Is Learning Dependent on Environment?

I'll start this post with a blatant advert - due to cancellations, I have one remaining place on each of NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner in Spain this September. If you're interested, or you know someone who's interested, see www.nenlp.com for all the details.

Now, I mention this because one of the most important aspects of the training in Spain is that it takes place in a wonderful environment. Peaceful, relaxing, beautiful, and a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

You roll out of bed, have breakfast on the patio and join the training, all in the glorious Andalusian sunshine. Previous participants have said that the environment is a great place to learn, but does it really make a difference? The course content is the same, regardless of whether it's delivered in the foot hills of the Sierra de las Nieves or in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn just off junction 25 of the M1. And at the Holiday Inn, you don't have to make your own coffee, it's provided for you in thermos flasks conveniently located outside the training room. Also, you get proper flip charts and fluorescent lighting for those dull autumn afternoons.

Intuitively, you're probably thinking that you'd rather work in the sunshine. Doesn't it evoke memories of primary school, and being allowed to work outside on the sunniest of afternoons? And doesn't it make your manager think that you're skiving, not working?

My experience is that taking people away from their daily routine for long enough that they actually forget their routine is what 'works', rather than the specific environment. Going to a hotel function room for life-changing training is exactly like going for a team meeting or health and safety training. The associations that we make probably include boring, waste of time, mandatory, irrelevant and so on, whereas the associations that we make with travelling to a villa in Spain are the opposite - exciting, valuable, free choice.

'Alternative' meeting venues are popular for corporate training, team meetings and team building events, and superficially these offer a good alternative to hotel rooms, except for one big problem - in order to cater to what they think the corporate market wants, they provide... meeting rooms with flipcharts, projectors, bowls of sweets, coffee on demand, cheap biscuits in individual packets. So as soon as you're past the lovely landscape, or the museum displays, or the fun stuff, you're right back where you started - in the hotel meeting room.

In Spain, we'll be putting lining paper on entire walls to work out language structures, and we'll be using all of the outdoor space as a 'breakout area', and as soon as I call it a breakout area it sounds boring. There will be no flipcharts. Outdoor and indoor activities, demonstrations, practice sessions and group discussions will be broken up with videos and other media. None of this is any different to how a course would run in the UK. The difference is the whole set of associations that students make before they even arrive.

So, does environment make a difference to learning? Absolutely, yes. But it's the anticipation of the environment that makes the biggest difference of all.