Trainers Acts and Their Impact on the Learner

By Stephanie Burns

Professional trainers are a special breed. To do their job competently they require a broad range of behaviours exceeded perhaps only by versatile actors. What a trainer can do on stage, or in front of a classroom, is based solely on the range of expression and behaviour available to that trainer - only the behaviours that can convincingly be manifested in everyday situations are those that will be available when working in training sessions. There is no way to be a different person, with different natural behaviours, by the mere fact of coming to a standing position to talk. Uninteresting people will be uninteresting trainers unless they take steps to become interesting in some way. People whose behaviours make others feel incompetent, will become trainers who make many others feel incompetent. If you do not listen to others in your family you will not listen to students in a classroom - What we do and what we can do on stage, is merely a reflection of what we have learned to do in other communication contexts. As I said recently to a group of trainers in Melbourne: If you bore people around the dinner table, you will do that even better on stage.

Increasing Range of Behaviours

If we observe outstanding trainers, one component of their excellence is the broad and appropriate range of behaviours and expressions they bring from life into the classroom. For example, if you want to become more precise in your gestures on stage, then those new gestures need to be developed by some kind of life activity over time. It is not enough to tell a trainer how to use his or her hands, or how to stand, or to make eye contact. If the behaviours are not natural, they look acted, stilted, sometimes silly, and always incongruent. Our range of behaviours and expressions are learned in life, through experience.

The performance of a trainer on stage is simply an exaggeration of the behaviours that are used in everyday experiences. One thing I know for certain is that there is no way to improve one's performance on stage while working on stage.

There is a myth that experience on stage is the pre-eminent path to becoming a competent trainer. This simply doesn't make sense. Through repetition we only get better at what we already know how to do. On stage you can not focus on your outcomes and on your performance at the same time. Most trainers have no doubt had the experience of trying out some new 'technique' only to lose everything else that was good about our performance. A trainer can not effectively educate others who are not listening to them, who do not perceive them as credible, or who are sceptical because of that shifty thing they do with their eyes. Like it or not.. as a trainer, other people's perceptions matter more than the trainer's personal likes and dislikes.

Analysing Your Performance

The first, and single most important task I have when working with trainers as students, trainers I might add who are already competent in their profession is to assist them in analysing their own performances and identifying the acts, or behaviours that they are perceived as having by others. This activity is two-fold.

First, the task is to assist them in learning how to perceive and label their own acts. The second part of the task is to give the trainers a safe environment in which they can receive honest feedback from other trainers who have seen them alive a presentation on stage. This process is a critical examination. Trainers who have experienced this process are often pleasantly surprised by the strengths that are perceived by others.

By critically evaluating what the trainer is not doing on stage, and how other people perceive the acts they exhibit, they can begin to appreciate both their current strengths - those acts that are natural to them, and appropriate for their work as trainers, and the current weaknesses - either acts that are not particularly appropriate for their work as trainers, or acts that are missing altogether. It is through this analysis that they begin to pull apart their performance. And begin to see the gaps that, if filled, would lead to greater successes. Those successes might relate to achieving outcomes more consistently, or the ability to work with more diverse audiences, or even earn more money for their time.