Ep. 198 Speaking vs. Training

Hey there, Mark Brown. One of the things that I remember early in my career is training versus speaking. I was like, what's the difference? And I made the classic mistake of thinking, oh, I'm a speaker. All I need to do is add a couple of exercises and I'm good. I'm a trainer. Oh, my goodness, Mark.

Oh, man, that was a big mistake. And that's why I'm really happy. We got some companies today, one of our brothers here to join us to kind of explain the difference. And you might be surprised at what you find out. Let's do this. Darren.

Yeah, we're going to sit down in a sec with Ed Tate, the guy who taught Mark and me how to be world class trainers.

Anyone can give a presentation. Few deliver unforgettable presentations. What's the difference? You're about to find out. Welcome to the Unforgettable Presentations podcast with your hosts, world champion speakers and coaches, Mark Brown. Mark Brown.

Your life tells a story and there's someone out there who needs to hear it.

And Darren Lacroix. And Darren Lacroix.

Stage time, stage time, stage time.

Ready for some powerful presentation. AHAs. Let's dive right in.

Oh, let's dive right in. Ed Tate, welcome.

Thank you. I'm back at the show. You know, could you punch my frequent flyer podcast card? I think I get a Starbucks.

Yes, yes. I think you get two. I think you get two in a pup cup. Ed, you have taught Mark and me how to do it right. And I think one of the big mistakes out there, which I made myself, was thinking that it's easy. If you're a great speaker, you can be a great trainer, and if you're a great trainer, you can be a great speaker. And you can. But you've got to understand the difference. And I love what you taught us. Ed, what would you say the difference in the outcome is? You know, the goal, what we're trying to achieve between speaking and training.

Patricia Fripp, of which we all have followed, and she's coached us, et cetera, and she says a keynote is what they call a higher level of abstraction. That is, it's a big idea, if you will. Whereas training, in my opinion, is about the execution of the idea. It's all about behavior change. And these are two completely different skills. I have seen hall of fame speakers who are extremely talented on stage. I mean, they're world class, they're global class, they're universal class in terms of their keynote presentations, and I've seen them do less than stellar with regard to their presentations because they did just what you said. You know, they just. The first thing they did. Here's a big mistake is first thing they did is they ran to their computer and they made a bunch of slides. Well, that's mistake, that's mistake number one. You don't go to your computer when you're designing a training program. What you do is you do something.

It's old school.

It's called pencil and paper.

What?

Okay. For the younger people, you might have to chat. GPT. What this.

Okay.

Okay. But that's where you start.

Came right after the tablet.

And you, and, and you start designing your program and, and you, you focus on your objectives and what's the behavior change? I call it the kfd. What do you want people to know, feel or do once you're done? So that's, you know, that's one of the things that I want to focus on. But you know, in preparation for today's call, Darren, I did some additional research. You did, you know, and I want to share with you some additional research. And this research comes from the book. Oh crap. Potty Training.

Okay.

It's by Jamie Glauwocke. Yeah, the. The Pied Piper of Poop. All right.

Okay.

And there, and there are five things as a trainer that are applicable from this book that I've learned about potty training. My four year old daughter Toriel that are applicable in training. Number one, don't be attached to the outcome.

I don't want to be attached to that outcome.

Number two, you're looking for progress, not perfection.

Okay?

Get it done.

Number three, stay off your phone. Number four, lead with confidence, silliness and creativity. And finally, bring a spare change of clothes. Well, maybe that last one is not as applicable in trending.

Oh, you never know. And it's ironic there was a number two.

And real quick just now that I don't want our listeners to miss. You said training is about the execution of the big idea to change behavior. So in terms of our keynote versus training. Training you say is to change the behavior. But many keynote speakers focus on a different idea or a different goal. What would that goal be? Would you say it?

