Trainer Tested

“Why do you feel that your team needs to be trained?”

“What are the takeaways you expect from me?”

These are the two questions I ask, when I am being hired as a trainer.

Unlike physical regimens of soldiers and athletes, most managerial training sessions, irrespective of the settings, are often initiated and conducted without a defined purpose or end-state in mind. The question, what triggered the need to call a trainer, seldom elicits credible response. Training sessions, under such conditions are trainer-dependent and gravitate towards being ‘tales’ “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. Such sessions are often recycled wide-spectrum templates. Training, if not specifically customized is no training. The state can be best compared to the difference between the well-fitted and the ill-fitted. Adequately customized training enables the trainee, to no end.

My experience with performers, consistent and erratic, brilliance that flamed out and winners who started slow ( i being one amongst them), taught me that inherent to each individual and organisation is the wherewithal and more, for growth sustenance and success. What is required, is a catalyst to initiate the search for inner strengths and fuel the journey ahead.

As a trainer, to be of any credible value, I had to empower myself with requisite knowledge and techniques. I spend a lot of time reading, researching, observing events as they unfolded and understanding the unseen and unsaid. My formal training in NLP, certainly helped. Real life events and the human dynamics behind it triggered the articles I wrote and published this year. I could finally derive a matrix for evaluating success.

Little did I realise that I would be tested as the year drew close. An acquaintance of someone, who had attended my programme got in touch with me to find if I can take on a session with 'few' teenagers. More out of my compulsion to be tried and tested in the most demanding of situations, I agreed.  The ‘few’ turned out to be more than 200 high-voltage teenagers, brimming and bubbling with endless energy. Four sessions of 2 to 21/2 hours each, in batches of 50 to 60, over two days should have been a killer. But, when participants, don’t want a break, don’t lose interest, give their undivided attention and ask for more, either they deviated from what is expected to be 'normal for teenagers' or my spurs were real solid.

My toil has been worth it.

As I wind up my activities for the year and head for the family vacation precisely in four days, I proved to myself that one element of my success mantra, ‘Skills’ (acquisition, absorption, adaption and application) really worked.

Few years ago I was overwhelmingly voted to be the mentor for my department. 
Now a few have adopted me as their mentor to help navigate a journey called life.

Skills certainly reward.