Let's Improv to Improve!

I have not really covered the topics which I generally teach in my NLP for Business workshops.

As one of the topics to master in our NLP for Business training workshops, I teach the Improvisational (or Improv) technique to my participants.  The reason is that as most of you know that NLP is a form of brain training is a highly advanced skills and applications based program.  Likewise, Improv also is a highly developed application based skill that one needs to learn first hand before applying effectively.

You must be wondering as to where this concept comes from?

Improv is a dramatic arts based skill sets which are taught to actors to develop their on Spot Thinking ability.

How does it helps professionals from corporate world?  Well, read on....


Improvisation is a form of communication based art form that is also based in some principles of business.  The two worlds of art and business are not that distinct from each other.

In today's world where there is just so much going on, people tend to become stressed and burnt out from monotony.  Here, Improv helps in developing:

• Full commitment 
• Decision making
• "There are no mistakes" attitude.  As every choice you make leads to a developing proposition and progress.
• Trusting attitude 
• Being positive

If you apply Improv to any conversation, just ask yourself 3 Questions:

1. Why these people?
2. Why right here?
3. Why right now?

In which scenarios, Improv can be used as an application:

• Cracking interviews
• Decision making
• Positive psychology
• Developing a sense of humor
• Stress management
• Sales communication
• Dealing with difficult people during presentations and meetings
• If you are a ToastMasters International member - being good at your Table Topics' speeches!
• For an entrepreneur, pitching in front of investors - that one good deal that can get you raise money for your business to grow!

Improv technique enables a person to build a load of self confidence, boosting self-esteem.  Person is more in control with what ever situation life throws at him / her.  Improv is perhaps one of the few techniques that even housewives can master to deal with unpredictable situations.

It enhances your "Thinking on your Feet" ability - a term very commonly phrased in the corporate world.  In short, Improv is a life skill and once mastered, you can really have the power to turn your life around!

Learn to master Improv by signing up for one of our workshops.  We do it for entrepreneurs and professionals looking to built that link in their communication Spot On!

- Article contributed by Entrenador Shruti, a Neuro-Leadership, Communication & Business Coach.  She is an Improv specialist, Soft Skills Trainer & NLP Master Practitioner (Dr. John Grinder's edition) recognized by American Board of NLP (ABNLP).

Eye Contact in Communication

A lot of times, when I had been asked to deliver soft skills training, most of my participants had this fear of making a proper eye contact with the person they talk to.

Out of all our senses used in communication, having an eye contact tops the list of one of the most crucial form of sending a message across.

Some of my participants find it difficult to make eye contact with their audience.  When a person presents in front of say 2-3 people, they are comfortable to talk.  But when this number exceeds to about 10 or more people, the presenter finds it very hard to focus and concentrate to their trail of thoughts and lose out on confidence of speech.  This also results in stage fright and loss of confidence.

Labelled in one of the non-verbal component of communication process, making an eye contact with your audience indicates that you are focused and paying attention.  It means that you are actually listening to what the other person has to say.

So when I take a communication or presentation skills workshop, I teach the importance of eye communication.

You must be wondering as to what is the difference between eye contact and eye communication.

Eye contact can be fleeting or just a glance for a fraction of a second.  It does not necessarily indicates audience connection with the presenter.  The audience tends to loose their interest and generally stop listening to what the person has to say.  This kills the purpose of the presentation or communication process.

It also leads people to think that you are unsure of your content.  Frequent flickering of your eyes convey low self esteem, lack of control, and unconvincing.

Exercise:  In a group of 2-4 friends, talk to only one friend in the group when all of you are together.  Ignore all others present and their initiations towards being part of your conversation.  Observe what happens to the group dynamics.  

Whereas, an eye communication refers to the connection.  It:

• establishes rapport
• increases your ability to persuade and influence
• contributes towards higher attention levels
• strengthens the involvement of the listeners

Food for thought:  When you look into someone's eyes, it changes the entire conversation!

So when you are next presenting in front of a group or an audience, follow an eye communication pattern rather than eye contact pattern.

Remember, the only way to make you a better presenter, Practice, Practice and more Practice!

- Article contributed by Entrenador Shruti Misra, a Neuro-Leadership & Business Coach.  She is also a Soft Skills Trainer & NLP Master Practitioner.

Smart Cities & Future of Smart Governance

Recently, I have been approached to provide my insights in the current topic of Smart Cities & the future of good Governance. 

In order to understand the need of creation of smart cities and for those of you who are new to the topic, we need to understand how cities have evolved over a period of time.  When we look back in history, we find that every historical period is characterized by the emergence and development of cities in connection with economic and social conditions.  The practice of developing cities is called urbanization.  

