Are You A Boring Trainer?

Let’s be honest: the battle for people’s attention is an uphill one. It can be tough to get an audience to listen, let alone learn.

Imagine giving a presentation before an audience but all they are doing is scrolling through their phones, chatting with each other while some are even dozing off. Tough, right?

No matter how hard you try, sometimes, it just seems impossible to get trainees to not just truly learn something, but to be eager to put what they’ve learned into practice.

To find out what makes a training boring, is to zero in on the factors affecting training impact and efficiency. Let us have a look;

Reading from slides. 

Simply reading text on a slide instead of explaining it tends to cause your audience to stop listening and their minds to shut down. After all, they can just as easily read it for themselves (and more often than not, much faster than you can read it aloud).

Too much text on slides.

Unsurprisingly, text-heavy visuals are heavy on the eyes, which is no help at all in keeping your listeners awake, especially if your presentation happens to be scheduled in the afternoon.

Spending too much time preparing slides

And not enough time getting ready for the actual presentation or training activity, itself. Many trainers make the mistake of equating slide preparation with preparation for the act of presenting. Your presentation skills will really determine how engaged your audience will be.

Forgetting about the trainees. 

Still other trainers get so caught up in preparing what the trainees need to know, that they overlook the need to put themselves in the trainees’ shoes. As a result, they forget to ask questions such as, “Would the audience find this interesting?”

Get them involved. Conduct a Question and Answer Session. Have them engage in activities that will illustrate a practical example of what you are teaching.

Speaking longer than 10 minutes. 

Studies suggest that people being presented to (as is usually the case during training events) really only pay attention for about 10 minutes, after which their concentration and engagement tend to decline.

Using too much figures and facts

Have you ever listened to a speaker who just uses facts, figures and statistics? After a while it just blends in. To engage your audience, every 3 to 5 minutes there should be a story, anecdote, analogy, exercise, question or example. In other words, create a picture in the mind of the attendee. For example, a number of years ago, one speaker wanted to show how terrorism has affected countries. Instead of just showing numbers, he showed a slide with pictures of ruined buildings, victims. The picture is memorable the facts would soon be lost.

Lack of preparation

As cliché as this sounds, practice makes perfect! There is no argument about it. The best trainers prepare and practice their presentation so that it flows from one point to another. On the other hand the boring presenter talks a lot, but never gets to the point or makes it clear what he/she is talking about. It’s so confusing that you tune out and focus on other things to do.

Bottom line;

Enjoy it! Try to have fun, it helps you relax and you’ll be more natural and engaging. This will in turn make your presentation more appealing and the audience will remain engaged and take more information away with them.

Looking to improve your training skills and make your presentations engaging? Sign up for this Training of Trainers course today!