Extended Adolescence—and What it Means

Lately I’ve been catching myself saying things that make me sound like an old woman: “She looks way too young to be tending bar.” “He’s so immature. Were we like that at his age?” “When are these kids going to grow up and leave the house?” I recently was heartened to...

All Learning Is Emotional

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin In the area of adult learning, Ben Franklin turns out to be quite prescient. If you think that emotions have no place in training or should be relegated to “soft” skills,...

The Growth Mindset Starts in the Brain

I sometimes like to think of the training profession as going through an evolution similar to the path taken by the medical science more than 300 years ago. Before we knew about microbes and viruses, we knew that certain diseases affected the human body. Through trial...

The Cost of Being Smart

We’ve said before that the brain is a survival machine, which evolved specifically to keep us alive. You might think that because the human brain is considered to be the most complex organ, it is superior in all respects to those of other animals. However, because...