If you design or facilitate training sessions, I’m going to guess that you don’t get a chance to participate in training yourself very often. That’s a lament I frequently hear from trainers. They are so busy designing and facilitating that they rarely get to take courses themselves.
Watch a short video blog post about lesson learned as a participant
When we take courses we learn valuable lessons about designing them. For example, I used to hear people lament the fact that they had to participate in role play sessions in my courses. I thought that they didn’t like making mistakes in front of others; that their pride was getting in the way. That was until I took a course where I had to role play. It was at that moment I realized that it really is hard to do. For some reason my mind went blank and I felt totally incompetent. Performing on the spot in front of others isn’t as easy as I thought.
From that moment on I realized how important it is to regularly put yourself in a participant’s shoes; to see things from their perspective. That experience has helped me to redesign role play sessions so they are more productive for participants by creating realistic scenarios, reducing the size of the role-play groups and giving them triggers or tips cards to help them along the way.
Every time I take a course I win in two ways: I learn whatever it is that the course is about, plus I learn valuable lessons about designing and facilitating. That`s pretty good ROI!
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