Put a group of successful, educated adults into a training room and something strange can happen: They start behaving like sixth graders.
Educator and facilitator Linda Gidlund began noticing this pattern while working with adult learners. Then she noticed something similar happening much closer to home.
What is it about certain environments that can bring back behaviours we thought we’d left behind years ago?
And perhaps the more interesting question is whether we even notice when it’s happening.
Edited Transcript
Linda: I found out that adults are just like sixth graders.
Geoff: In what way?
Linda: Well, when you ask them to walk into a training session, they do some of the same behaviours that they did when they were in grade six.
One of the places that I facilitate a lot for fiver years, was a very well known electronics organisation. And I had system engineers for three days and a facilitation with them to learn how to do facilitation.
And they would come into the room, and you’d look at their behaviours and go, “Yep, that’s the sixth grader in him,” even though they just finished university and they’re well beyond higher education.
But they have the same behaviours. It’s just really subtle little things like the way that we ask questions and the way we get disgruntled as a learner, frustrated, whatever.
Geoff: Why do you think that happens?
Linda: We have habits and patterns that we never question. We just don’t do that.
I even saw my own husband do it.
We used to go to his mum’s house in Yarrawonga. And he would start to get agitated about going there because of being back in that setting. It was like he went retro on me.
He would start to be the little kid that used to live in that house when he started to interact with his mum.
At one time, his mom called up because she used to call up and say, “When are you coming up?” And he said, “Oh, you know, we’ll come up this weekend.”
So he starts talking to me about it, and I said, “Well, I’m not going.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “Because you turn into a little kid and you get grumpy and I have to deal with it for the next six days, and I don’t want to do that.”
So it’s a really stark example that was in my own life, but I used to see the same things come out in a classroom situation or a facilitation situation.
Geoff: But I think that’s really interesting in terms of so talking about experience… Why do we go back there?
Linda: I think a lot of it, to me, was the environment. Walking back into, you know, he used to live there.
Just reflect on how is this affecting me, and how is it affecting him.
Geoff: So he was aware of it?
Linda: Well, he wasn’t until I actually made the observation and had that conversation with him. I’m interested in self-reflection and, you know, what’s our behaviour.
Have you ever returned to an old environment and found yourself slipping back into an old version of yourself?
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