It was 1998. I was working at Mango and I had just been promoted to International Trainer. I was 24 and nothing could excite me more than grabbing my suitcase (I have the same feeling 20 years later) and travelling the world training the sales teams at the peak of the brand’s expansion. Nahman Andic, GM of Mango at that time, gave me the best professional advice I’ve ever received: ‘Emma, when giving a training session, do not get obsessed about the contents you have to say in every slide. The most important thing is reaching people’s hearts’. I am sure Nahman cannot even imagine how often this advice comes to mind and I’ve even given myself the same advice several times.
Even if nowadays teaching a course is only 20% of my professional activity, I keep on diving into the session with the same intensity as when I was 24. ‘Dose out your energy sparingly’ the experts told me when I began. I have never paid attention to them. Today, the idea of ‘reaching out’ is still there, in the deepest part of my brain, and moderating the session with unconditional passion is the least I can do for someone who is willing and able to leave his or her world on standby for a while to spend some time listening to me. I am genuinely interested in the people who attend my sessions: what their names are, what they do, what their expectations are… Because that’s the only way to adapt my speech to them (I’ve never given the same session twice, even if its title is the same. It truly bores me to repeat contents as if I were a robot. Besides, you already have YouTube if you want to watch the same content over and over) and thus achieve my coveted ‘reaching out’.
It’s true that certain groups are magical. In those sessions, thanks to a special alignment of the stars (or maybe because a mastermind managed to find the perfect mix of attendees), a brilliant combination of profiles and talents mingle in the room. The flow in those sessions is incredible (even addictive for the speaker) and, by the time you wrap up the course, you might even feel like having dinner with the attendees (well, several times I DO have dinner with them). And, exactly the opposite, sometimes there are audiences where I perceive they are not there because they really want to be or I notice a very low energy level. There, I showcase my whole circus-mode toolkit and use all my resources to shake up the participants to break the fog invading the room, so I hopefully can finally reach their hearts (I must say I also love the acrobat style).
And this is the takeaway for all those who, in one way or another, tell our stories to audiences (it could be training, a speech, a panel). Reaching out is not a matter of repeating the same jokes, mistaking disruptions for rudeness or just showcasing contents you have learnt by heart. To reach out, we must realise that the star of the room is not the speaker, but the audience. Reaching out is a humility cure.
