Sunday 21st March 11:20

"Would You Rather Fly Or Be Invisible?"

Hi everyone,

As a trainer, I'm a great believer in using little snippets of time. Those are the minutes on courses when nothing else is happening, such as the waiting time when people are coming back from coffee, lunch, groupwork, natural breaks, meetings, whatever.

Anyhow, I've found that in these little snippets of time, you can engage people in really valuable discussions which, because they're not part of the official training programme, catch people in relaxed - and therefore more learnable - frames of mind.

On one recent course, I found myself in just such a situation. It was post-lunch, and during lunch I'd been catching up on my emails where I'd read an interesting survey carried out by a radio station on the following question:

"If you had superhero status, would you rather be able to fly or be invisible?"

So, as we waited for the stragglers to return from lunch, I put this same question to the early returnees.

Before long, everyone was in animated discussion. It emerged that on the whole the men preferred the flying option so that they could get their kids to soccer practice quicker and beat the rush hour traffic while the women opted to become invisible so that they could sit in on conversations that others were having about them.

From this, a wider discussion developed with the suggestion that the men wanted to fly to beat others and the women wanted to be invisible because they lacked self-confidence.

The funny thing was, I didn't have to do much to move the discussion on. It happened pretty much spontaneously. And of course as the latecomers arrived and sensed the fun that was going on, they wanted to join in.

Two things emerged from that little episode. First, I've started a swipe file for other thought-provoking time-fillers. My latest one is: "Which 3 characters from history would you invite to dinner and why?" The second thing is my realisation that no time on a training course is ever wasted. As a result of the superhero discussion, I'm convinced that the whole tone of the course became more relaxed. It was as if there had been a shift in how people saw me, saw the course, and even saw the nature of learning.

It's a pity I've not returned to do any further training with this group. I'd love to know how they're getting on.

If only I could fly to them and be invisible...

Best wishes,

Eric

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