How to Incorporate Your Passions into Training Session

Introduction ✨🎤

As a new corporate trainer or someone looking to get into the field, you might be wondering how to make your training sessions more engaging and memorable. One of the most effective ways to do this is by incorporating your passions into your training session. I was recently reminded of this while chatting with some fellow learning professionals on the A Better Way of Life podcast. 🎙️ To watch the full episode, 👉 click here.

Whether you have a love for magic 🎩, music 🎵, sports 🏀, or storytelling 📖, bringing personal interests into the classroom can make your sessions more dynamic, relatable, and impactful. Sharing your passions provides a glimpse into your personality, which fosters authenticity in your presentation and allows you to connect with participants on a deeper level. Incorporating your passions into your training also helps keep the content fresh and stimulating for you to deliver. So let’s jump in! 🚀

In this post, we’ll explore why integrating your passions can enhance learning, practical ways to do it, and how to strike the right balance between engagement and professionalism.

Why Incorporating Your Passions Works 🎯

People learn best when training is relevant to them and immediately applicable, but let’s not forget that they also need to be engaged. When trainers bring enthusiasm, passion, and personal experiences into their sessions, learners naturally respond with increased interest and participation.

Here are some key benefits:

1. Increased Engagement 🎉 – Passion is contagious. If you’re excited about what you’re teaching, your learners will be too.

2. Memorability 🧠 – Learners retain information better when it’s tied to a unique experience, such as a story or demonstration related to your interests.

3. Authenticity 🤝 – Sharing what excites you helps build rapport with your audience and makes the learning experience more personal.

A Real-World Example 🔮

In a previous role, I used to deliver training on an email marketing tool frequently. 📧 An email marketing tool helps you send, track, and automate emails to reach your audience with features like customizable templates, automation, and analytics, among other things.

At the beginning of the training, I would have participants write down their favorite superhero 🦸‍♂️ on a slip of paper and throw it into a hat 🎩. Then, I would have one of the participants pick one of the slips of paper from the hat and read it aloud. Finally, the big reveal! 🎭

I would have them log into their computers to find an email campaign that I had scheduled to run before they even entered the classroom. The email would perfectly match the favorite superhero that had been randomly selected. 😲

I used that as a transition into showing them how I set up that email campaign and continued the training from there.

That way of opening the training session immediately captured attention 🎯, and every group I did it for consistently met their learning objectives. It drove instant engagement, and it was remarkable how many participants remembered the experience. It was authentic to a true passion of mine—magic 🎩✨—and it improved the class’s understanding.

Practical Ways to Bring Your Passion into Training 🎤📚

1. Identify Your Passions 🎯

It may sound silly because you obviously know what you are passionate about. The key is to think about which of your passions might be easiest to relate to your content and easiest to understand for your participants.

The first key, finding the easiest passions to relate to your content, is twofold. The first thing to consider is context 🧩. Can clear lines be drawn from your passion to the content you are covering? In most cases, you will be able to draw some lines, but the clearer, the better—especially when you are first starting out.

Secondly, consider how you plan to approach step two below, “reflect on connections.” Some of your passions may not lend themselves to either approach well, so you may want to go down a different avenue.

When identifying your passions, the other key is to consider what will be the easiest for your participants to understand 🤔. If you are passionate about hockey 🏒 and training in Asia 🌏, your passion won’t likely be relatable at all to that audience without a lot of upfront explanation. So, stick with topics that are widely relatable when possible.

2. Reflect on Connections 🔗

This is the practice of connecting the dots from your experiences engaging in what you are passionate about with the content that you deliver in the classroom. It can take form in a couple of different ways.

One way is to have the content in the back of your mind while you are participating in your passions and make a mental note about a connection you envision 💡. After you finish listening to your podcast 🎙️ or playing your game 🎮, take a moment to write yourself a note 📝 that you can expand on later.

The other approach is to purposely set aside time shortly after engaging in your passion to document your ideas. Either way—or a combination of the two—may work best for you. So try different approaches and remember that one may work better for some of your passions than others.

3. Document and Scrutinize 📝🔍

The biggest mistake you can make is to “wing it.” Taking time to write down your idea and flush it out is vitally important 🚨. If you don’t, you’re running a huge risk of rambling a story or analogy that makes no sense, wastes time, and ultimately has to be abandoned because all it’s doing is causing more confusion for your participants 😵‍💫.

It honestly only takes ten to twenty minutes ⏳ to document. You can start with just some bullets 📌 that outline your talking points and get as deep as a full script 📖 if that is helpful. Typically, I would recommend something in between—where you document anything you may find tricky a little more thoroughly and areas you find easy a little less.

4. Practice 🎭🎙️

Another key to successfully leveraging your passions is to practice delivering your outline or script. These stories, analogies, or other forms of engagement should be quick-hitting anecdotes anyway, so it will only take a few minutes ⏱️.

You can:

• Record yourself 🎥 and watch or listen back.

• Practice in front of a mirror 🪞.

• Run it past a colleague, friend, or family member 👥.

They can help you ensure that what you have prepared makes sense and allow you to work out any potential issues before you deliver it to a live group.

5. Delivery 🚀

All the heavy lifting is done! Now, you just need to deliver the new addition to your training! 🎉

The first few times, you would be wise to keep track of how it lands and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Does it have the intended impact of increasing understanding? 🤔

2. Is it taking too much time? ⏳

3. Is it driving the engagement that you were hoping for? 🙌

If the answer to any of these questions is no, it’s time to tweak it for future sessions. If the answer to all of these questions is yes, you have a winner! 🏆🎯