P-E-R-F-O-R-M: seven tips for maintaining professionalism

June 5, 12:19 PMWorkplace Training and Development ExaminerLenn Millbower

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Places Please for Effective Instruction

In this and the next two articles, we will examine seven tips entertainers use to perform the same old same old with freshness each and every time. We will then look for ways to apply those P-E-R-F-O-R-M tips to the training environment.

During my earlier performance career, my band was performing at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri. For the fifth time that night we were forced by an insistent crowd to repeat a song we’d become bored with. It’s not that the song (Celebration by Kool & the Gang) was terrible, it’s just that we’d had too much of it. The audience, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough. We wanted to change the lyrics from “Celebrate good times come on!” to “Can not stand this song no more!”

This experience is common to show biz professionals. Actors in a play must deliver the same exact line, thousands of exact lines in fact, night after night while appearing that the lines are coming out of his or her mouth for the first time. Comedians must deliver the same joke every night while acting as if they made it up on the spot. Classical musicians must perform the works they have spent their lifetimes learning without variation in any of the notes: ever!

This experience is also common to trainers, teachers, and presenters. Be it diversity, leadership or asbestos awareness, delivering any learning program over and over can over can become a facilitation bore. And yet, for the audience it’s the first delivery. Those participants hope for, and deserve, the trainers’ best performance. But how do you insure that each and every delivery is as fresh as the first?

In this and the next article, we will examine seven tips entertainers use to perform the same old same old with freshness each and every time. We will then look for ways to apply those P-E-R-F-O-R-M tips to the learning environment.

Tip One: Play for the Audience

Performers perform because the audience exists. There is one primary reason to put on a performance: to please an audience. Rehearsal is not a substitute. Blank walls do not applaud. Only an audience ignites the performance.

Performers who have tired of their role tune the mechanics of the role out and tune the audience in. For those watching the experience is new and, by focusing on them, the performer becomes one with the audience’s experience. The performer stops living for and enjoying the line and instead lives for, and enjoys, the audience. It is the audience’s reactions, not the delivery, that make the show a success. It is through the audience, the bored performer sees the performance as new.

In learning environments, the material, not the instructor, is the show. Great facilitators do not overshadow their learning points. Those points, and the success of the connections those points make with the trainees, determine the success of a learning event. Trainers, teachers, and presenters who have tired of the material can take a tip from performers, focus on the reaction of the audience to that material and, as a result, see the learning anew.

Tip Two: Explore the Alternatives

Performers never stop enhancing the performance. Actors are told when to enter, how to stand, where to look, what to say and which emotion to portray while saying what they have been told to say. These are confining parameters. And yet great actors, through subtle variations in the inflection, movement or look, vary their performance greatly.

Trainers, teachers, and presenters are more fortunate than actors. They are not as closely directed. There is no set character to portray, no word-for-word script to follow, and no one directing the instructor to stand on an “X.” Trainers, teachers, and presenters who become bored with their material should embrace this freedom and deliver the material in different ways. Stand in a different spot. Use a different vocal inflection. Add humor. Run an activity with a different twist. If an actor, with all the specific direction, can stave off boredom an instructor can too.

In the next two articles, we will continue offering tips to help you "celebrate" your own learning "good times!"