164. How do you understand your learning style? (f. Kathleen Brigham)
Wish you could pinpoint your super strengths? ⭐️ Then you'll find this Brand Therapy episode inspirational! Hosts Phil and Lauren meet with client Kathleen Brigham, the Founder of Brigham Learning who specializes in learning assessments. Kathleen gives an overview of executive functioning skills and provides a fascinating analysis of Phil and Lauren's individual strengths and weaknesses. If you want to operate to your full potential, you don't want to miss this episode!
Episode transcription
Phil
Well, hello, welcome to Brand Therapy. I'm Phil.
Lauren
And I'm Lauren.
Phil
This is the podcast where we help you position, build and promote your brand. Welcome to this very educational episode. You're going to learn something very valuable about a topic that I have been wondering about. And there's only one person I feel like I can trust, who I know is going to explore this topic to the fullest. Okay. And that very special individual is here with us. It's Kathleen Brigham of Brigham Learning, a client, but also a wonderful friend. Yes, you're a friend of ours now, Kathleen, and you're on Brand Therapy today. And I'm absolutely thrilled you're here with us. Welcome.
Kathleen
Thank you.
Lauren
Kathleen, you're literally one of my favorite people on the planet. So to kick things off, I would love for you to just give a quick overview of what learning assessments and styles are, in general, what executive functioning is just give a quick little 411 on what we're about to learn today.
Kathleen
Okay, so I'm going to start with learning assessments. Learning assessments is something that you have done, you know, a lot of different education, people can do it, sometimes it's done in school, but the general goal of it is to learn more about your individual learning style. And so if you think about school, teaching different ways, or we go into the workplace, different ways, we're always learning everywhere we go.
But the way we take in that information is different for everybody. So when getting a learning assessment, you find out, this is where my strengths are. And this is where my weaknesses are.
So the second part of that is within a learning assessment, there are skills called executive function. And executive functioning skills are really a set of cognitive or mental skills that help us get through the day, help us plan,help us execute. So obviously, this takes place in school, but well beyond school into our everyday lives, how we even get around during the day, how we do our jobs, how we get tasks completed, all fall into the category of our executive functions.
Lauren
When did you find out your executive functions? Is this something you've always kind of known? Or was it recent?
Kathleen
No, I did not know. I was a really hard worker in school, but I never learned very easily. And at the time, we didn't know anything that we know now. So I would just go home and reteach myself most of the material. I literally remember in high school, I would lock myself in a classroom and I would copy everything onto the blackboard, that ages me a little bit to say blackboard, but putting everything up there, because I really had trouble understanding it in school. And then my daughter, who is now 23, when she was starting in school, she had a lot of a lot of learning challenges, which is put it that way. And in watching her and taking her to different people to evaluate her or tutors or getting feedback from school, I realized the learning style she had was very similar to my learning style. And she needed a fair amount of support in school. And then once she got that support she just took off.
Lauren
Could I ask what your learning style is?
Kathleen
There's sort of a debate of whether there are four types or seven types. So let's just think about four things simplest for today, which is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, those are the top three. And then there's a reader writer. For me, I'm very much a visual learner. So I need to see things all the time. When I learn, I write everything down. If anybody sees me at work, I always have pad and pencil out. So I need to write it for myself and see it but when somebody is trying to teach me something, I need to look at it. So a simple example of that is if I can watch a YouTube video, that's great, how to put something together if you try to hand me an Ikea pamphlet and look at it that way, there's no chance I'm gonna be able to do it.
Phil
So interesting. There's a few things that have already come up that I think are worth acknowledging. Why is it I'm sure you feel passionately about this given your work but like, why is it that it feels like society just assumes everyone learns the same way? Why am I only learning about this now? Why didn't I learn about this in school? Why wasn't there time spent on this that actually explore becoming self aware of how I learned. You were describing your challenges like having to write everything out agai, I am a terrible note taker, even though I would take notes it was so that what I was hearing I would register what was being told to me but then to go back and read my chicken scratch was extremely challenging and almost have to like type them out again. That was so much more work. They made school like not that fun. Even though I did well, I think I was not aware of my learning style. And I wasn't aware of strategies to improve that. I don't know. It's something I'm thinking about.
