The Real Cost of Learning New Things
What Two Weeks of Potty Training Taught Me About How We Teach
Principle: Learning Draws on a Limited Budget
Last month, my wife and I decided our two-year-old was ready to potty train. We cleared the weekend, took the diaper off for good, and braced for tantrums about sitting on the toilet.
The tantrums came. What surprised me was everything else. For the first three or four days, she was a different kid outside the bathroom too. She wanted to be held more than she had in months. She napped through stretches she normally fought hard against, and slept longer at night. For three mornings in a row, she fell asleep mid-morning in my wife’s arms, something that hadn’t happened since she was an infant.
None of that had anything to do with the toilet. It had to do with the fact that we had changed her entire relationship to her own body’s signals overnight, and she was spending real resources learning how to read them. The extra clinginess and the extra sleep were not a step backward. They were the cost of something new becoming automatic.
This is not just a cute parenting observation. The brain makes up about two percent of our body weight but burns roughly twenty percent of our resting energy, and that share climbs when we are encoding something genuinely unfamiliar. Sleep researchers have spent decades showing that new motor skills get consolidated during sleep, replayed and strengthened hours after the learning actually happened. My daughter wasn’t avoiding the lesson by sleeping more. She was still doing it, just somewhere I couldn’t see.
We talk about learning like it should be instant, like information goes in one day and skill comes out the next. It has never worked that way for a two-year-old, and it does not work that way for the people we coach either.
Perspective: Delivering Information Is Not the Same as Teaching
Most coaches measure their teaching by how much they say. More corrections, more reps, more information delivered in a session gets treated as more coaching done. It feels productive. It is also the wrong measure, because the athlete’s brain has a limited amount of processing capacity available at any given moment, and every additional correction on top of an already full load competes for the same shrinking resource.
Cognitive load theory has shown this for decades in education research. A novice performing a task carries far more mental load than an expert doing the exact same thing, because the expert has automated what the novice is still consciously working out step by step. Pile new information on top of an already loaded working memory and very little of it lands. Some of it actively pushes out what you taught five minutes earlier.
The coaches who teach most effectively are not the ones who say the most. They chunk the lesson down to what the athlete can actually hold, they space out the corrections instead of stacking them, and they read fatigue as information rather than as a discipline problem. A blank stare or a short fuse late in a teaching session usually is not attitude. It is a brain running low on the resource it needs to keep learning.
If your athletes look worn out after you have taught them something new, ask yourself whether you built any room for that cost, or whether you just kept talking until the session ended.
Story: The Diaper, the Naps, and What My Daughter Couldn’t Hide
By the end of the first week, she had it. Not perfectly. There were accidents into the second week, and a few regressions when we traveled. But the extra sleep and the extra clinginess started fading back to normal right around the time the skill itself started to feel automatic to her. Her brain had finished doing the expensive part of the work.
What stuck with me was how honest her body was about the cost the whole way through. She could not tell us she was overwhelmed. She did not have the words for it yet. But she showed us, in the only ways available to her, that something demanding was happening beneath the surface. The clinginess was a request for security while her world felt less predictable. The sleep was her brain doing overtime on something we had asked of her without warning.
Adults are just better at hiding the same signals. A staff member learning a new system, an athlete unlearning an old technique, a young coach adjusting to a new way of giving feedback, they are running a version of the same process my daughter ran that week. They just know how to show up on time and nod along while they do it.
Watching my daughter’s body tell the truth she couldn’t put into words gave me a level of empathy for the people I coach that I did not have two months ago. I already knew learning was hard in theory. I had not felt how expensive it actually is to watch it happen to someone who cannot fake being fine.
Question:
Think about the last time you taught someone on your staff or roster something that required them to unlearn an old habit first, not a small tweak, but a real change. Did you build any recovery into that process afterward, or did you read their tiredness and short temper as a discipline problem instead of the cost you should have expected?
Closing Thought:
Learning is not free.
It draws on a real and limited budget every time.
The best teachers plan for the withdrawal, not just the deposit.
Your people are not being lazy when they are tired from learning something hard.
They are paying the price you asked them to pay.
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens
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