When Actions Summon Memories
Connecting actions and skills to people, stories, and emotions creates an unbreakable bond.
What is something you do that reminds you, each and every time you do it, of the very person who taught it to you?
Nearly twenty years ago, I received a one-on-one omelet tutorial from one of the deans of my culinary school, the esteemed chef Andre Soltner. He gently tapped an egg against the table, pried it open along its horizontal axis, dumped its contents into a bowl, and turned to face me as he said with a thick French accent, “And this is how my mother taught me to get 13 eggs out of a dozen.” He then deftly used the widest part of his thumb to scrape out the residual egg white clinging to the inside of the shells.*
In the two decades since this lesson, I’ve easily cracked an average of four eggs a day for work, family, or myself. And each time I do, in the way Chef Soltner taught me, I am both physically and mentally reenacting this exchange. This comes out to 29,220 involuntary reenactments, never mind the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of eggs that await me in my future.
Associating actions and movements with people, emotions, or stories serves two critical functions:
It becomes a retrieval cue. The more an event is tied to a feeling or relationship, the easier it is to remember. A recent study on gender differences and memory finds that this practice establishes more connections in the brain, resulting in a higher number of entry points for recollection and greater long-term memory.
It’s a self-reinforcing impression. Even if I tried to, I wouldn’t be able to forget this exchange with Chef Soltner. At this point, it’s coded into the muscle, and when I teach my kids how to crack open eggs, this story will be the one I share. The inherent lifetime value of that simple exchange is incalculable.
These types of connections can’t really be forced or manufactured, but they can be brought to life by recognizing the importance of contextualizing knowledge in people, places, and things.
When we at Larabee create lessons, we are very intentional about connecting the knowledge being delivered to the expert behind it. Experts are the keepers of countless stories, mistakes, lessons learned, and relationships made. Meanwhile, learners are acutely - albeit subconsciously - aware of these kinds of emotional details. Their brains will do the work to make links between these contextual elements and the materials at hand.
Experts contain so much information in their heads that it can be a challenge to extract it in neat packages. As you think about your own needs for improved guidance and training content, consider some of the questions below that we ask experts when helping them convert internal knowhow into external guidance:
I’m curious about who you learned this method/technique from.
Can you walk me through one of the most difficult lessons you learned?
Where were you when you learned ____? Do you remember anything else about what was going on around you?
It goes without saying that the more you seek answers from a place of genuine curiosity, the deeper and clearer the answers will be. However, sometimes follow-up questions can be super mundane, like “What were you eating” or “Do you remember what you were wearing?”
And of course, you can’t go wrong with the age-old question: "And how did that make you feel?”
*Chef Soltner was not way off on his estimate that you could get 13 eggs from one dozen. By my non-extensive calculations earlier this morning, one large egg was 63 grams. Dumping its contents into a small bowl resulted in 54 grams, while liberating that last bit of egg white added four grams. If 4 x 12 = 48, you’re only six grams short of one lazily cracked whole egg.