Kathleen
I think about all the time because for me, I work with these students who come in and are having a lot of difficulty. And I mean, it just it really breaks my heart to see them half time because there's so deflated by the time they come in. They're like, oh, I just can't do it. And then I'll say, wait a minute, if you have a teacher who's just speaking to you all day long, and you're more of a visual learner, that's not because you there's nothing wrong with it. It's not that you can't learn, it's just that you're not getting what you need, you know, you're not getting that approach.
I find it really interesting watching, you know, a lot of my students and even my daughter now getting into the workforce, going from that learning environment into the career environment, and seeing what jobs or what careers work for them. But I think to answer your question, Phil, the simplest thing is, I don't understand why we don't do more of this in school. But we tend to really compartmentalize, right? There's English, and there's history in the sciences is five core courses, we keep it that way. The majority of teachers have an enormous amount to teach. So they're gonna just deliver it in whatever way they can. All of the things that help us learn are going to help everybody learn. So if I'm in a classroom years ago, and I was a visual learner, just because a teacher use more visuals doesn't mean it's only for me, right? It's going to help everybody. I personally would love to see just that approach used more often. And there's not a really clear answer to me why it's not being done. But it's, it does tend to be up to the individual person to choose it. So a teacher can choose it. It's not necessarily pedagogy or the school choosing it. I think it has to come more from top down, if hat makes sense.
Phil
It's interesting episode 150 on Brand Therapy we had on Erika, and she talked about planning an event and you wouldn't believe in that episode, she focused largely on this idea of being aware of learning styles to properly plan an event. And I think it was that episode, I had messaged Lauren on Slack Secretly, I was like, Oh, my God, isn't this so interesting? We need to talk to Kathleen about this, we were gonna have you on the podcast anyways. But, the fact that an event planner is bringing up the importance of learning styles, I think this is not something that exists just in a classroom. I think this exists in a lot of ways, even for adults. And that's why this area of expertise or specialty is fascinating for everyone, because no one is exempt from learning.
Kathleen
No. And imagine if you got that information before you went out into the workforce. Right? So yeah, more about that in school, then you will be able to take that where you're going.
Lauren
Yeah. Okay, for the listener, we've got some really specific examples that show Kathleen's genius and action. So Kathleen had us take, what do you call the test a learning assessment?
Kathleen
Yeah, well, it's part of the learning assessment. So this is one questionnaire. And I do have to give great credit to Peg Dawson, who created this. So this is part of what I use in a learning assessment. And this really focuses on your executive functioning skills and sort of where your strengths and weaknesses are. And so when a student comes in, I have them do this along with some other questionnaires and some other conversations about them. And then through all that, I then I come around and say, you know, you are more visual than auditory. And by the way, just so we understand, it's very rare that somebody comes into this as one kind of learner. I mean, I'm very much a visual learner. I can also use auditory. So usually you have a combination of things.
Lauren
Perfect. And maybe before we go through Phils and my results, could you give an overview of what all the executive functions are, if it's not gonna require too much lung capacity, because there's a few of them.
Kathleen
So think of it as a conductor of your brain, okay, so that's the one that's managing everything that's going on. And so there's response inhibition, you can hold back and not blurt everything out, there's your working memory, which is holding on to the immediate information. emotional control means you just can regulate and not get too upset. There's your sustained attention, basically, how you pay attention, task initiation, and that's getting something started planning and prioritizing, not just planning it but also being able to say which should be done and prioritized over something else. And then there's organization which really is just creating some kind of system to organize you. Time management is being able to understand how long something takes but also stopping or starting and not letting it take over and go too long or to not being able to break and do other things. There's goal directed persistence, which really means to have a goal and be able to complete it and focus on it. Flexibility is one, we're going to get to it both of you, which is interesting, which is really the ability to revise or kind of change, you know, something happens unexpectedly, you can bounce back and kind of move forward. Stress tolerance is another just how much we tolerate our stress. And I think one of the most interesting ones is metacognition, which is just really thinking about our thinking, kind of what we're talking about today to what Phil was saying, if everyone understood who they were. And then so those are all the executive functioning skills.
And those usually fall into a larger category of learning styles, which is visual, which is when you want to see something to learn auditory, when you want to hear it to learn. Kinesthetic is a lot of doing right physical doing. And then there's also read and writing. So you're better when you read and write it.
