Are your Lackluster Training Sessions in Need of CPR?

You know how it happened. 

You have been serving your audience one-dimensional uninspiring dishes of sameness with a lazy sideorder of stale content in your training sessions.If you are honest, you have seen the lights dimming in the eyes of the participants in your recent training sessions. Perturbed, you feel the emotional disconnection. But you hoped it would pass.If you are truthful, your sessions have not quenched your audience’s thirst for new ideas or sprinkled improvement tips on budding skills. They departed your training sessions parched.“It was on my To-Do List.”  Mmm! To-Do Lists are a curse of wishful intent over real accomplishment. Deception. You have had the wool pulled over your eyes.“But I did update it.”  Adding 10 more blah slides to the existing 120 dull slides of the PowerPoint presentation doesn’t count.“I’ve just don’t get the time or the quiet headspace for creative design.”  I feel your frustration.Sadly, there is no benevolent genie waiting to bestow creative moments upon you at your bidding.  Don’t waste another moment. Carve out the time for your creative flow.

No need to J.D.E.

Justify. Defend. Explain.We have all been there. So here are 6 simple ways to inspire your audience and reignite your trainer mojo.1. Ditch the Powerpoint Slides. What started as a useful trainer’s tool to facilitate learning has turned into a crutch for lazybones content delivery. Slides have increased in number but often not in value. Unchecked, slides block the emotional connection between the trainer/facilitator and audience. In the worse cases, the slides have eclipsed the human trainer, resulting in training by proxy.Sometimes you can’t ditch the PowerPoint Slides. I understand.But do you really need 130 of them when 20 carefully curated ones will achieve the same effect…and more?Will 130 slides honestly help you serve your audience? If not, time to cull.Ruthlessly cut out the fluff and the padding with ‘less is more’ as your mantra. Be discerning; your audience deserves it.2. Forage and Curate. Leave the comfort of your subject area and go cross-discipline foraging in Marketing, Interiors, Behavioural Science, Economics, Philosophy, Politics etc.  Seek out inventive and emotionally rich ideas.Go ‘off-piste’ to find exciting examples to help demonstrate important points.  These grab your audience’s attention – like dashes of hotsauce adding zing to your material and pep to your training delivery.I recently facilitated a Customer Experience Training afternoon for a retail client.  YouTube clips from The Dollar Shave Club’s commercials were exactly the tweak on tradition I was looking for.  Their briliant parody of typical retail customer service experiences (cue much laughter from the team) was the perfect icebreaker and conversation starter.Transported from their own retail setting, the team freely dove into decoding the difference between customer service and customer experience.  After, they were ready to focus on how they can add meaning and uplift their own customer experience offering. Find #stealworthy inspiration.3. The answers lies within. Look within the heart of your organisation – your tribe.The best case study material, role play ideas and solutions tailor-made for your business reality are often right under your nose.  Sniff them out.Delight your tribe with tales of your mission.  Hook them into your (ad)venture by defining their role in the story.  Ask for their help and be open to their feedback.  Weave your tribe into your story.4. Want to take your training up a notch or 10?  Go multi-sensory.When designing training material, my goal is to touch as many of the senses as possible in the entire training experience. Here’s a peek into my 5 senses checklist for maximum audience engagement.See

• Different types of visual media are a must - photos, illustrations, video, PowerPoint slides (in moderation).
• Go old-school with your coloured marker pens and the trusty flip chart.

Listen 

• Add music. Select an appropriate playlist to change the mood or pace of your session.
• When facilitating, listen to your audience needs. Be agile enough to address their needs whilst keeping the flow. Be ready to adjust your content on the fly to suit unexpected learning requirements that pop up.

Taste            

• Bad food can derail the best training event. Make sure the snacks or meals offered are scrumptious.

Smell           

• If the business has a signature scent use it. E.g. freshly baked bread for a bakery or unique fragrance wafting through a spa. This is olfactory brand reinforcement.

Feeling

• Go all out to make each member of your audience feel that they are important – that they matter. Incorporate their ideas and operational experiences in the design of role plays and case studies.
• At the end of your session, did you touch the life of your participants? How did you make a difference?
• Evaluate to find out. An easy-to-complete questionnaire is good for data. If you are exhausted yet invigorated at the end, know that you have trained with feeling. That’s good for the soul.

5. Make your audience the hero of the training session. This is not the place to excessively show off your qualifications, credentials and industry experience. Leave that for your CV or LinkedIn profile.  Fascinate your audience with your content not your credentials.Always keep your audience in the forefront of your mind. Training sessions padded with irrelevant industry jargon and bafflegab are a boring annoyance.Speak to your participants directly in plain language. Value their time. Their engagement is a prize to be earned.Make them the hero of their training session and they will champion your organisation’s cause and brand as they learn.6. Secret Ingredients. To serve a dish of inspiring training, season generously with passion for your craft and your personality.  Too much of either and you will overpower.  Too little and you will be serving tasteless gruel. The same training tools and techniques are available to everyone.  To these raw ingredients, mix in your 'secret ingredients' in your own unique and imaginative way. This is the alchemy of inspiring training!  Find your own unique secret combination.Pick one tip, more is better.Apply with gusto and transform your next training session from blah to cooking with gas!