In this educational video, Susan Britton MCC addresses coaches, leaders, and managers who aim to facilitate behavior change. Drawing on neuroscience research by Wendy Suzuki of NYU, she outlines four key principles that support memory consolidation and retention of new behaviors or ways of thinking: (1) Novelty – the brain is attracted to new, distinct information but excess novelty can distract; (2) Repetition – learning requires repeated exposure and practice rather than a single instance; (3) Association – linking new concepts to existing knowledge or experiences strengthens memory; (4) Emotional Resonance – positive emotional states such as safety, happiness, gratitude, and excitement enhance hippocampal encoding, whereas negative emotions may create undesirable memories. Susan emphasizes balancing novelty, consistently repeating new behaviors, creating meaningful associations, and fostering a psychologically safe, positively charged learning environment to help adults retain new skills and mindsets.
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If you're a coach or if you're a leader, you're a manager, you're in some kind of a role where you're involved in behavior change, you want to see behavior change either in the people that you're coaching or the people that you're leading or managing, you have to be somewhat aware of what goes into memory and retention. So if you want people to remember new ways of being or new ways of thinking or new tasks that you want them to do, there are 4 things to consider. And these 4 things come from Wendy Suzuki, who's a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. And the first thing to remember is that the brain loves novelty. So novelty in the sense of it's something new, and you've got to find a balance between something new. It should be new and different where somebody goes, "Oh, I haven't seen that before." You just want to be cautious about not having so much novelty that you end up in sort of like a "Ooh, shiny!" and people get distracted. So have some measure of novelty. That's the first thing that the brain needs to have some memory consolidation. The second thing that the brain needs to have some memory and bring memory and new learning online is repetition, repetition, repetition. So in other words, it's not a one-and-done. It's not one sit-up, one crunch, and I'm in great shape. It's repeating, repeating, repeating new behaviors, new ways of being, new ways of communicating, new ways of expressing yourself, whatever the new way way of being is that you want to do, it's got to be repeated. The third thing is association. So this is what I love about being an educator and working with coaching education and training adults, is that adults come with so much information and knowledge and experience. And so when they figure out how to associate a new behavior, a new way of listening, a new way of speaking, a new way of delegating, a new way of behaving, whatever it might be, that if you can link it to something that is is already known, you're going to have a much better chance of that memory consolidation. And the fourth and final thing that the brain needs to have memory is emotional resonance. So we make a very concerted effort to be able to create in the classes that we teach in coaching education psychological safety, a sense of emotional resonance, and that emotional resonance can be happiness. We can laugh together. We can feel safe together. We can feel compassion towards one another. We can have gratitude for the learning experience. We can have excitement about having new things to learn. All of those things play into helping the hippocampus remember new things, new models, new concepts that you want to have learned in the people that you're communicating with. So again, needs to have novelty, needs to be repeated, needs to have an association, and needs to have emotional resonance. Hopefully that emotional resonance isn't some negative emotional resonance where like, "Oh, I was so scared that I remember that and I don't want to have to repeat that again." No, it's much nicer if you can have a positive emotional resonance in that process. So enjoy training your brain to remember new things with those 4 principles.
