If your doing the same thing all the time more than likely your bored and so is your audience. Worst still they have fallen into line with your delivery pattern and know what you are going to do, when you are going to do it and have even judged how effective it will be before you even start. I have talked about this topic before in one of my 56 second videos – Being Different. I found this video at YouTube which is really quite funny and as I found out by watching the news last night as a little test, quite true.
The point being made by the video is that often it is easier and quicker to be complacent and follow a standard format when carrying out a certain task. But it is also boring and predicable. I stopped watching the TV news and current affairs shows a long time ago for this reason and that I only partially believe what they were reporting. They tell you part of the story, what they think you want to know and do it with a predicable format that you barely even notice when one story begins or ends. Is your training like this?
So where do I get my news from? Basically my main source of news is the Internet via short to the point news briefs, blogs and news aggregators. Particularly in regard to my profession the Internet provides a constant stream of up to date, breaking, worldwide news and information. It’s how I stay informed. I do it using two tools, RSS Feeds and Google Alerts. I am going to talk about Google Alerts in another blog as I am still playing around with this tool but RSS Feeds are critical to every trainer. If yo haven’t got a Google Account yet and turned on the Google Reader do it straight after reading this post. You should subscribe to a couple of blogs and check them daily if not weekly as part of your development process. If you want to find excellent blogs on whatever topic try Technorati or Google Blog Search. A fair amount of people read this blog from the stats that I look at but only 6 people have subscribed. Subscribing costs nothing and is as simple as clicking on the RSS feed line at the top right hand corner of the screen. Do this and you get approximately a post a day of new training information that has appeared on the Internet. To do this I read approximately 500 posts a day and sift out what is useful. You can also post to this site and make comments about what you want to see.
Take control of your development. Learn something new everyday. Change the way you develop, deliver and review training and you will never be accused of being complacent. Don’t let yourself down, don’t let your students down.
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