Hands-on learning: What’s all the Buzz About? *By jessica Moncrief and alan brenner
How many workshops or training have you taken and walked out with nothing to show for it? Or maybe you liked what you heard but all those biblio sheets got misplaced, just liked so many things, never to be seen again? As my grandmother would say, in one ear and out the other.
How many experiential workshops have you attended?
Research demonstrates that experiential learning provides the following benefits:
Increases perceived learning, professional readiness, and critical thinking (Boud, D., & Molloy, E. 2015).
Increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and well-being (Lascaux, M., Malboeuf-Hurtubise, C., Taylor, G., & Mageau, G. 2021).
Improves knowledge retention and integration of theory with practice (Yardley, S., Teunissen, P. W., & Dornan, T. 2012).
Enhances transferable skills like problem-solving, teamwork, and communication (D’souza, M. J., & Rodrigues, P. 2024).
Experiential Learning: A Foundation for Real Change
Experiential learning, or "learning by doing," is recognized as a powerful approach for fostering personal, group, and organizational transformation. Instead of passively receiving information, individuals actively participate in realistic scenarios that enable them to apply concepts, make decisions, and witness the impact of their actions. This approach provides several critical advantages:
Self Paced Practice Environment: Experiential simulations create a risk-free self paced space to experiment, make mistakes, and learn without negative real-world consequences. When the perceived stakes are lower, there is less anxiety while learning; anxiety gets in our way of integrating new information. Learners refine their skills and build genuine confidence at their pace.
Team Cohesion and Psychological Safety: The framework of the Gestalt Experiential Cycle fosters psychological safety—a culture in which team members feel safe to express themselves and take risks, resulting in improved performance and satisfaction.
Enhanced Engagement and Motivation: Active participation generates deeper engagement, leading to more effective skill development and retention of knowledge. In group settings, the collective energy often creates entrainment—a natural synchronization of rhythms, emotions, and focus. This shared resonance heightens motivation, strengthens connections among participants, and amplifies learning outcomes.
Personal Growth and Self-Awareness: Reflection on experiences reveals individual strengths, weaknesses, and working styles, fueling our energy to pursue personal growth. Academic studies NOW show that experiential learning supports personal and professional development.
Unified Understanding and Alignment: Shared experiences create common language, consistent approaches, and alignment across teams or organizations. This decreases misunderstandings, conflict and difficulty being understood.
Bridging Theory and Practice: Experiential learning connects abstract concepts with practical application, helping teams and organizations develop intuitive skills and test new strategies safely.
The Power of Learning by Doing
Experiential learning creates transformation because it engages people as whole beings rather than just intellectual processors of information. When David Kolb, a professor emeritus at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, first articulated his experiential learning cycle in the 1980s, he identified a crucial insight: real learning happens through concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation working together (Kolb, 1984).
But there’s something deeper at work here. When people are actively engaged in experiences rather than passively receiving information, they encounter authentic moments of recognition about their patterns and behaviors. These cathartic insights emerge organically from the experience itself, making them more personally meaningful and harder to dismiss-These cathartic insights emerge organically from the experience itself, making them more personally meaningful and harder to dismiss. A perfect antidote to the you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him swim.
Reading is not the same as experiencing.Would reading about riding a bike be enough? Consider the difference between reading about anxiety and actually feeling the heart rate increase, noticing shifts in breathing patterns, and observing the stories the mind creates. The latter produces embodied awareness that integrates mind, body, and emotion in ways that purely cognitive learning cannot achieve. A psychotherapist may be highly trained, yet still lack an understanding of another’s lived experience. For example, when my own family member was diagnosed with anxiety, educational handouts were provided, but this knowledge alone did not capture the depth of his experience. Reading my own body, with the help of Gestalt professionals in my immersive and experiential classrooms, was more [productive than books about anxiety Years later, as I started my Gestalt training, my own anxiety emerged from it's creative hiding spots and it was through these firsthand experiential encounters that the reality of the condition—and its impact—became fully understood.
Enter Gestalt: The Art of Present-Moment Transformation
Building on this experiential foundation, Gestalt training offers a uniquely powerful approach to deep personal and systemic change. First explored in 1890 by Christian Von Efrenhels and later developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 50s, Gestalt theory operates on a deceptively simple principle: awareness itself is generative (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951).
