Train The Trainer – Tip #4

Your goal as the trainer? Not to be the smartest person in the room, but the most prepared. This week Amy shows how getting in that mindset sets you up for success and actually energizes your participants. We hope you’re enjoying this series on our Train The Trainer program, keep following along!

Transcript:

Hi, I am Amy back with Iluma Learning. This week we are talking about Train the Trainer, and we’re doing just a blog series on my best tips for how to make your training more dynamic. If you are a trainer or a presenter, this is helpful for you.

So when we’ve talked about numerous things already about getting PowerPoint to just be a tool rather than the focus. Making sure that you are taking the time to hyper prepare your introduction and then get them up and moving within the first five minutes of class. So when you do all those things, fantastic, because what’s next is a mindset thing for you as a trainer.

So if you can take this and really consider, you are the captain of this ship, this training, this classroom that you are in with all these participants, you are the captain. And so it is your job to make sure that that ship gets to its destination. But you are getting the participants to help you steer. In fact, your hands are off the steering. You are letting them take that ship to where it needs to go. And when they get off track, you’re coming up, you’re straightening it out, you’re making sure our coordinates are back to our destination.

And so what does that mean? Well, what that means is that I am really getting the students, the participants, to do the heavy lifting during our class. I am not the giver of all knowledge. I am responsible for pulling all the knowledge of that room into some kind of collective understanding because adults come to the class with so much experience. It’s very different from when we teach children. When we’re teaching children, well, they’re sponges. They don’t have life experience. Our participants come in with a lot of life experience and if we can help them file away the new information, we want them to learn with what they already understand, then lock it in.

So that’s a really important piece. It’s a really around your mindset that my goal is to not be the smartest person in the room. It’s to be the most prepared for this class and to pull the knowledge out of the room. So with that, I am always, if they can answer it, I’m letting them answer it. I want them to say it if they can say it. So getting them to participate, be engaged the whole time is the best way to have them energized at the end of the training. It’s odd. Ironically, if they do the work during training, then they are going to be energized at the end of the training. If they sit and just listen passively to a lecture for the whole of your training, they will be exhausted by the end of your training. So that’s just another tip, just a mindset thing for you to consider.