Seminars are just information dumps
Yes, I don’t mind going to a seminar, but it’s just a newsreel.
You then have to go out and do all the hard work.
In fact, everything that’s being taught at that seminar could have been downloaded on a PDF file and an audio (if not video).
But let’s just assume people who conduct seminars don’t know what they’re doing.
Let’s assume you’re a workshop kind of person
Do you know what you’re doing?
Because as soon as you start doing a workshop, you invariably end up doing something that’s connected to the business of the participant. And that’s when you’ve made your first mistake.
And it’s a big mistake
People rarely learn anything if they start applying the concept to their own business.
They get too tangled in their own business.
Of course they haven’t even understood the concept yet.
So when we have live workshops (they’re not seminars) in California, we’ll ask the audience: Do you get this concept? They say yes. We send them on an assignment, and they get it wrong. And part of the problem is that when they’re sitting in a group doing that assignment, their buddies are rarely conversant or interested in the other person’s business. And almost within minutes their buddies will either misunderstand the concept or tune off.
The trick to getting everyone on the same page is to give them an assignment that doesn’t involve their business. Something they can all partially relate to like sushi, or yoga, or a restaurant.
So let’s say you take the concepts and apply it to a yoga school
Then what we have is a situation that’s very easy to imagine, even if you’ve never been to yoga (and usually at least 30-50% of them have already been to yoga). And they have to apply the concept to the yoga school. Of course they still get it wrong, but now there’s group effort, and everyone’s interested (there’s no tuning off).
They go back. And it’s fix, fix, fixity fix.
And yes, at some point I let them work on their own business if they choose to, but they always find it harder to work on their own business. That’s because whatever you’ve been teaching is usually extremely hard to comprehend. The information is too new, and they’re bound to make mistakes. Unless they start owning and understanding the concept, they don’t get implementation right.
The yoga school concept helps them focus on:
1) Understanding the concept.
2) Getting everyone on the same page.
3) Keeping everyone alert and vibrant.
4) Making mistakes without fear of ‘oh, it will affect my business, so I need to get this right.’
5) And learning the concept so that it’s easy to implement.
This is where the crossover begins
It’s only when the participants have gone through the process of hearing, understanding, talking, fixing, breaking, discussing the concept—that implementation is possible with few mistakes. And that’s when they can apply the concept to their own business.
And that’s why you need to have a third-party business they can work on.
If you’re really interested in teaching, that is.
Otherwise you can just give a seminar instead



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1 Why Shock And Awe Is A Waste of Time (When Teaching) // Nov 24, 2008 at 1:01 pm
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