A little while ago, a top bloke I know mentioned that training facilitation is more about leading people through a series of states; In short, excellent facilitation is about states. I couldn’t agree more with him even if I didn’t want too. He is absolutely right.
As a training facilitator, one of the core and prime skills ( in addition to knowing your stuff and walking your talk ) is to be able to create states in yourself and of course other people.
In his extremely well presented and excellent book ‘The LITTLE BOOK of BIG STUFF ABOUT the BRAIN‘ by Andrew Curran a particularly relevant paragraph is this
“… some 30 or 40 years ago a very smart chap called Donald Hebb argued you learn things because your nerve cells join together in a way that makes them fire together. He said that ‘Nerve cells that fire together wire together’. What is also know is that this wiring together of nerve cells is predominantly under the control of your emotional system – the more emotion in a situation the more likely it is you will learn from it…”
This can be taken to mean
boring, dull uncharismatic, unemotional presenters who simply can’t be bothered, their messages will likely not be remembered very well and soon forgot.
The obverse is if you are lively, shiney, emotional, provocative and love what you do, dynamic – your messages, learning points and applications are much more likely to be remembered and acted upon and made use of in much bigger contexts.
nigel hetherington
Communicating Excellence
Excellence in NLP ( Diplomacy 😉 ) and Clinical Hypnotherapy
