Learning: What draws us in (and what leaves us cold)
When we spend enough time working with people who are serious about their own development, whether they occupy the roles of leaders, coaches or thinking partners, we can often start to notice patterns in how people learn. It is seldom about the transfer of information. I have lost count of the number of times I have watched someone glaze over in a training session, only to light up the moment the conversation shifts, and they are suddenly speaking from their own experience or making sense of something in their own words. That shift, from passive to engaged, I notice, is almost always relational. It has more to do with what is happening between people than what is happening inside their heads.
Relevance and relationship
We talk a great deal in coaching about motivation, and I am much more interested in what actually keeps people present in the process. When does learning feel like something to enjoy, and when does it become something to endure? In my experience, the answer usually comes down to two things: relevance and relationship.
Relevance is personal. When another person can see how an idea connects to their own questions or challenges, they lean in. That may sound obvious, and yet it is often overlooked in organisational settings, where learning objectives are set at a distance from the people who will benefit from them. I have seen the same pattern in language assessments: the moment someone stops memorising vocabulary for a test and starts using a phrase to talk about their own life, learning sticks in a completely different way. The same is true in coaching. When a thinker’s own agenda is driving the conversation, learning feels like discovery. When the agenda is imposed from outside, it starts to feel like compliance.
Relationship is harder to pin down, and just as critical. People learn best when they feel seen, heard, and felt (Claire Pedrick, 2025). This calls for genuine curiosity from whoever is facilitating the learning, rather than endless affirmation. Coaches will recognise this from supervision: the sessions that stay with you are the ones where the supervisor is genuinely interested in your experience, rather than working through a checklist of competencies. There is a quality of attention, Nancy Kline labels this as ‘Generative Attention’, that tells people their thinking matters, and more importantly, that they matter. That is when they start to take risks, to experiment, to learn.
There are, of course, times when learning stops feeling engaging. In my own experience as a language learner, the moments when I have stalled have almost always been the ones where I lost sight of why the learning mattered to me, or where I felt invisible in the process. A few years ago, I spent months dutifully working through an online language course, ticking boxes and feeling steadily more disengaged. It was only when I joined a small conversation group, where my mistakes were met with genuine curiosity and encouragement rather than correction, that my confidence and my progress took off. The content had not changed; the context had.
This is why, in a training room, in coaching, I keep returning to the quality of the relationship as the foundation for learning. Reflection is not a solitary practice, even when we are doing it alone; it is shaped by the questions we ask ourselves, questions often borrowed from others, and by the language we use to describe our experience. As Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If we want to support learners and coaches to learn in ways that genuinely engage them, we need to pay attention to the language they use, the questions they are wrestling with, and the relationships that make those questions safe enough to explore out loud.
The same principles hold in team settings. Google’s Project Aristotle research found that psychological safety was the single most important factor in effective teams. When people feel safe enough to take risks and admit what they do not know, learning becomes a shared endeavour rather than a private struggle. That is as true in the boardroom as it is in the training room or the supervision space.
What makes learning engaging?
When people ask me what makes learning engaging, I do not point to a particular model or method. I start with a question: when have you felt most alive in your own learning? The answers are always personal, and they are almost always relational. That is the space I try to hold, whether I am working with a thinking partner one-to-one, supporting coaches in mentoring or supervision, or designing development for organisations. Everything else, the frameworks, the tools, the techniques, follows from there.
About Amanda
Amanda Livermore is the founder of LORE Consultancy Ltd and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). With over 20 years of experience in coaching, training design and facilitation, Amanda specialises in helping individuals and teams develop the skills to work even more effectively together. As both a trained mentor coach and coach supervisor, she supports coaches in their own professional development whilst helping organisations create more inclusive, psychologically safe environments where different perspectives are both invited and welcomed.