So the goal for a speaker is obviously to inform, but there's, you know, there's an entertainment aspect to it, et cetera. It is to. There's a wow factor. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's feeling good. But training is about the execution of that idea. And typically speaking, it's a one way communication. Occasionally you'll find an engaging keynote speaker. Like we all use speakers, some form of engagement in our keynotes and, but it's limited, if you will. Whereas training, you know, we know how to train. We need to, we know how to keep people's attention for a half a day, a full day, a week, several weeks and several months. And that's how long it'll take, you know, to actually change behavior. And that's what training's about. Training is not just a one time thing. Training is ongoing, it's continuous. It's checking in with people and making sure that they, their behavior changes. Here's the other thing, the difference between speaking and keynoting. With a speaker, we're typically impressed with the speaker. We're typically impressed with him or her. But with training, our goal is to make sure that the participants are impressed with themselves. And if they walk away impressed with us, frankly, we haven't done our job.

Nice. Well said Mark, go ahead real quickly.

You kept saying training. It was funny. I grew up in Jamaica. I played football slash soccer in high school. And we never ever talked about going to practice. We always talked about going to training sessions.

Interesting.

No, we didn't call it practice. Well, that's the 1970s. I'm older. Okay, but we never used that word. We said we're going to go to training. And the thing is, the routines we learned habitually did, did better over and over again. The different exercises were to train our physical bodies, but also to train us to understand the game and to execute on the playing pitch when it was game time. And in all my years, I never made that connection until just now when you said change the behavior. And I love the point about we are impressed with the speaker, their charisma, their energy, their wow factor. But if we can be impressed at how we can change our behavior as a result of being trained, then the entire thinking process becomes different. But I like that training changes the behavior.

Darren, you were saying, I remember Mark when we had Vince, Pastor Vince on, he had a great quote that I loved and he talked about trying versus training and he defined it as training is doing what I can do today so that tomorrow I can do what I can't do today. It's a thinker. Trying is doing what I can do today so that tomorrow I can do what I can't do today. So like you're saying, ed, it's that experience now it's our job. We're almost the facilitator versus the speaker, if you will. We facilitate the training, which is a bigger job. Than it sounds like, well, here's something else.

So I took my daughter out to the park. Now, I'm kidding about this, but my daughter teaches me a lot of lessons actually. Awesome book, by the way, just in case you're curious. So we're at, we're at the park yesterday and there's a brand new park. And this brand new park has some very unique and different apparatuses. That's the only thing I can describe it. I mean, like this, it feels like I'm in an avant garde art gallery, if you will.

Wow.

And this one div. This one piece of equipment is you have like these little slots and you just push them in and they go up by rows, by rows. And there is, I think there's like seven rows of these things. And initially Toriel can. She can push in that, like the last three. And that says, hey, hey, honey, once you reach up. And she, she reached up to the fourth one. And I says, honey, I think you can reach the fifth one. I think there were six rows. There were six rows, not seven. And then I says, hey, you can jump. And then she actually jumped up to the fifth row. She cannot physically reach the sixth row. But initially she felt she couldn't, she couldn't, she couldn't do the first row. But she walked away actually being able to like, actually push in these little device, these little slots for five of the six rows. And she walked away. Daddy, I did it by myself. You go, that is our goal as a trainer. She walked away feeling great about herself. And you know, that's a short story, but that's what our job is. Our job is for people walking away and say to themselves, I did that all by myself. That's our goal.

Wow. And Ed, just for people who don't know you or know maybe you won the world championship, give us a little bit of your background. Where did you learn all this? Or where were you a trainer?

