When we are delivering a keynote speech or doing a coaching session we are often asked about our top tips for trainers, our favourite books or great films for learning leaders to watch. So this week some of us who focus on the ‘learning’ strand of our business have put our heads together to give you some of our top tips, book recommendations and movie recommendations.
Our Top Tips for Trainers

• Live, breathe, walk and talk the Five Principles of Brain Friendly Learning.
• Learn how to get people into a flow state, and then get out of the way.
• Only train on subjects you are passionate about. 
• Raise the bar for yourself and your learners. Raise your expectation about what they will go back and do differently. 
• Lose the PowerPoint! 
• Learn to let go. Content isn’t the experience and sometimes learners need to go off track to get the real learning. 
• Build a great relationship with your client (internal or external). Be business partners rather than a service department. 
• Build your outcomes with your client. Once you’ve got the outcomes right, design and evaluation are much easier. 
• State is part of the design process. Plan what states will be best to learn the content, and design activities that drive the learners into that state. Oh, and be in that same state while you are designing.

Movies that every trainer should watch…

• The Shawshank Redemption (to learn the value of patience and friendship
• Pay It Forward (how one person can change the world – or at least a bit of it)
• Educating Rita (to re-connect with how new worlds open up when you’re excited about learning)
• A Bridge Too Far (Just because you have ‘rank’, doesn’t mean you are always right.)
• Field of Dreams (Sometimes your decisions don’t have to make sense to those around you. If you want it, do it!)
• Crash. (The new version with Matt Dillon, not the other one! It shows how one small quote/decision can have widespread ramifications.)
• The Office. (Not strictly a film I know but I challenge anyone to watch David Brent and not cringe at something they have done or seen themselves in business. Especially the training episode!)
• Dead Poet’s Society. (Because that’s what education is all about…Carpe Diem!)
• Remember the Titans. (An encapsulation of all that is good about learning, leadership and change!)
• Coach Carter. (As above! Also for anyone who still disagrees with our belief that there is no such thing as a difficult delegate, only an inflexible facilitator!)

It is interesting for me that a number of these are true stories or are based on true stories. May be there is something here about ‘keeping it real!’

More books that everyone should read…

Before I give you them I should make a couple of things clear. Firstly there is a huge reading list on our website, if you’ve not visited this before, please do. Some of the best works in the fields of learning, leading and change are listed there.

Next, this is just so hard for us to do! We are reading constantly, I’ve got three books on the go right now (A Return To Love, An Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Book Published and The Skilled Facilitator). I also revisited three other books today for some work I’m doing with some coaches of future Olympic athletes next week…and I probably read less than some of the other members of the team.

To try and choose just three out of the hundreds and thousands that we’ve learned from was a joyful and almost impossible task.

At the time of writing here are our recommendations

• The Art of Possibility, by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander 
• You Can Have What You Want, by Michael Neill
• Tools for Engagement, by Eric Jensen 
• The Naked Leader, by David Taylor 
• The ‘Rules’ Series, (Rules for Work, Rules For Management, Rules for Life)
• How To Be Brilliant, by Michael Hepple 
• 51 Tools for Trainers, by Kimberley Hare and Larry Reynolds (Not just because Kim wrote it. It is the brain friendly toolkit for trainers.) 
• Solutions Focus, by Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson. (So simple, so applicable!) 
• The Passion Test by Janet and Chris Attwood 
• The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

This Week’s Call To Action 

• Do them, watch them, and read them!

This week’s FriendlyBrain Tip comes to you from  Richard Nugent of Kaizen Training. Kaizen Training Limited is a well-established consulting and training firm based in the UK and offering its services to the global business community. Training for Excellence is a leading-edge Train the Trainer company based in the U.S. and providing training programs internationally. For more information, contact us at info@wetrain.biz