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!