In this article (another excerpt from the book Tesla
Teaching) I discuss how to get personal and connect with your training group. A
lot of trainers think that the introduction and icebreaker is where this is
done. I recommend shifting the introductions to a little later in the training
or after the first break so that people get to the purpose of the training
right away and understand why they are there and what is in it for them first.
My recommendation here is, don’t jump in and go through that typical
introduction where everyone introduces themselves one at a time. Think about
when you have been in a class and that happened. Did you remember any of the
other people’s introductions, or did you just wait for your turn to talk? Be
honest. I have a whole section on how introductions can be done in the book
that I will save for a future article. But, let’s discuss making training
personal and making a connection here. This may be contrary to what many books
out there say. I believe that training is a conversation and that to gain
credibility and to show sincerity you need to truly engage your audience and to
do this you need to connect. To connect you need to take it to a personal
level. This works for me and this is why I put it in the book and shared a part
of it in this article. Three are two major things I do to make it personal that
I recommend here.
Tell stories about kids and or family (or what really
matters to you)
I like to tell stories about my family and include ones
about my kids. This helps the students to connect with me on a personal level.
They know I am human and that I have a life outside of where I am now. The
important thing here is to make these stories topical and to make sure they tie
into the lesson in some meaningful way. I usually teach about technology, sales
or sales management. I can usually tie a family story into one of these major
topics.
Set the environment / own the space
It is important to set a classroom space that allows for
open communication and that is as intimate as it can be. For example: we
recently conducted a training that had lower attendance than was expected.
Because attendance was low, we had much larger space and more tables and chairs
than were needed. In order to make the space more conducive to open and
intimate communication, I removed a few of the tables and closed in the
training space. This is counter intuitive, because, generally, people tend to
think the more space I have the better. But, in training it is better to have
smaller space so that people are closer and feel more open to communicating
with each other.
It is also
important to set the stage for collaboration. This is tough to do when you are
using rented spaces such as hotel conference centers and such, because they
tend to not know how to set up collaborative spaces. When you tell the hotel,
you want to collaborate they go with “Rounds”. But, rounds are not even really
what we are looking for because we need to be able to go into presentation mode
and collaboration mode. Using rounds doesn’t allow for presentation mode
because many of the students will have their back to the presentation/presenter.
This may require a space that you can change the configuration on the fly. Be
flexible and own the space. You as the presenter need to be able to call the
shots.
For me, being open and transparent as a presenter is what
works. I make it personal and I try to connect with my students. You cannot
fake genuine and you students will know, connect and be inspired learners.
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