Have you found yourself throat dry, heart pumping, scared out of your wits? Knowing that you paid good money, made a conscious decision to do this, but not sure if you really want to feel quite so petrified?

Have you ever wondered why on earth you chose to get yourself into such a predicament that you can’t even think straight, and long to feel safe & in control once more?

So that was me the other week, 25 feet up in a tree, looking at a rather narrow & even bumpier log that I was somehow meant to cross. A log that seemed impossibly difficult to traverse but one I had just seen my 3 kids practically skipping across. “I don’t think I can do this” I squeaked. “Of course you can,” said Dave, my supremely confident instructor.

And then it hit me, no it wasn’t quite my life flashing before me, instead I found myself thinking of my work. As a trainer, is my job to be liked or to be respected?

So often ‘happy sheets’ make us obsess on whether the delegates like us (that is after all what we are asking with the end of course questionnaires) but surely what we really need to know is ‘did I help you to learn?’ In other words is respect more important than being liked?

My instructor knew the journey he wanted me to go on. He knew that the battle was in my head – I had to want to do it & feel confident that I could. Dave’s job was not to worry about what I was thinking of him, it was to help me to succeed.

To do that, his task was to show me the goal and provide the right level of support & encouragement so that I found my own way to get there. Because he applied the right amount of ‘push’ & support I found that instead of looking for a way out, I looked for the way forward. Dave did his job brilliantly, because I was at the heart of the process & not him.

There are many brilliant trainers out there like Dave, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as a profession, we could move on from happy sheet popularity contests and instead challenge ourselves to always know the answer to these questions: 

 - What do we want people to do after the training?

 - Have they done it?

 - What did they achieve as a result?