Summary 

Feel like you’ve “learned the lesson” but still end up repeating the same mistakes? Whether it’s in weight loss, family life, or your career, knowing something and actually using it are two very different things. In this episode, I’m breaking down the two types of learning and why the second one is the real key to lasting change.

Tune in to hear how lessons from failed trips, weight loss struggles, and even medical training turned into the building blocks for success and how you can do the same in your own life.

Learn more about The Unstoppable Group: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/group

Check out my private podcast for lasting weight loss here: https://www.theunstoppablemombrain.com/bodyreset

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why “student mindset” feels productive but often keeps you stuck
• The trap of beautiful notes and plans that never see real action
• What my brother taught me about active learning (and why it changed everything)
• The one shift that turns knowledge into actual results
• How to fold lessons into your daily life so success compounds over time

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Download the full transcript here.

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   Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. Today we're talking about how to actually remember the lessons that you have learned. I recently posted Inside the Unstoppable Group as I do real lessons from this past summer. One of the biggest things was, I shared with you all recently, I went to Banff. It was one of our best family trips to date. And if you're a mom, if you are juggling all the hats, you know what it's like to go on a family trip with two young kids. My kids are now ten and seven, and in the past we have had family trips. I purposely don't call these vacations because you come back from a trip like this and you feel like you need a vacation after your supposed vacation. And a lot of it is because there's a family dynamic. There are multiple personalities. There's you if you're traveling with your partner, of course, with your children. Everyone has a different opinion of what they want to do, what they want their day to look like. There is bickering, there are fights. There is all kinds of ups and downs that come with family travel. At least in my family, that's how it's been. I reported to my clients that this one trip to Banff, it was seven days. It was very outdoors focused, very hiking focused. We were off of screens almost completely, and how it was one of our best trips. And one of the things that I shared in the group, which somebody had a comment on, which is inspiring this entire episode, was the success of this family trip. The success of this vacation was built on the back of multiple previous family trips, trips that I have taken, vacations that I have been on. This success of this trip didn't just happen on its own. It wasn't just that we were all aligned with each other, that we were all just in a good mood, that we were all just behaving the way we were supposed to. This trip's success was built on the back of multiple other trips, and I shared with my clients, I did a whole breakdown for them around some of the past trips that I had been on over the last year where. I experienced massive epic fails both in family travel and in work travel where I wasn't feeling my best, where I gained some weight, where I wasn't following the plan the way that I said I would and the lessons I learned and how incorporating those lessons is something that led to the success of this trip. So one of my clients asked a really great question, which is inspiring to this podcast episode, which is, how do you remember the lessons that you've learned in the past? So you've gone on a trip, maybe you take some lessons from it. How do you actually remember those lessons enough to incorporate it into the future enough to actually make a difference? And I wanted to share with all of you what I shared with her in my experience. Now this is with my physician hat on, and now this is with my real life entrepreneur, mom. Working mom life hat on. I have discovered that there are two different types of learning. The first type of learning, which we are very accustomed to, which I have been talking about on this podcast recently a lot, is the student mindset. We're coming in, we want to be, you know, the A+ student. We have our trapper keepers out our notebooks, out, our highlighters, our colored pens. You're someone that really loves learning information. Maybe you have signed up for workshops in the past. You've gotten workbooks in the past. You wanna do the worksheet, you want to get through the course to get the A plus, and this is again, the student mindset. It's an amazing, important, very valuable skill set to have. It's what got me through the educational system. It made me a really good learner, and that type of learning hinges on passive learning. What this looks like is you maybe attend a lecture or even listen to this podcast. You are going through a course and you have a notebook and you're taking a lot of notes, right? So this is hashtag notes. I remember this was, maybe this was over 15 years ago. Medical school was back in 2008. If any of you are physicians you might remember, do they even have this book still alive and in circulation? I don't know. But first aid. First aid was, what are the first books you get or you're told to really buy when you are in medical school? At the very start, the first two years of medical school to get through step one, which is one of your first big exams. There are so many exams, where do we even start? Step one, then there's step two, then there's step three, then there's oral board exams, then there's written board exams. There's a whole slew of exams that you take. And so if you're listening to this podcast and if you've been the ever loving student, it's because it has been hardwired into you to pursue your life as though you're taking the next big test. So if you're here and that's you, I see you. I get you. I am you. I understand. But the student mindset really is someone that takes a notebook. For me, it was like, I still remember to this day, I was so proud of my first aid. It was this book. We would cut off the binding if you were like next level like me. Which again, I think many of you are, I cut off the binding. You take you to staples and you put in a lot of blank pages into the middle of the work. It's like a textbook comma workbook. It's kind of a combination, and you have them spiral bind it because you know your next level. So when you're going through first aid, when you're going through the book, you have colored highlighters. I still remember I would have pink for high, blue for low if something was hypertonic versus hypotonic. Like I visually remember. Again, my style of learning was very visual. I needed colors. I needed to have kind of a tactile experience of me learning. But I went through first aid making lots of notes, lots of underlines. I would write in the margins, and it looked like, if you looked at my first aid book after I completed it, it looked like I was really smart. Oh my gosh. I mean, the facade, the facade of his book, it looked like I was really smart. If you looked at, it's like. Whoa, look at those notes, girl. She takes a really good notes. And let me just also preface this by saying that first aid book, I felt so much pride over the book. I felt so much pride over the notes that I did not let that book go. That book was on my bookshelf. Well past medical school, well past residency. I was a full on attending like 10 years after using that book, I still had it because I felt bad throwing it away. Because I was so proud of it as though it held any value, which it didn't. It didn't hold any value on its own. It just was this memorabilia of a time that I was in the student mindset. So lemme say, why am I digressing and talking about the student mindset is because most of us who have been in the student mindset, who have done well as students, we tried to apply the student mindset to all types of learning. So you have your notebook, you're taking the notes, you might even have flashcards. Did anybody do flashcards? Like I think we all did some flashcards. I remember my brother, who is just, he's a smart guy and he saw my notes. He's my younger brother, by the way, and he's smarter than I am, and I remember he went through medical school as well after I did, but he's just like 10x smarter than me and just naturally like a better test taker. He saw my notes, he saw my first aid book, and he saw me struggling with the way that I was test taking and the way that I was like. All of my learning style, and he was like, what are you doing? Just passively reading notes and highlighting things and writing things in the margin does not mean you've learned anything. He called me out so hard, and that was when he introduced me to active flashcards. So these are smart flashcards where it's like not paper flashcards, which again, can become passive learning. They're not as passive as taking notes. Flashcards are still a little bit active where you have to flip the flashcard.

