Can you remember the excitement of your favourite TV show? Maybe it was a particular person/character you saw on screen. Maybe it was as simple as that familiar feeling of your heart fluttering when you heard the music? Or maybe you have more recent memories of binge watching an entire season of gripping TV late into the night?

Maybe you are a soap fan? Maybe you like a good quiz? Maybe reality TV is something that has enhanced your life? Maybe, like me, you were screaming at your GBBO TV screen last week that the rather wonderful Richard "woz ROBBED!!!!!!!!"

Whatever genre our TV preferences fall under, there is a good chance that we like to be entertained, we like to feel warm and fuzzy, we like to be challenged & occasionally we like to be informed.

I reflected upon this when asked recently "who should I follow on Twitter?"

A great question. How to put it into words? What makes me press the 'Follow' button? What makes me ignore them and hope they go away? What makes me press the Block button so that they never enter my twitterverse again?

As ever, it is a combination of the logical and the emotional that informs my decision. As ever, too, I realise that as a trainer I can learn from this experience.

You see I find myself saying: "the people I follow are more BBC than ITV"

The reason I say this, is not because I am a cultural snob (Broadchurch was rather wonderful after all). It is because I want to be engaged. I want to be informed. I want to be challenged. What I don't want is to be bombarded with adverts and no acknowledgement of me.

So what on earth has this got to do with training I hear you cry! Everything is my reply :-)

When we enter the training room as a learner we are nervous; we want to learn, but we don't want to know we are wrong. We want to feel safe, but we don't want to feel there is nothing we can do to better ourselves.

Or in other words we want to be engaged, informed and challenged.

For this to happen, we don’t want to spend the day just hearing what the person at the front of the room knows. We want to learn for ourselves. We want to share, to listen, to discuss, to try, to laugh at our errors and cheer on the successes in the room.

For this to happen it can never just be about the person at the front of the room. Instead it is about creating exercises that capture the imagination of the learner; an environment when we, as learners, are immersed and engaged.

You see once we are thus immersed we can forget where we are, we relax and we behave ‘normally’. Thus we enter what I often call ‘Facilitator Heaven’ – because at this precise moment barriers are down & people are acting instinctively. The impact of those behaviours are played out in a way that is safe, a way that allows us to discuss, to reflect, to conclude and, above all, to plan for the future.

It is about giving our learners a complete learning experience. Our personal wisdom and insight as trainers is part of it. But never forget that we are there to facilitate the creation of knowledge in the minds of our learner and not just tell them what we already know.