Phil
That's a lot of info will actually, here's what we'll do. We'll note all 12 of the executive functions in our blog post that accompanies this episode, not in the show notes. But we'll actually do a dedicated blog post about this because I think it's fascinating, just to give the listener some idea of the questions that we answered prior to this podcast recording, we were asked to score ourselves on a scale of one to seven where one is strongly disagree, seven is strongly agree. And then basically questions, I think there were around 36 of them, we would tally up every three questions, we would tally up our score. So it's almost like their little little sections. So questions were like this, I don't jump to conclusions. So for that one, I said, I tend to disagree. I jump to conclusions. I think before I speak, I give myself I tend to agree. I think I think before I speak.I don't take action without having all the facts. Okay. I tend to disagree with that. So I scored myself quite difficult. Actually, I was like hard on myself with the scores, I thought it would lead to some interesting findings. Kathleen, you have those findings after Lauren and I went through each of our quizzes, we had very different results. Maybe that's the first thing I'll say, but Kathleen I will leave it up to you for the assessment. What did you learn about us?
Kathleen
I know that is actually the most fascinating part is how different you guys are, which is I think why you make such an amazing team. Your strengths support the others weakness, which is, is ideal. It's like if you were thinking of this whole group of skills, and you wanted all of them to be as strong as possible, if you combine the two of you, you've got like these amazing, amazing strengths. But I'll start with Lauren.
So Lauren, you have is, as far as like your skills, you have really strong working memory. So when people give you information, you can hold on to it, which we've all seen you do. Right? That's so true. I mean, think about how she's reading her writing the posts and things like that. And she's just taking all that information and think about working memory is you have to hold a lot, right, you have to hold a lot, and then you don't just dump it all onto the page, you're then choosing and discerning kind of the important bits to use, that's a huge superpower of yours. Along with that is attention, sustained attention. So you can really stick at a task for a long time. And you're metacognition, you seem to really understand who you are as a learner where your strengths and weaknesses are. And then your weaknesses are flexibility, which means you just don't like when things are thrown at you, or schedules or any, you know, you'd like things to be organized.
Lauren
I like sticking to the plan.
Kathleen
Which would also make sense that your stress tolerance is pretty low. So really rattle you if you do get a change in plan, you know, it's not, you might not be the kind of person to just roll with it.
Lauren
No, the opposite of that.
Kathleen
And then emotional control. So that might lead you to just sort of unravel a little bit if things are not as you had thought they would be.
Lauren
That's why I need to think through all scenarios and meetings, 20 different ways before something happens. So I've got a plan for all scenarios.
Kathleen
That's a great strategy. So you're figuring out while most of us do this, we get a kind of a coping mechanism, right? So now you're, you've figured out how to insert that.
Lauren
I've realized people are predictable, but they're also wildly unpredictable. And they're predictable in the fact that they are unpredictable. And so before any important meeting or whatever, I always map through different scenarios, different reactions, and I need to have time to think about my script, so to speak, or my reaction or direction before going into something important, otherwise, I feel very, very off guard.
Kathleen
And that way, you're also planning for any scenario that comes up. So you're basically trying to control as much as you can in that situation, which is a really, it makes sense to really good strategy.
Lauren
Or a waste of energy, I guess, depending on who you're talking to.
Kathleen
I mean, you could think of it as if you think if you're the kind of person to get who unravels pretty easily or it really does affect you, then putting those sort of stop guards in place are, I think, a really good strategy?
PHIL
By the way, Kathleen, it was a very accurate assessment of Lauren. That felt like a very true assessment.
Kathleen
And I love to see how it matches up. Well, Lauren, you're gonna have to weigh in on it. So Phil, your strongest skills actually are stress tolerance. So you can handle a lot of things when they don't go as planned, or get, you know, maybe a deadline and things are moving fast and things like that. And your other strength is flexibility. So you can move around things, which I would say, Lauren, you might agree, like if you get different deadlines thrown at you, and that one didn't work out. But you now have to just change lanes and go this way, like the all of that is not going to, it's not going to derail you, you're going to be able to handle it. And organization is also your other really strong strength, which is really interesting to me. Because if you imagine sort of like bouncing balls like Phil, if things are going really all over the place, and you've got you know, a lot of different deadlines or a lot of things in front of you, you're able to kind of assess all of it and organize it and almost like put it into its place, and probably means you're extremely efficient.
Phil
Interesting, I think organization is my coping mechanism. If there's chaos, if I can organize it in a certain way, then it's easier for me to process and finish. Yeah, I don't know, if I'm efficient, that might be a stretch.