  You have to ask yourself a question, you have to answer it and see if you got it correct. So there's a little bit of an active component to it. But he introduced me to an online flashcard program that was a smart flashcard program. So what this looked like is it would give you, like the front part of the flashcard, basically ask you the question and you had to see if you knew the answer. And when you got the answer, you had to tell the flashcard program whether this was. Easy, whether this was medium or whether it was hard, and if you selected that this flashcard was hard for you, it would show you the flashcard more quickly. If the flashcard was very easy for you, it would space out when you got the flashcard next. So you can see that this level of flashcard learning took passive note taking, highlighting, and just writing in the margins and passively consuming, and it made learning become a little bit more active. It forced you to ask yourself the question, was this easy for me or was this hard? It's because of those flashcards, like the active learning process that I really felt my ability to learn and retain information started to just exponentially improve. So especially, I wish I had known about this in medical school. He was younger than me, of course, at the time, so I did not know about any of this. But when I was studying for oral board exams, I was now, well past my residency years, I was now an attending studying for oral board exams. I just remember he was already through the medical school process and that's how I learned from him. And he was like, what are you? I was going back to my old ways, my note taking, my highlighting. He was like, what are you doing? Is this how you're studying for your board exams? He doesn't even know anything about OBGYN oral board exams, but he's like, you cannot learn like this. So I'm really grateful he introduced me to these online flashcards. Why am I telling you about this? Because that type of active learning where I had to actively actually answer the question, was this easier? Was this hard? If. Forced me to face the flashcards that were hard for me more often. So I wanna say this part again. If you've meandered away, come back. Having an active learning process forced me to face what was harder for me. More often when I was in my passive learning student mindset, I found myself revisiting topics that I already felt very comfortable with. I was revisiting subjects and chapters that I already felt really good about because they felt good.

