Transcript:

Shane Jacob

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. This episode is brought to us by Cowboy Cuffs.Elevate your style, elevate your life. This particular shirt I quite like is called "Rough Out"—that's the name of this shirt. I appreciate Cowboy Cuffs.

So today, we want to talk about retaining learning. I know a lot of times, people ask me, "Well, how do you get horses to do what you want them todo? How do you train horses to do certain things? What is the process? How does that work?" What I call developing horses.

The answer is that developing horses, training horses, is a series of consistently communicating clear communication. So it's clear communication over time and a lot of repetition. A lot of repetition, and it takes time. I don't believe that there's any substitute for the time on task that it takes. You know, a horse can accept something, and you can repeat it, and you can kind of feel like they have it. But when you ask them for the same thing under different circumstances, they don't fully have it.

You know, so then it becomes more and more and more repetition. Or they feel a certain way on a certain day—they act, you know, they have a certain mood going on. And so you haven't been through that. So it's just the more that you go through the same thing in different circumstances, the more that you go through the same thing with the way that the horse actually feels that day, then the more that you go through this process of repetition, the more it seals in the learning and the retention. And you end up getting more of the same result. Eventually, with a lot of time and repetition, you end up getting the same result in most, you know, all circumstances and regardless of how the horse feels that day, which is very, you know, it's the same kind of process .There are a lot of similarities there with people and learning.

Some trainers, some people with horses, can accomplish incredible things in just very short amounts of time. Take, for example, there's a competition called The Road to the Horse competition, where they take horses that haven't been handled, and in, you know, just a few hours over two days—about, I don’t know, four or six hours or something—they have horses not only being saddled and ridden but doing extraordinary things that some horses can’t do after months. So, it is true that some people can accomplish more. How solidified is that learning with the horse? Not so much because of the time on task, but some people can accomplish more than other people in certain amounts of time. The same thing goes with teachers teaching people.

But then the question is, like in the Road to the Horse example, the horse has only had a few hours' worth of experience. So how much learning are they retaining? And today, what I want to talk about is retaining learning—people retaining learning. For example, if you want to retain learning, if you want to learn something and be able to recollect it in the future, or if you want to pass on information...because here's the deal: You know a lot of cool stuff. If you're a parent, parent of a teen...

You know, you've been around, and you've experienced a lot of the things that your kids are going through. You want to pass on information to your kids that you want them to be able to hold on to, and you want them to be able to pull it up at a moment's notice and be able to remember and use it. You want them to retain the information that you have. And so, on certain things, this is very important.

So, how do you increase retention for yourself and for the people that you care about retaining certain things? Communication can be kind of tricky in that we hear that something like you have to hear something approximately nine times, okay, before you fully understand it. And we hear this in the work place .I don’t know the exact study and the exact quote, but the point is that it takes a long time for people to fully understand communication and be able to fully retain it, so that they can bring it up, have it stored in a file in their brain, and bring it up to front and center—be able to recall it, remember it, and then be able to do whatever the thing is. So how can we increase retention? That is the question.

So, there's basically four levels of retention. From Stephen Covey, we use a modified process that Stephen Covey used in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He talks about seven different—excuse me—four different levels of retention. So, one is when you simply hear information. Okay, that’s level one, if you simply hear it. The amount of information that you can retain is in single digits, they say. Less than 10% is what you will retain if you just hear it.

If you hear it and you see it, retention goes up. It'll go up to somewhere in the 20 percentile, somewhere in the 20%. Okay, we'll say the next level is if you experience it. So, if you...so what we do in Stable Living Coaching and in our horse feed business here is that we not only...If we're trying to do a training or we're trying to present information, you'll hear it, you'll see it, and then we'll model it. You will see us do whatever this activity is that we're talking about. The next level is, you see it, you hear it, and the next level of retention, level three, is that you experience it. So, you actually do the thing.

Because when you're doing the thing, you'll have feelings and you'll have thought processes that you wouldn’t have had if you just heard it and saw it. When you're actually doing the thing and going through that process, it increases retention. So you'll be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60%,maybe. Okay, so just think about that. If these numbers are true that I'm giving you, and I believe that they are, then if you...if you see something, if you hear it, and if somebody shows you how to do it and you do it, you're going to remember about 50%, maybe 60% of what you're working on, trying to learn.

Okay, so that doesn’t sound like the best odds. Here's the big takeaway. The big takeaway for today is level four of retention and how to go about it. Pretty simple, just something that we don’t really think about and do intentionally. Level four is— and horses can’t do this. We can't do this with horses because they don't have the ability to do this. We just have to take along time and a lot of repetition. Like I said, clear, consistent communication over time with horses is how it works. But with people, we can highly accelerate that with number four, which is when we teach it to someone else.

And if we do that within a 24-hour period, our retention jumps clear to 70%—ish, 70 plus, around 70% of what we learned. For example, if we’re doing a training here at our horse feed company and we’re going through how we go about doing things, we're going to train you how to do one of the tasks inside of that.

We'll explain it. Okay. So you'll see it and hear it, and we'll show you how to do it. We'll model it. Then we'll watch you do it, critique you while you're doing it. So you'll see it, hear it, and then you'll do it yourself. And then what we do is ask you to train one of the new trainees. Once you can do it by yourself, unsupervised, then we ask you to train the next person—to teach it to one of the new people coming on board.

And here's the thing with that: Most people are more than happy to share their knowledge, be the authority, teach people, show them how it's done, and kind of take charge and be the leader. And that's kind of nice. People tend to go for that. So they’re taking care of two things at once: They are training the new employee, but more importantly, they're solidifying the retention and the knowledge for themselves. Okay, it's just how it goes.

And it's an incredible process. When you—We also use this in Stable Living. You can use this for yourself as parents, and you can also use this with your kids. If you have something that's important to you, something that you really want your kids to know and fully understand and comprehend and be able to use in their daily lives—if you want them to retain it, go one, two, three, four, and go all the way to four. And that—number four, remember—is to ask them to teach it within a 24-hour period.

You can ask them to teach a friend, a sibling, your spouse—someone, just someone that they can teach it to. There's something about teaching that if you can explain it to somebody else, you have a level of understanding, and it just solidifies the retention in your mind. The retention goes up considerably. Like I said, it's 70%.

So, one thing that we do in this, that I think is important, is that we don't just show somebody, explain it, show them how to do it, watch them do it, and then ask them to teach it in the end. We ask them to teach it in the beginning. So as part of the beginning of the process, what this does is it prepares them that as they're receiving the information, as they're watching it being done, as they're doing it for the first time, their brain’s already thinking, "I need to take this in so that I can teach it."

So rather than springing number four—asking them to teach someone else—rather than doing that at the end of the process, I recommend that you do it at the beginning.

This is a highly effective tool, super good takeaway today. Those are the four steps of being able to retain the most, the highest amount of information, in the shortest period of time. Again, that’s within a 24-hour period, if necessary. And the more that you teach it, the more that it solidifies inside your mind. Super important for retaining information.

Hey, again, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us today on The Horsemanship Journey, more than that in Stable Living. Remember, you cannot fail as long as you Don’t Ever Stop Chasing It.