Motivation
Training Exercises and Resources

This exercise helps delegates realise what values they are impressed with the most, so that they can then relate these values back to themselves.

This powerful exercise is ideal for motivating people and helping them identify their true goals in life. Most people are aware of only a few objectives and desires. For the rest of, they don’t think of them every day or even every month. Yet, if asked they still express their desire in possession of something or going through a particular experience.

This relates to what is known as the “law of attraction”. This captures the simple principle that “like attracts like”. If you are positive and think of positive goals most often, you are more likely to get them. If you don’t think of these goals and you are not constantly aware of them, you are less likely to reach them.

This exercise helps you demonstrate the power of this important law and also allows people to realise which areas of their lives needs more attention.

This exercise is ideal for courses on self-motivating, motivating others and goal setting.

Use this exercise to motivate people and help them to view an experience differently. This exercise is fairly simple to execute and yet quite effective. The essence of the exercise is to show that even the most negative experiences can be quite educational and useful in the long run and that if one does not see the benefits, others might be able to see it and bring it to their attention. This exercise is also useful to practice improving emotional intelligence and empathising with others.

It has become fashionable to place motivational posters on the walls in the companies. Depending on the nature of the organisation, this can be seen in two ways; a propaganda campaign by the management to make the workers work harder or an attempt to remind the workers of certain values held by the organisation.

With the first view the posters may look nice but usually do little to lift moral, educate or motivate. Various formats are used but usually those that have a generic picture with some bland slogan are the ones that are despised the most. They usually have a dark background, a central picture and a slogan at the bottom. Most often these slogans are single words, such as “Prosperity”, “Motivation”, “Ambition” or “Stability”. Perhaps, the idea is that by seeing “Motivation” (and some random picture) on the wall every day, people become more motivated!

Well, you need to make a bit more of an effort than that to motivate people.

Posters which are used in the workplace to remind us of the organisation’s values are often not very effective. They might be noticed the first time seen on the wall but it is then filtered out the same way we filter out those motivational posters or intrusive advertisements.

Both of these views seem to be problematic although the general ideal of being repeatedly reminded of something is a good one. In fact, productivity gurus have been recommending using this technique for years and if implemented well they can have great effects.

As a successful trainer, you must be able to perform at your best every time you provide a training course. Your aim is not only to teach a given subject to delegates, but to also entertain them and make the event more memorable. So in order to boost your delegate’s learning, you need to be a good entertainer as well as a fantastic educator.

Your performance as a trainer is also observed by your client or the training agency that you work with. Therefore each training course is an opportunity for you to advertise your skills.

Trying to be an entertainer and educator is not easy and can put a lot of demand on you. If due to your previous success you have lined up a complex schedule of training courses, you need to make sure you stay sharp and focused for every single training delivery.

Here, you will be introduced to 6 powerful methods that can help you stay in shape mentally and have a successful delivery every time.

During a training course several topics are often covered. Each of these topics leads to a number of actions that will help improve delegates’ behaviour or skills in the future.

However, many of these actions might not be carried out. After the course, delegates can easily get carried away by other demands on their time and soon the ideas explored in the course will be forgotten.

In order to help delegates apply the learning from course to their lives you can get them to commit to certain actions and increase the likelihood that they will engage in specific post-course activities to reinforce learning.

This exercise helps delegates identify what might stop them from committing to the tasks and identify solutions for each obstacle. The exploration of these obstacles is fun and the exercise helps to motivate delegates in following up with actions after the course.

Ideally, you should run this exercise at the end of the course just before recap and end-of-course summary.

Fast forward to an imaginary future. You are receiving a standing ovation. The applause does not seem to stop. People admire you and your achievement. You are the centre of attention at this moment.

Full immersion in this simple visualisation can create a wonderful and positive feeling. This exercise helps to turn this energy into something that will benefit people by getting them closer to this dream.

This technique is particularly useful for those who might be wondering what they want to do in life or thinking that what they are currently doing is not what they want to do forever. By focusing on an emotional event such as receiving a standing ovation, you can focus their thoughts towards what they truly like as opposed to getting carried away by their current limitations or past direction.

Some questions are meant to increase our awareness about where we are and encourage us to learn from our experience. However, the way a question is formulated can make a huge difference in what you get out of it. This is applicable both to asking the question as a trainer or asking the question from yourself when self-reflecting.

In fact, there is a class of such questions called reflections on past performance. Here, you will be introduced to these questions and will see how to formulate them correctly for the best results.

To start, consider the following questions...

This is a very effective yet simple icebreaker. Delegates get to choose a contemporary or historical figure and share their choice with the class. These choices will help everyone to get to know each other better. In addition, it also helps the trainer to know the delegates better and use this knowledge during the course to tailor the training.

Imagine delivering a training course to delegates who are half sleep. Is there any point in carrying on? Sure enough, you still get paid for the current session; but surely that’s not your only aim when providing training.

Providing a training course is very much like playing a game. You want to win not just once, but repeatedly. When it comes to winning a particular game (say a board game such as Risk), your aim is not to win only once. Anyone can do that. You could get lucky, you could cheat or you could get away with other people’s mistakes, ignorance or simply lack of interest in the game.

The problem with this mentality is that soon, you will not have any more games to play. People will remember you as the dodgy, cheating player so they will stay away from you or will all gang up against you to make sure that you lose.