  In my mind, I'm like, this is really productive. The chapters and topics that felt challenging or hard, I noticed myself procrastinating on. I would tell myself, let's get to that later. I need to dedicate a whole Saturday to really diving deep and understanding the topic. It made a lot of sense. Again, a three C story convincing, convenient, and very compelling to not learn the material right now. I kept pushing it off to later, so anyways. What this did, just this one step of passive student mindset to active student mindset. So second phase, it forced me to face what was hard for me. Just that one step started to show me that actually taking action on the harder things, the things that are harder for me first is upleveling my ability to retain information. This entire thing that I've just described is the student mindset. I think of this as the first way of learning. The first style of learning. It's essential. It's where you get foundations from. It's where you get introduced to a new topic. You know, when you're embarking on something brand new, you want to first learn the material. If that's you, like, I'm really on board with that. However, what a lot of us are doing is we get stuck in the student mindset. We get stuck in the passive learning mode, either in the note taking or in the highlighting or in writing, in the margins, and it looks really beautiful. It feels really productive. So we get stuck there. You might be someone that's a little bit more advanced, you might do the next step, which is you take. Kind of your notes and your highlighters, and you start trying to make a slightly more active learning process, right? You start asking yourself questions. You start evaluating. I wonder what worked. I wonder what didn't. We talk about evaluations here on the podcast all the time, and this is what leads me to the second style of learning and what I told my client. The second type of learning, which is missing from most strategies, it's missing for you if you don't have results in hand that you feel confident about, and that is taking what you have learned and putting it into real life active implementation. Quickly, the key word is quickly. So before I tell you how this really worked in terms of my vacations and my family trips and with weight loss, I wanna give you my medical school doctor example. So there's one thing to read in a textbook, how to do a C-section. There's one thing in a textbook, or you know, to learn in a lecture, how to perform surgery, how to do a hysterectomy, the different types of hysterectomies. What are the risks? What are the complications? What are the pros? What are the cons, right? There's the learning, the student mindset of having the flashcards. What are the pros? What are the cons? What are the. Techniques. What's step one? What's step two? This is the passive learning part of it. But if you have been in this situation, you all know that the time that you actually learn and use that information and make your brain more valuable is when you take that learning, you put it into, into practice. So what this looks like is actually showing up in the or. First you show up as an intern or as a student, right? You show up kind of awkward, maybe show up, fumbling around. Maybe you mess up the way you scrub in, you get. You know, told by the scrub tech or the scrub nurse, or maybe the attending that you did it wrong. You have to go back. You have to do it again. You have to learn how to do it again. You'd fail. You have to do it again, again and again. Right? So I'm saying this because it's that part of the process that most people give up on. You don't give up when you're in medical school or when you're in training or when you're kind of starting your career because you see everybody struggling. But when it comes to weight loss or a real life. Goal that's outside of the educational system. This is where most people quit. This is where most people will take their foot off the gas, they'll start questioning themselves. They will mess up on the proverbial scrubbing in for the first 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 times and they'll look, see is probably not for me. And they take their foot off the gas and they get stuck in the start, stop, start, stop energy friends. You can be stuck in start, stop energy for years. I know because. I was there. If you've ever felt frustrated with, I've been trying so hard. I've been putting in so much effort, but it's like up and down, up and down. This is why you've been in Start Stop Energy. It's okay. It's solvable. There's a mindset gap and a strategy gap, which we talk about on this podcast, but I wanna share with you exactly what it takes to really. Leverage and activate the second type of learning, which is where I think in my experience, real results are born. That's where they're living. You have to show up as the intern who messes up on how they scrub. You have to take the criticism and the feedback of the scrub nurse and the attending and the senior resident. You have to take their feedback. You have to go do it again and again and fail and keep coming back. And the more you do that, the more you get better. You have to take quick. Fast action and you have to do more reps more quickly. So this is what I was sharing with my client. 'cause she asked, you know, how do you take all the learning from these past trips and how did you implement it into your trip to Banff? I didn't take out my notes, I didn't have notes from the last three trips. The last three Epic fails that. Led to the success of this trip. The way that I did it this time was when I failed the first time, which I must have shared on this podcast a year and a half ago when I failed at that trip, when I had a mess up, when I had a misstep, I evaluated that trip right away and whatever I learned from that trip, I started putting into action immediately.

  So I wasn't waiting for the next vacation to put that lesson and those lessons into action. I started. Folding in the lessons of that trip into my real life right away. The second type of learning is taking that active flashcard element of it and just putting it on steroids. It's taking fast, quick action on the lessons that you have been learning, and this is the part that is. I'm just gonna say it right here. So if you feel uncomfortable, I want you to know that nothing is going wrong. It's the taking of action that is the uncomfortable part. If you feel the little hesitation, the Oh, oh, I have to actually expend effort right now, nothing is going wrong. You're doing it exactly correct. Don't wait for that hesitation or the doubt or the. Effort, that effortful feeling tool, wait for that to go away or to feel perfectly aligned, or perfectly at peace, or perfectly calm or perfectly stress free to put your lessons into action the way that you actually start feeling better. You start rewiring your brain with new habits. The way that you create more ease and make things more automatic, the way that you fold it into your next vacation or your next trip, is you have to go through what we call the sticky, messy middle. The sticky, messy is taking that action and taking it quickly. What's amazing about this process is every time you learn a lesson, you get to to fold in one more ingredient. I'm thinking about fold. Like, you know when you're baking, you're supposed to fold the dough. I'm not a big baker, but I hear that that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to fold in the dough, you fold in the next ingredient. So rather than ever feeling like you have to do a hundred things to succeed at your weight loss goal, a hundred things to succeed at you feeling better at you managing your time. Imagine that you just folded in one very clear specific action at a time. Focus on the next one small habit that you know is going to most move the needle. So the way that this translated for me, for Banff, I reflected to my clients about three past trips.

