Having provided readers with her preview of Training Zone Live, event blogger Aleta Morgan, shares her learning points and other experiences from the day.
I got up on 16 May at 5.15am with the purpose of getting to Training Zone Live in London with time to get some breakfast. As with training sessions, you can plan, you think you have all eventualities covered but sometimes you can’t control everything.
So, we couldn’t have anticipated that a car accident would leave us in gridlock for over an hour and a half and would result in our late arrival. In an ironic twist, myself and my training manager arrived in time to attend Peter Honey’s “It couldn’t happen to a trainer”.
After missing out on the first workshop we decided to split up and I attended Steve Read's “Modern Leadership” workshop whilst my line manager went to Peter Honey’s workshop (I'll bring you his personal experience on this workshop once he is back from annual leave).
Steve Read’s workshop got me and other attendees thinking a lot about what great leadership is and do we do enough to recognise leaders and develop them within our companies. One of the interesting points of this workshop, and something that I will take incorporate into my future training workshops, is the idea of “followership” and encouraging those who aren’t in a leadership position to be an effective follower and for them to understand their role within the company.
The point that was raised around this is that not everyone who works within a company wants to be a leader or to progress and just because they may not have leadership ambitions it doesn’t mean that they cannot be developed within their role. In fact, developing their ability to challenge effectively and to give constructive feedback has a positive knock-on effect to develop leaders and improve the company overall. Given that most of the people I will be training will be in “followership” positions, I will be using concepts from this workshop in the training plans I will be devising in the future.
After a delicious lunch I attended “The secret of emotional intelligence and behavioural change for exceptional leadership” by Seven Suphi. She kindly gave us all a free copy of her best-selling book “Authentic Catalyst”. Seven went on to show how we can explore our emotional intelligence to improve the way we learn.
She also touched upon how we could be driven by emotions to get results that we are hoping for. Sometimes these can be positive emotions and sometimes they can be negative emotions, although Seven advised that being driven by negative emotions, such as fear, is not sustainable and can often have a detrimental effect on the body.
This workshop provided many lessons that I can not only use in future training but in my day-to-day life.
Finally it was John Seymour’s workshop on NLP solutions for organisational problems. John gave us a simple yet mind blowing demonstration of how NLP works. He asked each of us to push our body to our physical limit then with a simple few NLP techniques we were all able to improve this by 50%. That demonstration alone showed me that, although it seems a cliché, we can achieve what we really want to achieve.
This small lesson has driven me to go beyond my personal comfort zone in a bid to develop myself further in areas, that before attending Training Zone Live, I didn’t think I could ever achieve in. It has also helped me to adapt my training styles to show others just how in control they are of their learning.
Overall the day gave me many tips which I have started to use in recent training sessions. And it also gave me lessons that will help improve my personal life too.
Aleta Morgan is customer service trainer at Simply Health.
