to use AI is to do the things that are harder for people to do. You know, AI coaches, I think those can be really valuable to support people to put their learning into practise in the workplace and reflection. But then they have to be nudge to ask those questions or the AI has to nudge them in some way.

Melody Moore [00:51:08]:
Yeah. And I think, you know, one thing I’ve really noticed recently is how much better chatbots have got. You know, I’ve had chatbot conversations with a chat bot that have actually been better than a conversation with an individual because they got me the answer I wanted instantly, which was really helpful. But I’ve also had experience with AI of hallucination as was I learned is what it’s called. You know, I was asking chat GPT to summarise actually some podcasts and it made up quotes. They weren’t real quotes, they were sounded very plausible. But I was reading them thinking, I don’t remember that person saying that. And they didn’t.

Melody Moore [00:51:50]:
They said something similar, but they wasn’t exactly. And it was giving them to me as quotes. And I thought, gosh, that was a real sort of aha moment for me, that you’ve got to be really careful.

Stella Collins [00:52:03]:
I had quite a long conversation with ChatGPT saying, Please stop referring learning style. I asked it what it knew about the. The myth of learning style and it knows that too. So I asked it to start using, you know, the myth of learning styles so that it doesn’t present me with learning styles. I haven’t gone back in yet to see whether it has actually learned that or whether it still will just present me with learning styles.

Melody Moore [00:52:31]:
Yeah, there’s a big caution. What’s the triangle on it for me? I love AI, but I think, yes, we need to be aware of its fallibility as well. So talk to me about your final personality, which is Don Taylor. Tell me a bit about him.

Stella Collins [00:52:51]:
I don’t even know if he knows how much he’s done, but to really help me work on kind of speaking slots. So I bump into Don when I first started speaking at conferences and events, I would bump into him and, you know, he was just this big person who I didn’t know and he was quite sort of grand and I thought he was very important. But he would always start to speak and say, you know, how did your session go? Or good luck, your session, or I know you’re going to, you know, I know you’re going to, you know, blast it out the park. He was always very constructive and helpful and then he started inviting me to speak and for help, sort of learning technologies and things like that, and just whenever I have something I need to talk through and he’s a very busy man, so I try really hard not to pester him, but he’s very willing and able to give and he’s very supportive and for me, he’s really, really helped me build my. Yeah, my speaking kind of role, my conference speaking role. So I, yeah, I just have to thank him for that and he’s very inspirational in that.

Melody Moore [00:53:54]:
Fantastic. And that leads us nicely on to my question about what’s next for you. Speaking is part of that. So what’s next?

Stella Collins [00:54:07]:
I appreciate speaking slots, kind of keynotes and things are. They’re eye openers, they’re not solid pieces of learning. But I think if I can get more people excited about trying to understand more about the brain, then maybe they’ll come back to me and ask me to really give them some support in terms of helping them understand how their brains work and improve the learning that happens in their organisations. But, yeah, if I can, if I can do More of that, that’s something I’m really interested in and always aiming towards that learning impact. So I’m trying to, I suppose perhaps challenge people’s assumptions a little bit around what they think learning might be and try and get them to think about learning is. It’s an effortful thing, it takes time, it takes the practise and that humans were very good at learning, but we kind of need to get back into learning the way we’re naturally good at and away from the kind of learning as it has been done in the last 10, 15 years, where it’s, well, probably, you know, through the education system as well. It’s been a little bit kind of sage on the stage and I’m asking to be a sage on the stage at the same time, seem to remain a guide on the side. So, yeah, I think and I want to discover more, you know, I really, really like to learn more.

Stella Collins [00:55:24]:
So I really want to see, you know, how can we use AI to help people? But I really want to bring together that kind of. I talk about the intersection of kind of neuroscience people and AI all working towards supporting performance, supporting productivity and helping people feel that when they spend time learning that it’s valuable and useful.

Melody Moore [00:55:48]:
And that’s that impact that you were talking about making sure. Sure it hasn’t. It’s related to performance rather than just learning for learning’s sake.

Stella Collins [00:55:57]:
Learning for learning sake outside of work, Absolutely lovely. You can learn to paint, you can learn to ski, you can learn to do anything you like. Absolutely lovely. But I think in the work context it has, it has to be relevant otherwise people feel they’re wasting their time, money, energy and that’s, you know, and it loses goodwill. I think that’s a tragedy of learning is so vital to handling and dealing with change.

Melody Moore [00:56:20]:
I think this reminds me of something you were talking about earlier about learning outcomes and how that is involved in the audit that you do. And I would say that many of my clients don’t really know why they’re asking somebody to learn or for the particular piece of their actual, actual clarity on outcomes is not good often. And you know, then we evaluate programmes against some outcomes that weren’t very good in the first place because they’ve not been enough time has been spent on them.

Stella Collins [00:56:59]:
And that’s one of the things I really loved about the AI part of our platform was it suggests really structured, transfer orientated, behavioural driven outcomes that you can then experiment with and explore, you can kind of discuss with relevant stakeholders and say, is this what you’re trying to achieve. So it can help give people a feeling for ah, okay. That’s kind of where we’re aiming for. So it’s good at giving a structure of a framework and even some ideas. And with that because it’s really hard to start developing outcomes if you don’t really know where you’re going. So if you get given some examples, this one works. Oh, can we just tweak that one? And that’s entirely possible. I think that’s really important to help people make suggestions for sensible outcomes, but just to keep asking questions.

Stella Collins [00:57:53]:
What do you want people to be able to do by the end of this?

Melody Moore [00:57:57]:
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And what about books? You’ve got some of your own books in the pipeline. It sounds like it’s certainly in your brain, if not on paper that are coming up. What about other books that you would recommend?

Stella Collins [00:58:13]:
One that I read and have followed up on and become quite a good friend with is Ina Weinbach Heidel. She wrote a book called what Makes Training Really Work and she talks about the 12 transfer levers. So it’s really, really about how do you help people make that transfer from formal learning into work based learning, actually making sure they achieve their goals. So that’s a really good one. And then one I read just last year and I absolutely love it. It’s the Extended Mind, the Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul. She’s a really interesting. She’s a journalist, a science journalist rather than a trainer.

Stella Collins [00:58:53]:
But it’s all about kind of, you know, the connection between our brains and bodies and some of the things we’ve already talked about in terms of how the environment impacts on what you think and what you do. Some of the things like how our gut is linked very strongly to our brains. Fascinating book. And as a, you know, and it’s very practical. There’s some really practical insights as to what you can do here and thinking with natural spaces. And it’s very practical about what you can actually do to really help people to use their brains in the best way and to kind of understand their brain.

Melody Moore [00:59:28]:
And what about a title for your story?

Stella Collins [00:59:33]:
I like alliteration. So I’ve kind of words that went together. A wandering wander through the world. I’ve had things that I’ve done because I plan to do and then I’ve taken opportunities when they’ve arrived and always through that sense of curiosity and well, I wonder what that would be like. So a wandering wander through the world.

Melody Moore [00:59:56]:
A wandering wander through the world. You just wanted to make it hard for people to say it’s like a tongue twister. Well, I just wanted to say thank you so much. I found this absolutely fascinating. It’s been really interesting hearing your story, but I’m just also really fascinated in your views and your expertise and experience. So I’m sure listeners will be equally fascinated. So thank you very much for your time. This podcast is brought to you by Liberare Consulting.

Melody Moore [01:00:29]:
If you enjoyed today’s show, why not click on the subscribe button? So you are among the first to hear about new episodes and we would love for you to do us a favour and click on the Share button and share this episode with one of your friends.