According to a UN report in year 2014, it has been projected that “urbanization combined with the overall growth of world's population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050 - out of this percentage, close to 90% of the population will be demographically based in African and Asian countries.” With more than half of the world’s population residing in cities, there is an increase of human interactions with the environment. 

During the late 1800s, the world’s population living in cities was just 3% as compared with 90% people living in cities by year 2050. 

With an increasing demand of education and skilling of people to match the dynamics – both from environmental and economic conditions, the concept of smart cities have materialized. 

So what are smart cities?

Due to an ever increasing numbers of people migrating to the cities, the smart city plan conceptualizes upon providing for:

• ·         Environment:  promotion of energy saving, usage of renewable energy, and reduction of environmental pollution (especially, CO2 emissions).
• ·         Mobility:  accessible and safe transport with a focus on low environmental impact.
• ·         Citizenship: promotion of civic engagement and citizens’ creativity and lifelong learning and education, thereby, nurturing of cultural diversity.
• ·         Living:  catering to the general public health and welfare, thereby, promoting social cohesion.
• ·         Economy:  creation of a flexible labour market; support for entrepreneurship and innovation, targeting women and young people in particular.
• ·         Government and political participation:  adoption of transparent decision-making and creation of accessible online services, thereby, promoting of political participation.

What it means for us?

Well, the concept of smart cities and smart governance is to help with the betterment of how we will perceive our future in this century.  The 20^th century had revolutionized the world with the onset of computers, while the 21^st century has experienced the rate the technologies are evolving to add quality meaning in the way a common man lives.  This has pushed the governments to think how to balance the lives of their citizens with minimum impact upon the environment with the growing population dynamics and keep pace with increased world exposure on technology based changes. 

With increase in education exposures, we are becoming more accustomed towards technology.  This means that Information & Communications Technology (ICT) has become an integral part of our lifestyle.  We have become highly accustomed to the internet and digital technology in all areas of our lifestyle (see picture for a graphical representation).

In order to effectively manage these segments of our society, we need smart governance and administration.  There is a strong need for our governments to design and implement policies which are effective for the society as a whole.  Our leaders and government officials need smart systems and tools to coordinate across different departments, sectors and agencies in order to have full access to data, information sharing and implementation of schemes, overseeing welfare and development.

Need for Smart Governance

The aim of smart or e-governance is to make the system more transparent and citizens more informed. Government information will no longer be a repository of few public officials or servants but accessible by all sections of society.  Countries like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Angola and many others are making government information digital across all segments. This has derived many positive results and value for citizens. 

Web portals, online forums, mobile apps and their unified services have helped public to directly share their questions, suggestions and grievances to government authorities.  One such example is that of the RTI application process.  In India RTI act was passed to empower ordinary citizen about the working of public offices.  Anyone can file an RTI application and know answers about government policies, funds allocation and implementation, publication of tenders, delays and discrepancy and get a reply within a stipulated time. 

To summarize, if our cities are to meet the challenges of tomorrow, the smart city agenda needs more clarity, and more innovative and ambitious objectives. Better technology to support business as usual is no longer sufficient. Therefore, by focusing on inhabitants, be they individuals, businesses or the community at large, and setting an aim for real outcomes that will impact them, city leaders can reinvent their institutions, improve services and build the infrastructure of the digital age in order to deliver public service for the future. The urban areas that fail to make the transition will be abandoned. But those that embrace a human-centered approach to their digital government strategy will thrive in the information and knowledge era. 

- Article has been contributed by Entrenador Shruti Misra, a Neuro-Leadership & Business Coach.  *All images have been taken from Google.com.

Acting in Training

Having spent about a decade in the Training industry, I have come across many trainers and coaches from all specializations - Time & stress management, Communication skills, Leadership & Team building Training, and so on.

For years, trainers have been found in all domains of expertise - be it at your technical or management training programs, assessment centers, and personal coaching.

It had been a great opportunity to learn and grow among side some good and great trainers. 

The major thing that separated the 3 groups of trainers were following traits:

• their content
• delivery and communication styles
• value additions to participant's knowledge
• participants' progress levels
• thought processes
• time invested

In today's article, I am going to put special emphasis on how acting in training actually works and how you as an employee or trainer can be benefit from my experience.

The fact is that there are two major means of getting a training program right:

• content
• delivery

Content:  The accumulation of the training content is fairly simpler.  Though, very tedious in nature and time consuming, this angle is covered very easily.

Delivery can be a little challenging.  After you have spent an eternity in organizing your content, just how do you deliver it in front of your audience?  The thing is, that one cannot really present it to people and expect them to take your word for it. You need to be pretty convincing and at the same time, be accurate in achieving your results in front of a group of people.  

