“To truly support people, lead teams, and design effective learning, we need a new prescription. We need a Neuro-Informed lens that helps us see the whole picture, not just the aftermath of harm.”
– Rick Griffin, Founder & CEO, Neuro Leadership Academy & Fall Series Speaker on September 30
We don’t talk enough about our brains. I realized that when planning for our second Trainer Academy session on how to deliver an effective training. Every tip I had to offer anchored in one big idea: working memory.
Working memory is where we hold and manipulate information while learning. Its capacity is very limited, and it becomes easily overwhelmed. Bottom line for trainers: working memory is the bottleneck between information and memory. We can design and deliver trainings around working memory. Their minds should be top of mind for us.
To help us understand our brains better, Rick Griffin will kick off our fall learning series. Rick is a Master Trainer for Community Resilience Initiative (CRI), the nation’s first community resilience network. He is the former Executive Director of a trauma-informed therapeutic residential program for struggling teens and recently launched his newest endeavor, Neuro Leadership Academy, an innovative enterprise committed to using neuroscience to facilitate personal and professional development. Rick just started a Substack on neuro science and learning—check it out!
“To understand human behavior, you must understand the human brain,” Rick reminds us. That means trainers, facilitators, and leaders can’t just focus on content—they have to account for how the brain processes, filters, and stores that content. Neuro-informed teaching asks us to adapt our methods so that learning sticks, behavior shifts, and people thrive.
I grew even more excited to learn from Rick after one particular conversation in Trainer Academy. I shared a metaphor of a mountain waterfall to explain working memory (see video above). On a slide, participants read: Our job as instructors is to steward and protect working memory—because working memory is the passageway where information becomes knowledge.
How does this framing change our role as instructors? Participants named how it shifts us from being deliverers of information to architects of experience—protecting learners from overload, creating flow, and ensuring the right ideas reach long-term memory. That shift is at the heart of being a neuro-informed trainer.
We warmly invite you to join our learning community during the Fall Series. Together we will make sure that every workshop and webinar is excellent, inclusive, and outcome-focused.