So I, I have multiple degrees. Or if you will, let's see. I am. I'm a former training director for the Denver Rocky Mountain News. And again, for the, for the younger people. That's a newspaper. And you might have to again, chat GPT. What that was. That's, that's how we used to get information before there was chat GPT. And anyway, so I was a training director for the Denver Rocky Mountain News. Trained over 1500 people per year. I'm also a former trainer for a company called Career Track. At the time, Career Track was the largest training company on planet Earth. And I was among their top trainers. If, if you will. I've also, I'm a certified trainer in something called Miller Hyman Strategic Selling. And what that means is I teach my coaching clients how to work with, how to sell to large corporations. So I have multiple training backgrounds. I'm also a, a graduate of Bob Pike. Bob pike is in not only speaking hall of fame, but also the training hall of fame. And I've gone through his Train to Trainer programs and courses. T Harv Eker, he has a program called Train the Trainer. So I've gone through multiple. And I've spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to get good at this skill. And this is something I love to do. This is something, it's a great deal of fun. As you guys know, I'm always testing and experimenting with, with new ideas. So for example, at Game Changers, what do we did for the first time? We launched a world premiere of doing a, an escape room. We did an escape room. Now, now, in all honesty, I think it was a good experience for the people who were there live. There's work to be done on the, the, the virtual piece. And I admit that. But I guess I'm so glad I did it. I have no regrets about it whatsoever because I learned so much about just taking a chance, taking a risk and experimenting and again, giving people an immersion experience. Here's another mistake that people make with regard to training. Again, they race to their, their laptops and, and, and, and type their slides up. The other thing they think is that if I'm just sharing the information with you, I am training you. No, you're not. What you, you're just, just talking. You know, you're just lecturing. And lecturing is not necessarily the most effective method of training. It is one method of training. It is one method in which people receive information. But the thing you need to understand is people process information differently. So for example, you've heard everyone's heard this before. We, we either process information visually, auditory or kinesthetic. Visual is the number one learning method on planet Earth, followed closely by listening or auditory if you will. And the smallest way that we learn, or the least in this in single digits is what they call kinesthetic. However, kinesthetic is the stickiest and what I mean by the stickiest is it's the most memorable. So what you'll notice with our training programs is that we incorporate all three. And it is a mistake to a assume that whatever your learning modality is, say for example, like as speakers, typically our learning Modality is auditory. It is a mistake to assume that the audiences, that's their learning modality as well. We incorporate all three methodologies. So if you've ever gone through any of our training programs, it's always visual, there's always PowerPoint slides or there's, or there is a video or a picture or you know, we'll do a screenshot, etc. There's multiple forms of visuals. Then, well, you know, there's also, you know, there's sometimes there's music and etc. And then there's movement. We just, you just don't passively sit back in our courses. You're going to lose a couple hundred calories, you know, so that's, that's another benefit of attending our training programs is like, hey, you're going to lose some weight.

Welcome to the Trainer Trainer fitness program led by Ed K. Exactly.

You know, it's just a bonus. It's just a bonus. Yeah.

One of the things that I learned from you that I think is critical and again if you're listening to this, we're trying to help encourage you that if you want to be an in demand world class trainer, you got to shoot for that. You've got to get the instructions. Nobody accidentally becomes an amazing trainer. It doesn't happen by accident. So if you want to be trained, you got to be trained. Whether it's us or Bob pike or peak potentials or whoever it is. But understand that you've got to get training from world class trainers to be a world class trainer. You can't do training 101 and be like, okay, now you could work at a corporation and that could be the process, but we're inviting you to go deeper. And Ed, one of the big things that I learned from you is that in and in the keynote speaking world, storytelling is the heartbeat. That entertaining, that again that higher level of abstraction. But in training it's instructions and we often and guilty myself, the instructions are not clear if it's virtual, if it's sending people into a breakout session on Zoom or in the room to just have them work in groups. If those instructions aren't clear now, they don't get the experience they need. So stories are to speaking as instructions are to training your thoughts.