So how do trainers normally manage this feet?  Simple, a little experience in acting.  One can always learn to act.  One, no matter how sincere or high on integrity is, have to act out their part convincingly in front of an audience.  With information being so easily available on the internet and books these days, a human touch should have an upper hand in a training program.

Great trainers understand the importance of acting in training.  Good trainers manage to implement certain ideologies of acting in training.  Not so good trainers are the ones who are either poor delivers or over do the acting part of the training program.  

Allow me to share an example:  I had, during my initial corporate training profile met this gentleman, who was asked by my company to deliver a training program on Time Management & Goal Setting.  It was a one day training program and my manager decided to elect me for the program from my department.  As I was new to the organization, I was really looking forward to gain new learning and knowledge from this program.  I had heard that the trainer was a very experienced and senior professional from a very known organization.  Naturally, I was super excited to attend this program.  However, the things that I had been expecting from the program never came.  I waited entire day for that to surface.  Mind you - I really had a good time but from my recollections, I only remember laughing my head off.  There was more content on jokes, a little on time and very much on stress buster.  Nothing on Goal Setting.  Not really what I was expecting and definitely not what was really handy at that point of time in that particular moment of my professional journey.  End result- the training was a complete failure in my eyes.

So what happened here?

Years later, I sat down, in the same organization, though this time I was handling corporate Learning & Development department, with one other senior L&D professional.  We came out listing few things we really wanted to see in our trainers:

1. Professionalism
2. Content in line with our expectations
3. Intense interview processes to select very carefully our trainers for respective topics during one year at a time
4. DELIVERY STYLE

We, as trainers, need to ensure, that though we are subject matter experts, we are not over loading you with more information than what you can handle.  At the same time, we also need to fast track your information download.

Acting with good presentation skills play a key role in getting this job done in much simpler forms.  by incorporating certain games and activities, with relevance to your experiences, it becomes a lot easier for you to understand and decode the information provided to you in a training program. 

Here, the concept of acting, in terms of role plays and mock practical sessions, help you gain an insight in a topic more quickly.  In short, training today is more focused towards promoting experiential based learning than earlier role plays methodology.

Did you know that today training has a lot of theater components imbibed to make it more fun and easier to decipher more challenging concepts?

If you want to know how so, do keep reading.

• Case Studies

Customized script writing or case studies pertaining to one particular industry or related companies are in fashion today.  

These help you to think from various view points.  Based on the perception, that there are more than one way to solve a problem, this methodology helps develop your creative and critical thinking, along with problem solving mindset.

• Improvisational Techniques

This is a very unique type of training.  Improvisation or Improv technique is used today for developing effective brainstorming ability in people.  It also helps people to develop a mindset and open up towards crucial change management processes within a person's professional or personal life.

It helps create an emotional intelligence skill in people who want to have more control over their lives and situations.

It also helps develop a strategy prone mindset in people.  From personal experience and by using this technique for more than 20 years, Improv has helped me develop a more problem solver mindset and given a confidence to be able to tackle any obstacle that comes my way in a positive and pro-active manner.  This has increased my work efficiency and got me recognized in the corporate world.

It stands as one of the most powerful and useful technique today.

Entrenador Consulting offers a special training workshop on how to develop your Improv technique effectively.  It can be availed as part of the a separate training workshop or as part of NLP for Business advanced training programs.  To know more, get in touch with our Chief Trainer - Entrenador Shruti Misra for more information.

• Role Plays

This is one of the most popular techniques used today.  It forces a person to put himself / herself in other people's shoes under a controlled environment and to come up with solutions to problems which are directly in proportional to their businesses or departments.

This concept has evolved drastically from mere script reading to hard core problem acting and solutions creation today.

• Non - verbal communication

The only way to teach or train a person in a non-verbal communication or mastering micro expressions today is through acting.

Not only one is exposed to a variety of expressions that people use across cultures or geographies but also gives one a sense of mastery on the subject and achieve their goals.  It helps improve one's inter personal and people management skills.

Our Entrenadors / Coaches are masters of non-verbal communication.  Entrenador Shruti Misra is a specialist on non-verbal communication through her years of training and mastering on the subject.  She also has a background in theater.

Theater is used extensively today in training programs to provide clients with building an exceptional leadership & communication skills. 

Entrenador Consulting believes that for one to be a successful person, one needs to become master on all forms of communication techniques and tools available to develop their neural acuities.  Everyone can become successful if only we develop the right and clear mindset towards our goals. 

Destiny is really in our hands!