254: The STICK Test - Why Your Students Aren't Getting Results

If you teach for a living and your students keep telling you your content is amazing, but six months later nothing's changed in their business... this episode might rattle you a little bit. And that's a good thing. A conversation with Scott Paley inside our Impact Mastermind cracked something open for me. Scott consumed all of our Summit content, but didn't show up live, didn't watch a single video. Instead, he ran the transcripts through Claude. And it made me ask a bigger question: what's actually happening to retention when people learn this way? The research is staggering. Students who used ChatGPT to study scored 57.5% on retention tests 45 days later. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. That's an 11-point gap, and it's not because AI is bad. It's because of cognitive offloading. In this episode, I'll share three things that stood out from the research, and then walk you through a simple five-letter test you can run your content through. I'm calling it the STICK test, and once you hear it, you'll see exactly where your courses, programs, and memberships are leaking transformation, and what to do about it. In this episode, you'll learn: Why AI summaries cause students to retain 11 points less than traditional learners (and the cognitive offloading effect behind it) The "passive learner trap": passive learners feel 62.5% prepared but only retain 79%, while active learners retain 94% The full STICK test — Space, Trigger, Illustrate, Community, Keep — and how to apply it to anything you teach Why the membership model naturally outperforms one-off courses for long-term student transformation The one shift that changes everything: you're not paid to teach, you're paid to make it stick RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at CONNECT WITH STU: Website: Book "Predictable Profits": Instagram: Podcast: Membership.io:

You can listen to 254: The STICK Test - Why Your Students Aren't Getting Results online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

254: The STICK Test - Why Your Students Aren't Getting Results is an episode from Marketing Your Business | Marketing strategies for growing your business and generating more recurring revenue by Stu McLaren.

This episode is 18:39 long.

This episode was published on Apr 29, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Marketing Your Business | Marketing strategies for growing your business and generating more recurring revenue when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.