Disengaging the audience

I don't know what the relevance of the image is in this post is, but I liked it for some reason so figure, why not. Normally I use my photos to support the text, sometimes the text supports the images, but I think that this time it is just an image placed but unrelated to the piece at all. I took it last night in Skadarska while waiting for my hosts to arrive to the dinner location, just after a group of drunks asked if I was willing to finance their next bottle of wine.

I declined.

Day two of the training went well enough today and I am pretty happy that both days came together successfully with the formal feedback so far confirming it. Sometimes it is hard to predict what the feedback is really going to be, but what I have found is that if I am able to connect on a personal level with the audience, it is generally good.

This particular training however posed a little bit of a problem in this area as while I did connect at a personal level with most of them and they enjoyed the training, I also helped them understand some of the necessary components to do the same as they are going to train their own users. The problem is that as I demonstrate and then explain why I do things a certain way, I am essentially telling them that I am manipulating their feelings, and even though this is technically true, it isn't because I aim to do so, it is a byproduct of a good training session.

The goal of training is to have people learn and the best way to have this happen is to build an environment that facilitates the process. I am quite social in general and am not overly concerned with people's judgement of me, so this allows me to be genuinely me without having to "perform" some version of myself. What I find is that when people try to hard to be something they are not, it comes across as disingenuous and untrustworthy, which in a learning environment is going to become a hurdle and hinder the learning processes. Essentially, untrusted personalities kill the training mood and will increase the barriers of change, the opposite of what one wants to encourage in training.

An engaging training that empowers users is one where the users are able to feel that they have some control in the way it moves and the direction it takes, that they feel supported and safe, that the content is relatable and applicable to who they are and their needs and in a group, that it is fair, that participants are treated equally. A good training session is inclusive of the audience and considerate of who that audience is and what their needs are.

In many ways, good training sessions are much like good content, engaging, compelling, piquing curiosity so as to think and ask further. The difference when it comes to content though is that the reader comes in with expectations without that content being specifically targeted to them. People judge the content on their leading expectations without looking at the context of what it was created for. It is like turning up to a random training session wanting to learn how to cook, and then being critical of the session when they spoke about blockchain.

However, there is also value in participating in the unexpected and I think that my clients over the last few days didn't really get what they expected, because they didn't know what they needed. Now however, they have a set of tools that they can leverage to better deliver to their internal end users that the didn't know exited earlier, even though they had come across them before.

As said before, I am an observer of people by nature, and as a result I have learned how a lot of pieces fit together and why some people are moved and others are not by who and how I am as a person. I don't change myself to manipulate them to my own ends, however I do find ways to better engage them through the stories I tell, the examples I use. We all act on the narrative we hold, and while the stories that engage me might engage many others, many more might need a different base to grow understanding.

In some ways it is like those slide nights of old where some family member would show and fondly talk about holiday snaps to people who weren't on the holiday and have no connection or interest in it. You had to be there, could be a way to sum this kind of thing up. In a training session, that really isn't good enough as if one loses the audience through insensitivity to what drives them, it isn't easy to get them back.

What i find is that a lot of people create blogs that are disjointed in regard to the creator, where each piece doesn't reflect who is writing or the experience, it is just kind of there to fill up space, to get some writing out, to give a target for curators to vote on. There is no real purpose behind it, no audience in mind when it was written.

Disengaging.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]