Kathleen
Well, it's interesting, because your weakest, your out of your weakest skills is time management, which means you just probably misjudge like, oh, that's gonna take me 20. And it actually takes you 40.
LAUREN
Whatever he estimates, I multiply it by three.
Phil
I am not allowed to estimate. And that's my own rule, I cannot be responsible for estimating things for estimating time, because it's always longer than what I estimate.
Lauren
I also think it's because you are very good at organizing, but organizing things can't always be estimated for time. So I feel like Phil, when you tackle a task, a big part of it isn't actually doing the task. It's actually wrapping your mind around it researching deciding what to start. And maybe that's not accounted for when you're estimating time.
Kathleen
What's really interesting about that, too, is that your other weaker areas fall in response inhibition. So you might be one of those people who interrupts or like really has to get your idea out and let you know as well. And then planning and priority prioritizing. So let's just talk about that for a minute, because it's so interesting that organization is one of your strengths, like getting things organized. But organization is very different than planning and prioritizing. So you can be organized about what you have in front of you, but you might not be very good at deciding what should be in front of you, if that makes sense.
Phil
It makes perfect sense. My Workspace is always meticulous, quite literally what's in front of me. But to look at like an inbox of things I need to take action on, it's hard for me to leave something there. If it's not as important as something else. If it's quick, for example, I'll just do it. Yeah, I'm not great at prioritizing.
Lauren
You always start at the bottom and work your way up instead of picking and choosing the emails.
Kathleen
That's really interesting. So for me, I have a very, very weak short term memory. So I cannot hold on to information at all, which is why I have paper all around me. I always have to write that things down. And that's a huge, huge challenge for me, and like Phil, I'm very organized in my area, but I can plan and prioritize. I can do that pretty well. But like Lauren, I don't have great stress tolerance. And so when things get ramped up, it can derail me it can keep me from getting things finished.
phil
l almost like stress. I like the challenge of it. I almost need stress to finish my work. I was telling her this also might be interesting. Kathleen I didn't plan on talking about this. But I went back and rescored myself and one of the areas after doing it because I realized my self awareness intuitively I responded that I am a procrastinator, but I think in the last few years I have on un-procrastinate myself. I actually don't think I'm procrastinator anymore because I see the merit in starting something even if it's just 15 minutes to start it. Keep it in my mind didn't finish it rather than just waiting and waiting and waiting to start it. So I actually rescored myself in one of the categories. And maybe that's to your point, this idea of being aware so that you put these mechanism in place that help you.
Kathleen
It's exactly what it is. And that's why it's so hard people think. So, from a school point of view, right? I get a lot of parents saying, hey, just organize my child or get them together, or we think of this in the adult or world, you might have a friend who's really always late and you think, why can't they just be on time all the time? Why are they always late? But the thing to understand is that the way our brains work, even habits that aren't great, we still do. So the way that we have done things in the past, think of it sort of like a almost like a railroad track, right? So if you're coming down that every time you tend to do it the same way over and over again. And what you just said, Phil, about changing it, is what you have to do, almost to make a new track to make yourself go that way instead of the other way.
And so even those habits are really, really difficult, but that's the best way to do them is when your brain starts to connect and say, Oh, that actually feels better. When I get up and do things by 10 o'clock, I think I'm going to try that again, then we tend to do it over and over again. But you can imagine that's a really hard thing for a lot of people, especially students to do.
Lauren
I remember one time Phil said, I'm like a pressure cooker. I need the looming deadline to put out my best work. So I guess stress tolerance. inh action.
Phil
I don't think anyone likes stress. But I guess I like thriving, I like getting to the finish line, it's almost like an adrenaline rush of, wow, we really figure that out.
Kathleen
But you know, the thing about stress is interesting is that you're using it in a positive way means adopting the word that's really, really negative. If we didn't have a little bit of stress or a little bit anxiety, we wouldn't get up in the morning, right? We wouldn't get anything done at all. But what's really fascinating to me about learning about yourself and doing these kinds of assessments is that you, you start to understand yourself more. So if I understand myself, Okay, I am not good with stress tolerance. I did just things really, that does not work well for me, and I'm not efficient, then I'm more mindful of okay, how do I make sure that I don't feel that that level of stress so much. And so the more you understand yourself, then you can sort of adapt and change things which most people think only happens in school, I would say it's happened much more from me having my own business in the last few years than it ever did. As a student.