When people become fully aware of what they are actually doing—rather than what they think they are doing—natural self-regulation and growth occur. Learning to ride a bike, for example, requires sensing one’s feet in relation to the ground, the bike beneath them, and the body balanced at the center.
This process is not about analyzing problems or imposing solutions; it is about creating conditions where people can directly experience themselves and their relationships more fully and authentically.
Clinical Applications: Healing Through Present-Moment Awareness
In therapeutic contexts, Gestalt training offers profound advantages over approaches that rely solely on cognition or analysis. Traditional methods often emphasize past events or future goals—yet focusing on the past can reinforce repetitive narratives, while focusing on the future may reduce therapy to plans for action outside the session. By contrast, Gestalt therapy takes a holistic approach, guiding clients to notice how unresolved past experiences emerge in the present moment—through their somatic or embodied awareness: bodily tension, emotional patterns, and relational dynamics.
For trauma work, this present-moment focus is particularly valuable. Trauma, the past frozen, often manifests as disconnection from bodily experience and present-moment awareness. Gestalt approaches help clients gradually reconnect with their embodied experience in a safe, measured and controlled way, developing the capacity to stay present with difficult emotions and sensations rather than dissociating or becoming overwhelmed. Gestalt offers a myriad of tools for grounding and integrating old memories and traumas into the present, where the range of choiceful responses has evolved.
Gestalt's emphasis on relationship also makes it powerful for addressing interpersonal difficulties. The relationship alone is the highest predicator of change. (Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J.) Clients don’t just talk about their relationship patterns—they experience them directly in the therapeutic relationship and become aware of how they create connection or distance in real time with a real person. During Gestalt training and even in private sessions of some well trained Gestalt clinicians, clients are made aware that they carry their past experiences with them, and that unresolved issues are likely to surface in therapy. The therapist serves as an optimal partner in this process—skilled at supporting conflict and, at times, even functioning as a safe practice partner for working through interpersonal challenges.
Combining the relational and experiential approach assures greater trust, fuller access to emotions, more expression of client, sense of belonging, regulation of nervous system, goal setting and feedback.Research and testimonials supports this approach. Studies have shown Gestalt therapy to be particularly effective for depression, anxiety, and personality disorders, with benefits often maintained long-term (Brownell, 2010). The experiential nature of the work unlocks stuck energy (depression and anxiety) and creates lasting change because insights are embodied rather than just intellectual.
Coaching Applications: Developing Authentic Leadership
In coaching contexts, Gestalt training offers a sophisticated alternative to goal-focused, performance-oriented approaches that often create internal splits between who people are and who they think they should be. Instead of trying to “fix” leaders or help them adopt new behaviors, Gestalt coaching helps people become more fully themselves—which paradoxically often leads to more effective leadership.
Executive coaches trained in Gestalt approaches work with presence, awareness, and authentic self-expression. A leader doesn’t just learn communication techniques—they become aware of how they actually communicate, what happens in their body when they’re triggered, and how their presence affects others. This embodied awareness leads to more authentic and effective leadership because it’s integrated rather than performed.
The Gestalt emphasis on working with resistance rather than overcoming it is particularly valuable in coaching. Instead of pushing clients to change, Gestalt-trained coaches help them become aware of their resistance, understand what it serves, and discover what emerges when they’re fully present with their ambivalence about change.
This approach is especially relevant for today’s complex leadership challenges. Research by Kegan and Lahey on immunity to change shows that most leadership development fails because it doesn’t address the hidden commitments that keep people stuck (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Gestalt coaching works directly with these internal conflicts through present-moment awareness.
Organizational Applications: Systems Transformation
At the organizational level, Gestalt training offers unique advantages for systemic change. Traditional organizational development often focuses on structures, processes, and strategies while ignoring the human dynamics that actually drive organizational behavior. Gestalt approaches work directly with these relational and cultural patterns.
Studies consistently show that 70% of organizational change efforts fail (Kotter, 2012), largely because they don’t address the embodied patterns of interaction that maintain existing systems. Gestalt-trained consultants help organizations become aware of their actual culture—not the stated values on the wall, but the lived experience of how people relate, make decisions, and handle conflict.
