How I Learned That the No's Are Redirects

Takara Small has spent her career in the business of telling other people's stories. As a technology journalist — at Fortune, CTV, CBC, Metro Morning, the BBC, and beyond — she asks the questions. Today, she's the one being asked. What she shares is honest, warm, and quietly powerful: a conversation about growing up between cities and classrooms, navigating spaces that weren't built with her in mind, and the understanding — hard-won — that the room doesn't get to decide if you belong. You do.

Dr. Tanya Harrison has spent her career working on Mars rovers, and she'll be the first to tell you that what got her there had less to do with being brilliant at school than with being relentlessly curious and willing to figure things out sideways. In this conversation, she takes us back to being the kid in three band classes a day who hand-wrote Star Trek sheet music because nobody told her she shouldn't. She talks about navigating a physical disability, learning to self-promote as a scientist (a skill she had to watch others struggle without, too), and the learning strategy that has served her throughout: always see the whole before you try to understand the parts. She makes a quietly radical argument for centering curiosity and the lineage of human knowledge at the heart of education, rather than facts and scores. And in her closing answer, she turns the conversation toward something she is genuinely still figuring out: how to be a person in the world beyond the identity of a planetary scientist. A generous, wry, and clear-eyed conversation.

Jeff Warren is one of the most accessible meditation teachers working today, and he is very much the person you'd least expect. ADHD diagnosed in adulthood, broken neck at 20, years of flailing through what he thought creative work was supposed to look like before discovering that his exact style of mind was never the problem — it was the gift. In this conversation, Jeff takes us through a school journey that moved from French Immersion confusion to literary revelation to social recalibration, and eventually to something much harder: learning, after a serious injury changed everything, how to learn all over again. He talks about what it means to stop performing being a human, why nobody ever told him that life was actually hard, and what a school built around knowing yourself might do to every other subject in the curriculum. A warm, funny, philosophical, and deeply honest conversation with someone who has spent decades making space for other people to slow down.

We are very good, as a culture, at celebrating where people end up. We are much less honest about how they actually got there. “How I Learned That” is a podcast for parents who lie awake wondering if their child is going to be okay, and for the teenagers who can already feel that they don't quite fit the mold school was built for. It is a show that believes both of them deserve better than the stories we usually tell about learning and success. Host Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer is one of Canada's leading learning strategists. Her work lives underneath the subjects, courses, and years, in the how of learning. In each episode, she sits down with someone who has done something remarkable and asks the questions that rarely get asked: what was your relationship with school? What is the hardest thing you have ever had to learn, and how did you learn it? Was there a moment when you finally understood how you learn, and what did it change? Every guest brings a different answer, and every answer holds an offering of truth: you are far more capable of learning than any institution ever told you. “How I Learned That” is not a show about exceptional people who made it despite the odds. It is a show about ordinary, extraordinary human beings who figured out how to learn, and what happened when they did. Short episodes, generous conversations, real people, and the real stories underneath their lives.