I love this one important takeaway, whether it's this quiz or another quiz, I think it's just being aware of your learning styles. So listener, if you've not done any exercise around this, we recommend doing it. If anything, it initiated a conversation between Lauren and I about Wow, our results are so different. And it probably is why we work so naturally and seamlessly together. One more thing that's probably interesting to bring up is, we did notice one thing in common that we had, we both had a weakness that I think was response inhibition. I thought there was one that we had in common that was basically like, when we check with like, Sue on our team to make sure that an email is not offensive, if we're both angry about something. We have actually put in place if we have to send what we would call a nastygram or an email to a client that I might take personally, it's my name the business, you know, I tend to sometimes take things personally, for Lauren, if it doesn't add up, we would then say, Mom, who is Sue read this email for us before we send it and she might say, I might change this language. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. You know. So that's another example of something we put into place. But otherwise, Lauren and I are pretty much opposite, which means we're not only aware of our own strengths, but each other's strengths. And we try in, yeah, those together.
Kathleen
It was really interesting, looking through it, I thought, wow, that's that you guys really match up in a really supportive way. That's, that's kind of ideal, because you wouldn't want the same strengths, right? Like I'm really, really good at getting stuff done. And it just, you would want different different strengths to help you guys through this business.
Phil
I would go so far to say that if we were going to hire someone new, and to be honest, we have tried hiring someone new and it hasn't gone that well to work, at least at our level, like at an executive level within the company, but I almost feel like this learning assessment style would give us greater insight to make sure that if we were going to hire a third person, let's say we're not but if we were going to, then we would need to make sure that they're not too similar to one of us that they would have to provide even more complementary strengths. Otherwise, we just won't put up with it.
Lauren
Yeah. Like task initiation and goal directed persistence, are someone's that some strengths we could use, I feel. So once you're aware of your strongest skills and weakest skills, how can you plan around that? So for example, with emotional control as one of my weakest skills, what do I do from here?
Kathleen
Well, you kind of are already doing it, in that you're taking these sort of viewpoints are sort of best case. And worst case scenarios before you go into a meeting, you're already planning ahead thinking if it goes this way, I'm going to do this, I think this is what you were trying to explain. If I do this, it's, you have these different range of scenarios and that's definitely going to help and make you feel like, okay, I can handle this. So you're sort of already doing it. And it's, it's also just not putting yourself into a place where it could get, you know, heated. I mean, it sounds every time we meet, you're incredibly organized ahead of time. So that's where that organizational strength might come in, because you are planning and organizing. And that's kind of bringing your stress levels down. Does that make sense?
Lauren
Yeah. So I need to become even more type A
Kathleen
You want to organize, but you also want to work on that flexibility. So that, okay, well, if it doesn't go, well, it's not the end of the world. I'm going to do this instead. Or that was just one meeting that went bad and look at the whole day, right? So the students may take a test. Okay, that was ma'am. But how did you do in your other subjects? Like for you, if you look at the whole day, for the whole week, for all your projects, keeping a broader view of things is probably going to be really helpful.
Lauren
Amazing. And what about for Phil? What can he do?
Phil
Mute myself, which I do.
Kathleen
Yeah, again, he's got the organization piece in there, which is probably I would maybe move the organization into the planning a little bit more. If I was working with you, Phil, I would say, Okay, you're organized. But let's look at what you're planning. Let's look at what you're choosing to do. And when, and that could be something that could definitely help. And then the other thing you could do is time yourself not to say I need to get this done quickly. But just to give yourself some of that metacognition around time management. Wow, I thought this project was gonna take me 20, it actually took me an hour, or vice versa, just because then you'll become more aware of your time management. And the more aware you are, then usually you can adapt around that. Like, wow, that really didn't take me as long as I thought so I will sit down and get it done. Or who am I kidding, I really do need a solid two hours for this. Let's not kid anybody and make a meeting and frustrate other people. Let's just make sure that I have this full two hours to do it.
Phil
Kathleen, you really know your stuff. Because Lauren, how much did our business change?
Luren
We use timers with all all clients and all projects. And Phil at first was like, resistant to using the timer because he's like, I need time to think I'm not gonna put that on the clock. And I'm like, just put it on and put it as non billable. Like we need to get everything down. And he's like, well, me responding to people on Instagram, that doesn't count. I was like, it does count as time. Let's put it in the timer. And so once that was accepted, then I feel like now it really helps because we know okay, Phil, realistically, you need 20 hours to prepare a website for first look.