This awareness-based approach is particularly powerful for addressing organizational trauma—the lingering effects of layoffs, mergers, leadership failures, or other disruptions that continue to influence organizational behavior long after the events themselves. Like individual trauma, organizational trauma lives in present-moment patterns of mistrust, hypervigilance, or disconnection that traditional change approaches often cannot reach.
The Gestalt emphasis on working with polarities and conflicts makes it especially valuable for complex organizational challenges. Rather than trying to resolve conflicts quickly, it helps systems stay present with tension and ambiguity long enough for new possibilities to emerge. This capacity for “creative adjustment”—a core Gestalt concept—becomes crucial for organizations navigating volatile, uncertain environments.
The Relational Thread: Contact and Connection
Across all three applications, Gestalt training’s emphasis on contact and relationship provides a unifying thread. In therapy, coaching, and organizational work, the quality of relationship determines the possibility for change. Gestalt training develops sophisticated awareness of how contact is made, maintained, and lost—skills that are essential whether working with individual clients, coaching executives, or facilitating organizational transformation.
This relational awareness is particularly relevant in our increasingly disconnected world. Research by Amy Edmondson shows that psychological safety is crucial for high-performing teams (Edmondson, 2019). Gestalt training develops the capacity for authentic engagement that creates these conditions for growth and change.
Integration: The Key to Sustainable Change
Perhaps most importantly, Gestalt training integrates body, emotion, and cognition in ways that address the limitations of purely cognitive approaches across all contexts. Whether in therapy, coaching, or organizational work, this integration eliminates the internal splits that often undermine well-intentioned efforts at transformation.
Research in neuroscience supports this integrated approach. Antonio Damasio’s work on embodied cognition shows that emotions and bodily sensations are not obstacles to good decision-making but essential components of it (Damasio, 1994). Gestalt training develops this integrated intelligence systematically, whether applied to healing trauma, developing leadership capacity, or creating organizational change.
The Paradox of Change
Central to Gestalt work across all applications is the paradoxical theory of change: people change by becoming more fully who they are, not by trying to become someone else (Beisser, 1970). This principle works whether helping a trauma survivor integrate their experience, supporting a leader in developing authenticity, or assisting an organization in aligning with its true values and capabilities.
This paradoxical approach often leads to more sustainable transformation because it honors the whole system, including the parts that resist change. Rather than creating internal warfare between different aspects of self or system, Gestalt work seeks integration and wholeness.
The Bottom Line
The evidence is clear across clinical, coaching, and organizational contexts: transformation happens through experience, not information. Gestalt training represents the cutting edge of experiential learning because it works with the whole person or system, honors resistance, focuses on present-moment reality, and develops the relational and adaptive capacities necessary for sustainable change.
Whether you’re a therapist working with individual healing, a coach developing leadership capacity, or a consultant facilitating organizational transformation, the principles remain consistent: awareness is curative, relationship is the vehicle for change, and integration of mind, body, and emotion creates lasting transformation.
In a world of constant change, the individuals, leaders, and organizations that will thrive are those that can stay present, adapt authentically, and maintain genuine connection under pressure. Gestalt training doesn’t just teach these capacities—it develops them experientially, creating the kind of embodied learning that actually lasts.
References
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*Jessica Moncrief earned her Master’s degree in Social Work from Case Western Reserve University, with a concentration in mental health. Ten years later she began her higher education with extensive training from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, where she is now faculty. Known for her compassion, insight, and grounded yet ephemeral presence, Jessie is viscerally attuned to the emotional and physical needs of those she serves—as reflected in both personal and professional testimonials. Her work centers on guiding individuals of all ages toward resilience and integration, from the past to the here-and-now, by identifying unmet needs and applying relational, embodied approaches rooted in humanistic and experiential theory.
*Alan Brenner, a former senior executive with Blackberry and Sun Microsystems, is currently the Interim Executive Director of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland(GIC) and a member of GIC’s Board of Directors. . His professional background includes extensive work and leadership in technical organizations in creating climates where innovation thrives and where financial results satisfy shareholders. He is a graduate of several programs in the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.