A number of years ago, I attended some training that I found to be useful and as such I took a heap of notes. I found the session SO useful that when the training was repeated a year or so later, I jumped at the opportunity when I was invited to sit at the back of the room to observe.

About halfway through the first day, I began to feel a little resentful. I felt like in the repeat session they were covering material that was not covered in my original workshop.  AND this content was SO USEFUL and RELEVANT to me, I began getting cross that I had missed out. 

I spoke to the trainer to express my disappointment that we had not covered this material in my original session and he replied, “We did cover it”. Now, I was not about to accuse him of lying, however I did go home that night and dig out my notebook from that previous session as my feeling was that if we had covered it, I would have made notes about it. 

Lo and behold, there were notes!  We had covered it!  It was like I had either deleted it from my experience or suffered some kind of amnesia.

The next day I spoke with the trainer and (a) apologised for my error and (b) asked why this had happened.

He explained that it was likely that during the first session I had insufficient foundational content in place on which to build this new content.  I was, in effect, not ready. 

I find this an interesting phenomenon and one that I am conscious of when I’m developing training programs. We need to think about layering the learning so that we are providing the right foundation on which to build the remainder of the program. 

And we also need to consider learner readiness.  I believe there are three factors:
 
Reference experiences - Have they had enough experiences (good and bad) to be able to apply the content in a way that makes sense?
 
Willingness to explore - Have they shown up open to new possibilities?
 
Contextualisation & Generalisation - Are they able to apply the learning to contexts other than the one that they are learning them in?

In my case, the time between attending the two sessions had provided new reference experiences for me to be able to apply the content, making it seem like it was brand new! 

There is, I believe, real value in sitting through a program more than once.  With the space to have new and different reference experiences, you are able to find new distinctions previously not available to you.

What training should you revisit to gain new distinctions?