The confused mind will not move and the confused mind will not learn. So you said this all the time, Darren. Clarity, clarity, clarity. And as a trainer you have to practice your directions as much as a keynote speaker practices their stories. And your directions need to be clear and simple and you need to Break things down. So for example, I have a program called the Story Finder where I teach people my process in terms of how I tell stories. Well, I break this down into minutia, if you will. So you know, step number one is I give the message, I want you to think of a time, you know, over the past couple of weeks of an incident that's taken place in your life that may or may not be story worthy. Just write down an incident. So that's just step number one. And I says, as a matter of fact, I says I don't want it to be extraordinary, I just want it to be ordinary. So maybe there's a conversation between you and your wife, maybe you met someone at the grocery store, etc. Okay, so that's step number one. And then, then I teach them my four steps. Head, heart, humor, heavy hitting. And I said, okay, number one, head. What's thought provoking about that event? Number two, you know, how could someone relate to that event? Number three, what's potentially funny about it? And there's nothing funny, just skip that part. And then step number four, what's potentially a message or a lesson or a walk away. So I have people work individually. So again, number one, identify incident. Number two, answer these four questions. And now after you've answered these questions, now we're going to put you into small groups, we're going to put you into triads. And again what I'd like you to do is I just want you to share just the answers. So what's your incident? And just answer the four questions. So I'm slowly moving people through the process. And again, like you said again, Darren, you also, this is, you also have another great aphorism, leave no learner behind. So when you're giving your directions, you want to make sure that no learner is left behind because the confused mind will not move forward. The confused mind will not learn. So you've got to again break down your process, simplify the directions and make sure that people understand and do it in phases. Do not give, I would never give all these directions at the beginning and hoping people will understand them. Now virtually you even have to even think it through even more. You have to like for example, if you're going to put people into breakout rooms, you have to explain what you're going to do before you get into the breakout room. You need to confirm with everyone that they understand this simple direction, this just this one step and then put them into the breakout room. And then once they're in the breakout room, you Got to repeat it again to make sure they understand. And then after they, and then maybe even check in the breakout room to make sure everyone's following, you know, actually join them in the breakout room and then after they come out of the breakout room, confirmed that they understood. So again, virtual, you actually have to even go through more steps to make sure that people understand. Again, our goal here is to make sure that people understand. And that brings up another point about the differences between speaking and training. And I'm going to call it responsibility. As a speaker you have one responsibility and that's to share the information. But as a trainer, it is our duty, it is our obligation to make sure that the participants behavior is actually changed.

That's big.

That's a, that's big. That's a big difference and that's a big responsibility. It is absolutely huge.

Mark, you been holding your pen up patiently?

No, he, he answered my question. Because what came to mind is those eloquent speakers who say, listen, I've got killer stories, I've got emotion to move them. I know I can get this audience to move with my style. I'll simply tell a few more stories and make that my training. Wouldn't that be enough? I've got their hearts, I've got their mind, I've got their emotions. That should be enough for me to do a half a day training. If I can do one hour, I can do three. Shouldn't that be enough for me to get the job done?

Not done well.

Not to do it well, because here's the other thing, people learn in different modalities. And the one thing that you know, Mark, and, and you know, Darren, is that we, we're constantly changing the way we deliver things. We're constantly, we will take one idea and deliver it to the audience in four or five different ways. And because people learn in different ways or they hear different ways or there are different places in their life, if you will. Whereas a non trainer only has one. They've only got one thing. Lecture, lecture, lecture. PowerPoint. PowerPoint. PowerPoint. Let's give you more lecture. Or they may say, okay. Or they may say like, you know, talk among yourselves, repeat.

Tell each other how great I am.

Tell them how good I am. I like that. Tell them how good I am. Yeah.

And Ed, when you and I did this for everyone, for the. We have an event coming up, which is why we're talking about it. But I love the subject and topic. I think I thought it'd be a great podcast. So if you want to join Us for train the trainer. We're doing it live in Las Vegas, but also hybrid. And you can just go to stagetimeworkshops.com stagetimeworkshops.com and because you listen to this, you can use Podpod 25, get 25% off Podpod for the podcast. 25. But, Ed, we had Jan, one of our VIPs, so in the event, we have three or four VIPs and they actually, on the last day, they teach. And Jan, I remember he was a vip and he said one of the things that dawned on him was the fact that he didn't have to do so much work. He let the participants do a lot of the work in teaching your thoughts.