  Over the last year and a half to two years that I had to learn from, I had to leverage lessons from, and they all over time got folded into what created the success of this trip. In trip number one, I learned one key lesson and I started folding that one key lesson into my. Actual real day-to-day life. And then when I had my second trip, I folded that lesson. So now the first lesson has already been folded in. It's already become more a part of my routine. It's already become a part of my awareness that that first lesson was a problem for me. So when I fold in the second ingredient, when I fold in the second layer, it doesn't feel so much because the first one is already mixed into the dough and just like that when I reflect back on residency, I, I just love the parallels between my experience in becoming an OBGYN and how it literally is the same thing as you achieving any goal, your weight loss goal, your body goal, a professional career goal or relationship goal when you just keep showing up. Don't take your foot off the gas, and you just put in the next small rep again and again and again. By the time you're a chief, you're doing stats C-sections in under two. You can get a baby out in under two minutes. You couldn't do that when you first started, but it's the showing up the day to day, not taking your foot off the gas, taking the feedback, taking the criticism, and just showing up again and again. It's the acting. On the lessons that in my experience, internalizes the lessons, it starts to become a part of your identity. We talked a few weeks ago about evolving your identity and I think that the mistake I used to make is I kept waiting to feel like it. I kept waiting to feel like the future version of me that magically is going to love working out, that's going to magically want to follow the plan all the time to follow the plan all the time. And this sounds so counterproductive or counterintuitive, but I realize it's actually. Completely flipped over on its head. What I have realized for me in achieving any goal that I have been setting for myself and what I'm helping my clients do inside the Unstoppable Group is you aren't going to have the identity first because you haven't done it yet, which is why it feels the most uncomfortable, why it feels the most awkward, why it feels the most clunky. I think that this is really an invitation to take passive learning. Take the notes, take the highlighted sections of the notebook, start putting it into active steps. We have to actually ask, where is this going to show up as real activities on my calendar, not a passive learning exercise, but where is this going to show up physically actually like me moving my arms and me moving my legs. To take action on because it's when we take action on what we're learning, that's when we internalize it. That's when we get to see, did I have gaps here? Am I confused about any part of this process? What part felt hard for me? What part was easy? What part do I need feedback on? What part do I need to uplevel? And the more that we show up to that process, the more that we do those reps, the better we get at it, which is the wildest part, which is why I call this entire journey really the best ride of my life. So to recap, there are two types of learning. You might find yourself being in the student mindset, which is okay, and normal and very, very, very practiced. I often slip back to the student mindset because it's more comfortable. We love being students. We want the a plus, but what we are talking about is starting to activate and leverage the CEO mindset. You're the CEO of your own life. If we weren't students anymore, if we didn't need permission from the big person in our life, from the parent, from the teacher anymore, if we were in charge of giving ourselves that a plus. If we had to give ourselves a grade, where is our gap and how can we start taking action on those small gaps? Because. It's taking the action, putting in more reps that starts to internalize these lessons. It's what makes them more automatic. I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you have been wanting this month to be your reset, I recently recorded that episode. You can go back, it's a couple of weeks ago where September is the new January. If you're a professional working mom, you know what I mean? Back to school season. Fall. It is for me way more of a January than the real January. It's a very close sister to the new year, and I know that a lot of us are getting back into our fall routines. Our structures are changing. Our calendars are changing. If you want this season to be your reset, if you want this season to be the season that you really make the most progress with your weight loss or body goal with you feeling better, upleveling your career or relationship, then it starts with really looking at, have you been in the student mindset where you're taking notes and you're planning and highlighting and preparing? Or are you in the CEO action taking mindset? We need both there, like two Ps in a pod. But if you've been over indexing on. The learning phase and passively consuming content, it means that you're not taking action on it. And I just shared this because it is a mistake that I have made. I have slipped back into time and time again and it's one worth calling out around when this podcast episode is airing. We are going to have about a hundred days left in this year, and between you and me, a lot can happen in a hundred days. You can do a lot in a hundred days. You can create massive, massive results in your life for your body, for how you feel in the next a hundred days. You don't need so much time every single day or so much time every single week to achieve your body goal, but I want you to just play with the idea of via January 1st in the next a hundred days, you could be down on the scale and feeling better at the same time, but it starts by just taking action, right? That second part of how you create results, not being in the student mindset, but taking action. Decide you're taking action, starting today. Don't wait for tomorrow. Don't wait for next week. Don't wait for next year. Don't wait for January 1st. A lot, a lot, a lot is possible for you in a hundred days, and you're going to feel so proud when you hit the ground running, especially in the new year. I hope you all have an amazing day. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode, and I'll see you at the next one. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started it turns out. That you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses, with true strategy, we will game change how we show up, and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable Group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.