Phil
That planning piece, I'm not great at actually doing anything with the information, the information being how long it takes for me to finish a task, but I always record myself working. I even preach this. This is so amazing that you picked up on this. I preach this to other people, particularly in my situation where I'm working on client projects, but also working on my own stuff. If I don't time myself, even if I'm not using that information, it levels the playing field for me like it gives me permission to work on my own brand stuff and not just client projects. But the timer being on keeps me aware and then gives Lauren the information she needs to quote for projects responsibly because Lauren knows I can't be trusted with that task.
Lauren
No, that's not true. That's not true. But because of when Kathleen was talking about your flexibility, I had all these flashbacks that kind of made my skin crawl a bit when a client on a call and be like wow, I'd love something like that. No problem takes five minutes and then for two hours after the call. You're doing this no zero priority project that you're not even making money for and it just derails so I thought that was really funny.
Phil
This still happens, but I try to resist because I've paid the consequences many times.
Lauren
I'll message in Slack when I see it about to happen. And I'll just do an all capitals NO.
Kathleen
Well, it's also just, it's a different relationship with time, right? Because we often think time is, if you have the timer on, you're thinking, Oh, I'm timing myself to see how fast I can get this done. That's not the reason you're timing yourself, right. So I'll do this with other people too and say, it's not about how quickly you're getting things done. It's about becoming aware of how long it takes you to actually do something.
Lauren
So this is why I have always had a challenge with the productivity method of calendar blocking. And I'm curious to know, Kathleen, if you feel like this is universal, or if it does depend on the type of person. So as an example, and I say this purely out of love Phil, obviously, so I know that you love calendar blocking, and you will have the most organized calendar on the planet. And it's like 15 minutes doing this task, 10 minutes doing this task an hour doing this task, but I know that time is flexible, and you can't always predict how long something's going to take. So this beautiful calendar full of calendar blocking just keeps the task keep getting moved day by day. And I'm thinking about the time lost organizing the calendar to do calendar blocking in the first place. But other people swear by this method, too. And I know Phil, you really really like it. So I'm just curious to know, Kathleen, is calendar blocking a good tactic? Does it depend on the person? Like, is it a waste of time? Like, what are your thoughts?
Kathleen
Completely depends on the person. So if I'm working with a student, and we can take this into what you guys are talking about, I'll talk about the time versus tasks. Okay, so do you want to work on something for 20 minutes and see what you get completed or do you want to work on a task? So are very task oriented, like I'm going to do this task until I complete it. Others are much better or more motivated by I can sit here for maybe 40 minutes, and then I need to stop. And the reason it's more complicated is because it falls into these other executive function skills.
So for instance, if you don't have a lot of flexibility, it's really hard to be interrupted. So if you say, I'm going to sit down and do this for 20 minutes and stop no matter what, that doesn't work for everybody, because they don't have the flexibility to say, Oh, I'm just going to put that down and come back to it later. So that understanding yourself more is really helpful. Because so for instance, I am much better with time versus task. So mostly because I don't have the flexibility in my schedule to sit and have, you know, three hours to myself. So I have to put in some blocks and say 20 minutes, you're going to return phone calls, the next 40 minutes, you're going to follow up, you know, with students and their their progress or something like that. So I do it that way. But full disclosure, if I had a different lifestyle, I would be better working task versus time.
Kathleen
Fascinating. So Phil, are you more of a time person? Or are you a task person? Probably more of a I guess a better for you to chip away at something? Or do you like to finish?
Phil
I don't know. I don't know. I think it depends. It depends on the task. I don't know if it's one, one or the other, I'd probably say task person. I find it really stressful, actually to have to do something in a certain amount of time. Maybe there's that piece where I'm not good with time management, I find it very stressful. Like Lauren, you thrive on a call day when there's calls intermixed. And there might be a spare hour in between calls. You have no problem working for that hour. I tried to and I can't like call days or write off for me. Like don't tell me. I mean, obviously there's exceptions to this, I hate it. I hate working on doing things on call days, then I get disrupted, and I find it I hate it. I absolutely hate it. So more task.