One of the keys here. Yeah. And I know you'll respond more deeply to this, but I realized from what you said earlier, one of the key differences here is the experience that the attendee has when they attend a training versus keynotes. And as speakers, we love to hear. Oh, that speech was amazing. It was just for me. It met me where I need to be. It really touched me. I can't thank you enough. That speech is going to change the way I live my life. And as speakers, Darren, Ed and I and all of our associates, we appreciate that. But help us one more time. And I always say, talk to me like I'm five years old, Ed. Help me one more time to delineate the significant difference between the impact that you and I can have after an hour and the impact you and I can have after two or three days. And how the idea that extending my stories and telling more stories to the audience would not be enough for them to have the different experience.

So with speaking, it is, I mean, the hard part about speaking, we never. Here's the other difference between speaking and training. When we're speaking and we have our message and we tell these wonderful stories, we have no idea who we've impacted. There's no mechanism, you know, whatsoever. I have stumbled upon a mechanism recently, but it's not that good. So, for example, when people reach out to me for LinkedIn, I ask, hey, why did you, you know, beyond that you want to grow your network and the usual LinkedIn cliches. Why did you want to connect with me? Okay. And sorry.

Oh, it's funny, it's relatable.

And I, I occasionally people will say to me, says, hey, you spoke at this conference. I just got a, I got a message just yesterday. Hey, Ed, I saw you speak in Toronto seven, eight, nine years ago, and I finally got my act together. To the point where I want to be a speaker. You said this, and this is where I was my life. But that's a very clumsy way of finding out as a speaker, if you've made an impact or not, you know. So here's a difference with training. For 13 years, I was a trainer for Johnson and Johnson. I'm in New York City. My wife is. I'm helping my wife celebrate her birthday. We are. We are on Broadway.

Okay?

It's super busy. I'm on this corner over here, catty quarter way across Broadway. And Broadway is a very busy street. I hear someone say, hey, Mr. Tate. Mr. Tate. And I look across. I look, and I'm looking at. This is. Okay, this, this. They're. They're talking to us. And he says, Mr. Tate, break preoccupation, friend. The message.

Jump into the.

New York City on Broadway.

That is great.

It's November, it is cold. We got our winter coats and, you know, and hats. And that kid I hadn't seen in over a decade, I should. I shouldn't call him. You know, he was a. He was a grown man, but he had just graduated from college. I was. I trained him. The elements of an opening, they are break, preoccupation, frame the message, jump into the content. I didn't lecture to him. I use a kinesthetic method. I said, there are three elements to an opening. How many? Three. The first is called break preoccupation. The second is called frame the message. For those of you listening, I'm pretending I'm breaking something or breaking up a piece of wood over my knee. Frame the message. I'm literally taking my hands and outlining a imaginary frame and then jumping to the content. And I'm actually having my hands actually jump, pretending like they're jumping onto something. So that's what we taught him. And that made it memorable. That told me that he got it. And not that only did he get it, but he got it at a deep and permanent level all the way across.

Bobby. Real quickly, Darren, Just last week, I found a photograph on my Google Drive from several years ago where Ed is physically doing the motion to break preoccupation. I'm behind to his left, and I realized we're both on the same stage in South Africa, which, by the way, is where he met his then his future wife Sarika, in Africa together several years ago. And I have a picture of that. Edo, I'll send it to you. That one action, that one methodology, that one process that you teach kinesthetically, physically, he remembered that from so many years ago, we don't do that well in a keynote speech. And there's so much more power to what you can do in a training. As Darren says, when you do it right, Darren?

Yeah, I get excited when I do a speech. It's fun, it's exciting. But when I do a training, I realize the impact I can have is light years away from speaking. So it's like give them to me for two or three days and they will never be the same again, whatever subject it is, guaranteed. Now, super quick, there's a lot of people who listen to this who maybe dream of being a high level, high paid keynote speaker in demand. What you might not know is there are a lot more training opportunities than there are speaking opportunities. At the highest level, there's tens of thousands of more trainers than there are speakers because there's tens of thousands of more opportunities. And Ed Tate, one thing in common, Ed Tate, Ford Sakes, David Brooks, Craig Valentine, all started training as a stepping stone to speaking. So they are now high level speakers. You see them, they rock the house. But they started by quote unquote, getting their C legs in training. And then I know that there's, I won't name names, but there's some great keynote speakers that they do high level, high paid speaking and then training is the back end that they get a huge contract so they get paid to get that opportunity to sell their training. So please don't underestimate the fact that if you dream of being a keynote speaker, maybe training is also a great stepping stone. And if you're a great speaker, look into becoming a great trainer. And what could you use as a follow up? I always say, what's your next step after they hear your keynote speak? What's your training? It's natural, especially if they love you, you and hear from you. Ed, your thoughts?

