Personal Resilience – Proactive v Reactive

I was stood on the 8th Wonder of the World last week – Platform 2 of Chorley Train Station. I stood in the cold waiting patiently for the 7.35am to Manchester. Initially thinking it was going to be a boring journey, I was chuffed to bits when I was able to listen in to a loud and interesting conversation that two blokes sat nearby were having.

One of the pair explained how his boss was a ‘complete dragon’ (I’ve left the expletive out). He explained how he’d missed his targets that month, but how it really wasn’t his fault. The dragon explained were he’d gone wrong and where he needed to improve next month, but the poor victim was having none of it; she was ‘getting at him’. She had also told him that everyone was going to be trained up to cover other tasks, in other words to multi-skill. He said this was the dragons attempt at ‘managing him out’. Now, I’m no Poirot, but I suspect he had taken all of this feedback to heart.

We’re all guilty of taking things to heart, but sometimes we need to see things differently.  What if he had actually listened to the dragon? What if he’d taken on board what she’d said and thought about learning from his mistakes so that he could hit his targets next month? What if he changed his perception of his manager from ‘she’s getting at me’ to ‘she’s genuinely trying to help me’? What if he saw multi-skilling as a brilliant opportunity to learn new skills, skills that undoubtedly would eventually improve his career prospects?

In his brilliant book, SUMO, Paul McGee suggests you ask yourself the following questions to help you put things into perspective:

• Who is to blame? You, them, both parties?
• How long will this situation last?
• On a scale of 1-10 how much does this situation affect my life?
• What’s the worst thing that can happen?
• What’s the best thing that can happen?
• What is the one thing I can do to make the best thing happen?

As for the bloke on the train, well, he got off at Piccadilly Station still oozing the characteristics of someone who is very reactive. I wondered who he was going to blame for his misgivings tomorrow.

Trainers – Get to Know your audience

Essentially, all courses could be referred to as ‘off the shelf’. For example, you can Google ‘Negotiation Skills’ and you will find that most of the course outlines you read are pretty much generic, with the same general feel, aims and objectives.

It’s down to you as the trainer to bring that course to life and more importantly, to make it relevant to your audience so that they actually learn from it. If it isn’t relevant, then the audience will almost always switch off. Get the pitch and the content right however and they will love it and learn from it.

To gain credibility, it’s vitally important that you bespoke your content to suit your audience’s personal learning needs. In most cases that doesn’t mean completely re-writing an entire course, but what it does involve is tweaking the course content, your case studies/stories and the language you use so that your audience knows that the session has been designed with them in mind. Of course there may be odd times when you have to re-write the whole course to meet their bespoke needs, but you will find this out well before you deliver it, during the design phase.

Here are some useful tips from us on getting to know you audience:

• Meet with the organiser regularly in the months/weeks leading up to the session, so that you can discuss the design/content you intend to use in detail
• Use their case studies and examples to ensure they are completely relevant and so that they are guaranteed to hit the mark
• Spend time working in the business e.g. spend time on the phones or meet the delegates and work in their environment, to get a feel for what it’s really like
• Get to know their roles and the issues & challenges they face

These tips still apply even if you work as part of an in-house training team. Speak with the Department Head, arrange visits and make time to really get to know them. You may have the same in-house course which you need to deliver across the business, but our advice would be that these rules still apply – The content should still be tweaked for each department, to make sure it’s tailored specifically to them. Different exercises, language/terminology and case studies should be used – don’t keep your course generic across the board (-unless you want to bomb).

These little touches go a long way in helping you to gain credibility and to build rapport with your audience, not to mention making the learning relevant for your lovely delegates. Something we always stress here at PU is that it’s our delegates’ course, not ours, so we always build ours with them in mind, not just based on what we think will work.

Oh, and the real secret in building rapport….chocolate! Whatever you do, don’t forget the chocolate!