Why Most Workshops Don’t Work
You can be told something. You can figure it out yourself. Only one of those changes you.
I dread bad training.
You know the feeling. You block off the time, you show up, you sit through it. A trainer reads from their own slides for an hour. Nobody is talking with the group. They're talking at it. And then it is over, and life goes back to exactly the way it was before. Nothing changes.
It is not that the content is always bad. Sometimes it is genuinely good. The problem is that being told something is very different than being in an environment where you are figuring out something for yourself.
When you figure something out for yourself, that is when things change.
I facilitate learning by creating experiences for people to learn, instead of just telling them the knowledge.
Think about learning to drive. Someone could explain parallel parking to you in extraordinary detail. Draw you a diagram. Walk you through every step verbally. And you would still have absolutely no idea how to do it until you got behind the wheel and tried.
Skills work the same way. You have to practice them. In real time. And then you have to make them yours, connect them to your specific situation, and to your values, before they have any chance of sticking.
That is what I think about every time I sit down to design a workshop or program. How do I get participants to experience the knowledge so when they leave, it's theirs?
There is a difference. It changes everything.
What people tell me
How do I know? Because people tell me. It's this feedback that gets filed away into the "self-esteem" folder I keep and refer to when I'm feeling low.
“Your presentations are the most digestible and interesting I have ever seen and are invaluable to my staff.”
“I found you to be one of the most dynamic and engaging presenters we have hosted on Zoom. You are a model for how to hold an audience remotely and I am already working with other presenters to adopt some of your techniques.”
“I forgot a workshop could feel like that.”
Those are real words from real people. Each one walked away with something real, something useful, something they could actually put into action.
That is the only kind of learning that counts.
I do this work because there is nothing quite like being in a room, virtual or otherwise, when something clicks for someone and they have a genuine "aha" moment. When you can see it happen in real-time. When a group that walked in as individuals starts thinking and building together, unlocking something they did not know they had.
That is why I built Work Wise Labs. And it is why I design every session the way I do.