Every institute I have ever visited has the shelf. It stands in an office or a corridor, and on it are the binders: the time management seminar of 2022, the communication workshop with the role plays, the leadership offsite with the laminated model. Each binder was, for one day, the centre of someone’s full attention. Each represents real money and a room full of clever people. And each is now furniture, because between the seminar and the shelf runs the steepest curve in learning science. Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped it in the 1880s: without reinforcement, most newly learned material is gone within days, and a modern replication confirmed his curve holds up almost embarrassingly well [1]. I take the curve apart in my article on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. The shelf is what the curve looks like as furniture.
The doubt this plants in anyone who pays for training is legitimate, and it deserves a measured answer rather than a confident one. So at week eight of the Resilience Training, two months after the techniques were introduced, we asked every participant one question per tool, built to leave no room for politeness: applied, or not applied.
Table Of Contents:
- What was still in use
- Why it sticks: the format is the mechanism
- The number to demand
- FAQ
- References
What was still in use
Of the twenty five techniques Paul and I teach across the training, eleven were still in active use by at least eight in ten participants at week eight, and the top five by more than nine in ten: the sleep check-in led at ninety four per cent, followed by the bedroom audit, the sleep diary, emotion labelling and the Three Good Things practice. Set that against the curve. The expected fate of a technique two months after teaching is the shelf. The measured fate of these was the calendar.
Miguel, a third year doctoral researcher in one of our cohorts, named the distinction better than any learning theory: “I expected to remember the ideas. I did not expect to still be doing the things.” His sleep check-in takes ninety seconds each morning, and it has stopped being something from a course; it is simply how his day starts now. That is the entire war against the forgetting curve in one sentence. Knowledge has to be remembered, and remembering decays. Behaviour, once installed in a daily structure, does not need remembering at all. The curve cannot touch what no longer depends on memory.
And because a stickiness page that lists only winners belongs on the shelf itself: not every tool reached those numbers. Deep breathing sat at seventy five per cent, and a handful of techniques were kept by only a minority. This is not a defect to hide but the design working: some tools are for everyone, some are for the researchers whose specific pattern they fit, and nobody is meant to leave carrying all twenty five.
Why it sticks: the format is the mechanism
None of this comes from unusually disciplined participants. It comes from engineering. The training runs as live workshops with light structured practice between them, around three hours a week in total, and the practice is spaced across the weeks rather than massed into one heroic day, because spacing is the best documented counter to forgetting there is; the evidence runs through my post on spaced repetition. Every technique is applied in the participant’s real working week the same week it is taught, so it attaches to daily structure rather than to a classroom, and it is tracked, so drift is visible while it can still be corrected. The binder on the shelf failed at none of its content and all of its architecture. A format either beats the curve by design, or the curve wins by default.
This is also why I refuse to rank formats in either direction. A strong one day workshop is the right instrument when the objective is awareness: it opens a topic, gives language to something unnamed, starts movement. What it cannot do, and was never built to do, is install behaviour. Formats are not better or worse. They are matched to a purpose or they are not, and the shelf is full of mismatches.
The number to demand
When a coordinator hesitates over a training budget, the real doubt is rarely the content. It is transfer: will any of this survive contact with week six? The right response to that doubt is not reassurance but a number, and the number exists. It is the application rate, weeks later, tool by tool, and it is the single most revealing figure a provider can produce, which is why so few produce it. Ours is above, and the outcome data from the same cohort, stress down, anxiety down, sleep debt halved, performance up on unchanged hours, is reported in full in my article on whether resilience training actually works. If you commission training and nobody has ever shown you an application rate, ask for one, and watch the room.
FAQ
How quickly do people forget what they learn in training?
Faster than any budget wants to hear. Ebbinghaus showed in the 1880s that most newly learned material decays within days without reinforcement, and the Murre and Dros replication confirmed the curve’s shape. A single session is one exposure, and one exposure is what the curve eats first. The counter is spaced practice applied in the learner’s real context, which is a design decision, not a willpower decision.
What does training transfer mean?
Transfer is whether the training is still in the working day after the invoice is paid. It is the difference between a course people enjoyed and a course that changed how they work, and it is measurable: ask, tool by tool and weeks later, applied or not applied, then publish the answer. In our February 2026 cohort, eleven of twenty five techniques were still in use by at least eight in ten researchers two months after being introduced.
Why do the techniques from this training stay in use?
Three design choices, none of them optional. Practice is spaced across weeks, the strongest documented counter to forgetting. Every technique is applied in the researcher’s real work the same week it is taught, so it attaches to life rather than to a classroom. And nobody keeps all twenty five: each researcher leaves with the handful that fit their pattern, installed as routine, and our week eight application data shows that pattern clearly.
References
[1] Murre, J. M. J., Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644.
Dr Nadine Sinclair
Dr. Nadine Sinclair is a molecular biologist, strategy consultant and co-founder of Mind Matters. A scientist by training and at heart, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. She has 30,000+ hours of hands-on project management experience, built across 18 years as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and as an independent consultant, working with research institutions, foundations, pharmaceutical and biotech companies and governments. She is the co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator and the author of On Track. Since 2018, over 1,500 researchers from more than 30 institutions have trained with Mind Matters.