On a recent flight from Chicago to Atlanta, where I was conducting a workshop, my seat mate was a trainer for a major insurance company in the United States.

Of course, when she found out I too am a professional trainer, we spent the next couple of hours sharing mentor training and coaching war stories, comparing notes on effective training techniques, discussing how to deal with difficult participants, and the latest research on learning theory.

Part of her job was to train her company on the implications of new laws and policies effecting the insurance industry. She said that more often than not, this involves helping employees get on top of and understand legal documents, company policy statements, new application forms, billing statements and procedures – not exactly the most stimulating reading for most of us!

“In fact, truth be told”, she said, “most of these training sessions are downright sleep inducing, for myself included! But it’s training I’ve got to do. Do you have any suggestions on how I could ‘juice up’ these sessions?”

I started talking to her about multiple intelligences and gave her a copy of a special report I had written called “Using Multiple Intelligence SmartStrategies™ In Training” and showed her how to use them.

The process is simple. I suggested that she choose one strategy from each of The 8 Kinds of Smart which would help her meet her objectives for the training. After thinking about how to use each strategy to achieve those objectives, then design the training session incorporating those strategies into the training session itself.

Here’s chart of the 8 intelligences followed by an outline of the training session she designed:

The Training Outline

1. There were usually about 20 to 25 people in one of her training sessions. She first of all divided the group in teams of three or four people who were assigned a portion of the material to master and then teach to the rest of the group (PeopleSmart)

2. The teams had to read and discuss their assigned information (WordSmart).

3. While reading and discussing, each team was to create a “web” of their information (LogicSmart) to help them sort out and analyze the key points of their assigned information.

4. Each team then had to make a poster to visually present its information to the rest of the group (ImageSmart).

5. As part of their presentation they had to create a short skit to demonstrate how to use their information and how it’s important (BodySmart; and

6. They had to make up a jingle or some kind of musical piece (like the ones used in advertisements on TV) to help others in the larger group remember the key points of their information (SoundSmart) . The teams could not just explain their information verbally!

7. As part of the handout materials, each participant was given a personal reflection log. After all of the presentations, participants were given time to reflect in their logs on how the information they had learned in this session would impact their daily work (SelfSmart).

After conducting the first session of this Different Kind of Training, my seat mate called me. She was very excited about the results.

“David, you would not believe the range of delightful and creative ideas the teams came up with to present their material to the rest of the group—there were skits, murals, flow charts, songs, and, yes, some logical explaining.”

Do you think people found these sessions boring? Anything but! In fact, she reported to me that participants left the training session invigorated and feeling they had really learned something new to help them in their work.

They had mastered a huge amount of material – more than most could have mastered in a relatively short period of time alone. And they remembered it many weeks after the training was completed!

What allowed this to happen? The “multimodal” teaching and learning structure, designed by the trainer using the SmartStrategies™. You can literally do what this woman did with any training!

Now I am NOT saying that every training session you do must rival Ringling Brother’s Barnum & Bailey Circus.

But I AM saying that if you want to Reach Everyone, Everytime, and know that people will leave your training having genuinely understood your information, you’ve got to present it in a variety of ways to appeal to the different intelligences, which I promise you are present in any group you train or to whom you make a presentation!

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