One of the joys of working as a trainer at Capgemini Academy is the frequency with which I’m expected to be on the receiving end of their courses. Just tonight I completed their ‘Vision and Didactic skills’ course, one of their requirements for Certified Trainer status and a rich source of theoretical knowledge (Behaviorism, Kolb, Leary) and practical applications ready-made for use in my own courses. I’ve been a trainer (on and off) for 13 years now, but this is the first time I’ve felt like I have the beginning of a firm grounding in didactic theory.

One of the lessons learned at the course, though, came from an unexpected source.

In one of the activities in the course, each of the participants was asked to give a brief presentation on a subject of one’s choosing. Since we were expected to be creative and take risks, I decided to try an improv theatre game with my group. This game simply consists of having the group tell a story. The catch is that the story must be told one word at a time. So with my group of five, by the time the first participant gets to say a second word, four other words have come in between and the story has flown off on a tangent. It’s a game of responding without rational thought, of letting go of one’s preconceptions, and other worthwhile things, but it’s also jolly good fun, as the English would say.

My ‘students’ had crowded around one end of the long table, making it hard for me to stand centered before them and manage the process (i.e. point rapid-fire at each of them in succession to keep the single words coming). So I chose to perch my right butt cheek on the edge of the (narrow) table a few feet from the first student, and lean in, thus achieving the center position I needed.

The story-telling commenced, got up to speed, and resulted in the kind of hilarous, surrealistic tale it always does. The end of the game, but not the end of the exercise.

The purpose of the exercise, of course, was not to produce a weird little story, but to provide a didactic learning experience for myself and the rest. So there was a feedback round attached to it. Some of the participants praised my enthusiasm and ease; others had trouble understanding what the deeper purpose of this game could be in a real-life course. Most of this feedback was expected and thus safe.

But then X* started in on me.

What didn’t improve matters was that X was the least favorite of my fellow students. Nothing specific, she just rubbed me the wrong way somehow. That may explain why it took me over a month to accept the lesson I learned from her feedback. Because when I listened to X at the time, my first reaction was one of disbelief and outrage at the pettiness of her comment, and amazement at the way she ignored all the important points about my game only to nag about her pet peeve.

So what did X say about my presentation, I hear you ask?

She said, or rather almost exclaimed, with barely hidden outrage in her voice, that in her opinion a trainer should never, ever, ever have the nerve and impertinence to sit on the table, let alone lean in and hulk over one of the students like that!

Tonight, over a month after that first training day, I’ve finally realized that there’s a lesson for me here, and that lesson is this. My very informal, easy-going, laid-back style of teaching, while it has served me well over the last decade and a half, rubs some people the wrong way. Big time.

And after that lesson finally got through my thick skull tonight, I was suddenly able to listen to X with much less prejudice, and ignore the muck of things that annoyed me, and filter out the gems of her worthwhile comments.

I’ll have to do some mulling on this one. Back to you, Jim.

* Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Or in this case, the guilty.