Kathleen
But that makes perfect sense, Phil, because in a lot of times, this is a more creative mind. Like you get into a task, right and you're in what you know, workflow or whatever you want to call it. And so being interrupted isn't just breaking up timewise it's also interrupting your efficiency of getting the project completed. Right?
Phil
It is fascinating.
Lauren
It is. And so from this assessment, Kathleen, can you determine if someone's the auditory learner or a visual learner or do you need more information from that?
Kathleen
This really helps me get there but it doesn't take much more to find out what kind of learner there are. So what I usually do is with all this, I just ask them a few questions about how they are getting at this information. You know, looking at if they're taking notes all the time, yeah, it's pretty simple to assess what kind of learner they are. It just takes a few more, maybe a few more questions.
Lauren
Can I guess what Phil is? I feel like Phil's a combination of visual and kinesthetic. Is that the other one?
Kathleen
That’s what I was gonna say I would guess, because he's very visual. And I think he definitely has, it seems to want to physically be doing things.
Lauren
Nt to a fault, but I know that like you love doodling on your iPad to listen, to retain infer, it's not that you're doodling
Phil
It helps me focus. Yeah, it's the only way to focus.
Kathleen
That's why I'm always saying you know, teachers don't scold kids if they are doodling, because lots of times it's just really helping them attend. What about you, Lauren?
Lauren
I feel like I'm a combo of the reader write and maybe auditory because I hear something and it stays in there. Never lie to me, listeners. Never, no one can ever lie to me, because I'll remember it from 10 years before if the story doesn't add up. God help my children if I ever have them, because they're gonna have to keep their lies straight for over a decade. So I guess auditory.
Kathleen
I agree. And I can remember any I can remember where I am. I can, I can see it, right. Like, even sometimes what I had on or what the place looked like, or anything like that. I'm such a visual person. But if you tell it to me audit, you know, that is I cannot hold on to that information. When you tell it to me. I mean, even a phone number, I have to like write it down right away. Y
Phil
Yeah, I resonate with that too.
Lauren
And so for Phil to learn best, you would need to be watching a video or listening to something while using your hands.
Kathleen
Or doing for instance. If he's trying to learn a new skill, he'll definitely want to watch maybe a video, but he would also want to test it out, whereas I would be able to look at it and really understand it, but I couldn't I wouldn't want to put it together.
Phil
You know, I love putting things together.
Kathleen
You would want to you would like read through it, you would probably want to read and get the directions and really process it understand first.
Lauren
I'm that person who reads through the the assembly manual from start to finish before we even begin to put legs on the chair or whatever.
Phil
I love the IKEA manual because it doesn't have words.
Kathleen
I hate everything about the IKEA manual because I can't hold the information in my memory. I can't make it pop and make it visual for myself in that the way that you're talking about though. But if I watched a video of it, then I can figure it out.
Lauren
See that's that's so interesting to me. Because I would think the IKEA manual it is visual because the strong. So what's the difference between the visual learning style that you have in drawings,
Kathleen
Because the visual in that is step by step. So I actually have to look at one step, hold on to that step, which is going to go next step. And I have to hold on to that step. And then the next and I can't do that. And it's so interesting, because my daughter is the same way. When she was little she'd be standing at the top of the stairs, like what are you doing? I just told you to go upstairs, pick out a book, get your pajamas on and brush your teeth. And she's literally standing in the hall thinking, hmm, I'm going to get my pajamas and I can't remember anything else. So that's the idea of not been that's where my short term memory really gets me in a lot of a lot of trouble.
Lauren
Wow. Oh, so interesting, Kathleen, absolutely fascinating.
Phil
I have loved learning bout this. Also, thanks for doing this learning assessment with us to make this a little more interactive.
Kathleen
Oh, it's so fun.
Phil
And I love that you're so passionate about it. And it's so obvious we have so much faith in your brand. I want people to go check it out brighamlearning.com as well on Instagram, you guys joined recently and you're rocking it. Brigham Learning is the handle. It's just fascinating. I think just so much of branding is about self awareness. And this is one of those pieces. You know, branding as a person or as a company is self awareness I think can make you thrive in life. It's not even about business. It's about life in the classroom and out.
Kathleen
It can help you with everything right like your job, your relationships, how you get things done. I mean, the more aware I've become have this really the the little bit more forgiving. I've been on myself, which I think is also been a really nice outcome.
Phil
Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us on brand therapy. What a fun episode.
Kathleen
Thanks for having me.