So, you know, some of the great keynotes, like you just said, some of the great keynote speakers. Mark Sanborn used to be a trainer, past president of the National Speakers association hall of Fame speaker, Laura Stack, past president of National Speakers association hall of Fame speaker, used to be a trainer with career track, Marilyn Sherman, our friend Craig Valentine, et cetera. So they started off with trainers, but they became these keynote speakers and vice versa. So they have both of these, these particular skills. Another thing, I just want to point out what, there's another thing that trainers have in their toolbox that speakers don't and that is as trainers, we have, we have toolkits called drills. And there's also what we call practice games, if you will.

Okay.

So for example, one of these things that we do in our trainer, trainer program is we can drill. So for example, a drill in basketball is you're going to practice your free throws. Mark, you played. We call it soccer. You call it football?

Yes, sir.

So what would be a drill in, in soccer?

Football, we have one called, we called three guys with one ball. So you had two guys in one. It passed the ball. One touch and run back and forth, pass the ball across areas for accuracy, for control and for speed. We would do that every single day. For passing, I could say it was a drill. You would do it every single day to perfect a technique.

So that's a drill. And then you have the practice game. Actually, you know, and a practice game is, you know, you're, you're actually, it's live, you're, you're doing what you've been drilling for, etc. So in our train to trainer program, guess what? We have what we call a practice, we have a practice game and this tick, this technique is called the teach back. So for our VIP members. Members, Our VIP members, guess what? You get to teach some of your content with some of the tools and tips and strategies that we have shared with you and incorporate that into some existing content. Or if you have a new program you want to design and develop, we'll help you do that as well. But you'll get a chance to actually have a practice game, a practice delivery of your content in front of and get feedback and what I, what we call deep dive feedback, not just your run of the mill surface feedback. We're, we will, we will take 30 to 40 minutes to give you some deep dive feedback. And we'll, we'll take your training, we'll, we'll take it apart. It's, the purpose here is not to make you feel bad, but it's to identify what you have done well. And that's how we always start what you've done well and some other areas for you to consider to make it, to improve it. So that's something else that we do that's different.

And I think what's cool about the teach back, when the VIPs do it, we teach filters. So we teach all the attendees, they're, they're focused on one area. So we give four filters to give that feedback. But now they got it, they can look for this and then we do another VIP and then they look for this. So the different perspectives help them ingrain what's important in training, which is different from speaking. And then what the VIPs get is they realize the impact of the exercise and the breakthroughs people get who are doing the exercise or the Ed Tate stand up, move kinesthetic thing that they lead. So Ed Tate, and we got to honor your time here. We got this event coming up. Check out stagetimeworkshops.com look for the dropdown of Train the Trainer. It's coming up June 14th, 15th, 16th or if you're listening to this after that just check out the schedule. We'll put another one on the calendar after that. Love to have you join us live in Las Vegas or virtual. Use the discount code podpod25 and we promise that we will rock your training world. You will not look at training the same way again. Ed Tate, final thoughts.

Your job as a trainer is to make a difference. It is to again for people to be impressed with themselves and like my daughter taught tutorial. Walk away. I did that. I did that.

Nice. Mark Brown, take us home.

When you consider going from speaking to training or incorporating both, remember the best you have to offer will change behavior when you choose the training route. And trust me, let guys like Ed and Darren teach you how because we want you to be as a speaker and a trainer. Unforgettable. We'll see you next week.

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